Salve,
When an enclitic such as -que or -ve is attached to a word, does the stress remain where it would be if no enclitic were attached, or does the enclitic “count” as a syllable, thus potentially shifting the stress?
My own practice is to include the enclitics in the pronunciation: ‘éum’ but ‘eúmque’. I think the man to talk to about this though is Lucius. He has the most practice in pronunciation of most of the people here, he’s looked specifically at issues like these, and he’s always willing to help.
It seems like I’ve read that not only does the -que shift the accent forward for words ending in consonants, but that (by analogy) it does the same for words ending in vowels (e.g. nautáque). But I could be making that up…
For some reason, it is frequently insisted upon in many arguments on Latin pronunciation that any enclitic, such as ‘-que’, causes the compounded word’s accent to be shifted right before the ‘-que’, for example the nominative “nautáque” in mraig’s example. However, I have not seen a single piece of Roman testimony to confirm this completely strange concept. Indeed, the Roman testimony I have seen describes, much as nostos affirms, that the ‘-que’ indeed “counts” as an extra syllable, and nothing more.
Eventually I finally read a proposed practice that puts the two divergent concepts into harmony, and I have adopted it: If you have a word that naturally ends with a long syllable, such as ‘-um’ or “-?” or “-ī” or “-am” among countless examples (e.g. eúmque), or if a word’s naturally final syllable is lengthened by the addition of an enclitic (e.g. “R?m?núsque”), then that syllable comes to be stressed, as in “eúmque” and “R?m?núsque”.
But say we don’t have this. Take “laeta,” in this phrase: “Amica mea est bella laétaque,” then the accent falls on the antepenult, the diphthong ‘ae’, just as in the word “áccipe” or “réddite.” So that’s easy: “ípsaque” “ítaque” “tátaque” “laudátaque” “minóraque,” etc. But, say we have a word like “comitia,” meaning elections. If we followed the above rule, which is the normal accent rule (which states: if the penultimate syllable is short, then the accent falls on the antepenultimate syllable), then we must perforce accent the compound noun thusly: “comitíaque,” on the ‘i’. Yet this sounds very awkward to me, and apparently was also to the Romans, so instead, it would seem, the solution was to accent the natural word’s final vowel, in this case ‘a’: “comitiáque,” while not making that vowel long. For anyone accustomed to the natural placement of word accents in Latin according to their vowel lengths, this feels very odd indeed, amost Greek-sounding. Still, apparently this was a custom, and is the best solution I have yet heard.
The other option is to act as if the enclitic is not there, retaining the natural word’s accent: “comítiaque.” Again, a little odd for the accustomed Latin speaker, but sometimes I find this solution even more appealing.
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