I stumbled across this apparent rule that states a vowel should be lengthened when it comes before ‘nf’ and ‘ns’; I don’t see this in Lewis & Short or Gaffiot, so I assume this was something uncovered through phonology research in the 20th century. The rule I found states that the ‘n’ in this case actually disappears from pronunciation, leaving only a long vowel. I think I’ve seen a similar pronunciation rule elsewhere where the ‘n’ becomes nasalized, but I’m drawing a blank on what letter combination triggers this.
My question: Is the above rule something that is a manner of pronunciation as a general rule, or just a description of how Latin speakers altered their pronunciation during a specific point when ‘classical’ Latin was still spoken? If the later, is better from an orthographic perspective to omit the macron in this situation and allow the reader to determine the pronunciation, or should the vowel always be marked with a macron?
The underlying rule, I believe, is that a vowel followed by two consonants is always long. It is sometimes described as “long by position”, and there is no need to put a macron on it.
A vowel before two consonants is not always long by any means. This is to confuse a long vowel and a long syllable. It isn’t even true to say that a syllable in which a vowel is followed by two consonants is always long. For example, in the line “natum ante ora patris, patrem qui obtruncat ad aras” the first syllable of patris is short, but the first syllable of patrem is long. In both words the vowel a is short. But a vowel before ns and nf was actually pronounced long, according to Vox Latina, so it should have a macron if you are writing macrons to indicate pronunciation.
I’m not sure I understand the difference between your two options.
What I can say though, is that the -ns- and -nf- context is specific in Latin spelling and pronunciation. Let me explain:
At some time, let’s say a word had the -ens- sequence. It was pronounced -ens-. Then, the n following the e caused the e to become nasalized, so it came to be pronounced -ẽns-, but would still have been written -ens-. Then, the n disappeared from the pronunciation, but the vowel, by compensatory lengthening, became long, so that the global rhythm of the word is kept, and so it was pronounced with a long nasalized vowel -ẽ:s- (the : noting the length of the vowel) and the spelling becomes -ēns- to partially reflect that state. So, it’s not mandatory to write the macron, but it’s more accurate.
Technically, you should see this n as a mute letter indicating the preceding nasalization.
Later in Vulgar Latin, the nasalization got lost, as we can see with CL mēnsa > VL mēsa, as we can still see today (with the length lost) in Spanish with mesa.
By the way, it’s almost the same scheme with final -m after a vowel, such as in mēnsam, but the vowel is only semi long and it’s not in the spelling.
Thank you for pointing that out. Yes, I see now that there might be a difference. From what I remember of my schooldays, I only ever needed to use macrons and breves in the context of scansion, of sorting out dactyls from spondees and so on.
Apart from dictionaries and grammars, do publishers ever issue books in Latin ― the Aeneid, say ― in which macrons and breves are shown in print? I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen one, but maybe that has changed since my time.
Apologies if I’m not being as clear as I should; I’m still in the process of learning Latin so sometimes my thoughts get all jumbled up.
Basically, I’m just wondering if the more ‘neutral’ orthographic position for words with the phenomena you described in detail here (as an aside, I found some info elsewhere online that suggested after the ‘n’ disappeared and the vowel lengthened, it was reintroduced at some point with the long vowel retained to make a ‘super heavy’ syllable; not sure if this is accurate or not though). Given that different periods in Classical Latin had varying treatment to ‘ + ns’, it seems marking it with a macron is to imply that there is one ‘correct’ pronunciation and hide away its historical variations. Also, as someone who is new to Latin, this caused a bit of confusion as I was trying to pronounce both the long ‘e’ and ‘ns’, which seemed to stand out in an awkward manner amidst the rest of the sentence; beginners Latin texts seem to omit this phonological quirk.
It looks like Italian retained the ‘n’ in this case; I see an IPA listing of /ˈmɛn.sa/. This to me would make sense with the above understanding that ‘ns’ went through some degree of change; very easy to believe that some regions held onto the idea that the ‘n’ should be dropped whereas others reverted or never adopted that mannerism.
Perhaps I’m just over thinking things or am still in my naive learner’s phase of the language, but it seem so to me the ‘ideal’ Orthography for classical Latin would be restrained in its usage of macrons, only using them where there is sufficient commonality across the periods of Classical Latin, with option to add them to vowels who’s quantity changed as needed - which I assume would only come into play for poetry really. I assume this would mean only marking vowels that are long by nature, but maybe I’m wrong.
Thanks for humouring me here. I really appreciate having someone to bounce my thoughts off of.
No problem. But we can also add the fact that I ain’t a native speaker.
While writing, I didn’t think about that, but although I don’t think I read much about it, it totally makes sense, as it happens all the time. That’s some kind of hypercorrection, or mannerism, as you state later. The correct pronunciation would have to give back the vowel its shortness.
In fact, only the long nasalized vowel is standard, as it appeared before any texts, as far as I can tell, or at least before literary texts, so the simplest option is to keep up with this model for any CL text.
The normal evolution has -ens- > -ēs-. If the word doesn’t match this pattern, something happened. Either the n was restored at some point, either the whole word itself was borrowed (and the native word lost).
It’s already the case, in fact. There are only a few word for which the vowel length is unsure, for various reasons.
Well, you may say that if you mean it for a same grammatical form, because the length may change on some radicals, between the three verb forms.
I always wonder how a vowel could be long other than by nature, because long vowels are an inherent part of Latin phonology and more. If a vowel becomes long because of its context, it’s long, and therefore are there serious reasons not to write them? But we must not mix that with long syllables, for which it would be a mistake to add a macron on the vowel.
By the way there is the specific case of ejus (and similar words). It’s often written ēius because the first syllable is long, but the supplementary length isn’t caused by the vowel but by the glide, which can’t be reflected with the -i- spelling, because it can’t distinguish e-i-us from e-jus from ei-jus while the -j- spelling automatically implies the -j- to be geminated between vowels, so ei-jus or ej-jus
But we can also add the fact that I ain’t a native speaker.