You say Iuli, I say Iulii…

There is something to this *VVV constraint in Latin. If you remember, as I did this afternoon, there is an alternate genitive for 2nd declension -ius nouns, the constraint gets some more evidence for its existence. Exhibit 1: the most famous gens Romana: Iulius. But in the genitive it can be either Iulii or Iuli. Curious that. (And thank the dead language phonologist's friend, Latin grammarians, that surface forms got written down.)

What is interesting—to me, and since I write the blog, we look at what I find interesting—is that even though the /ɪiː/ at the end is two syllables, it is close enough to violating *VVV that the underlying /ɪ/ gets deleted.

/juːlɪiː/	*VVV	MaxIO
☞juːliː		*
juːlɪiː	*!

While both forms pick up one violation the *VVV violation is worse, so [juːliː] is favored. Now tell me that doesn't make sense and give some strong evidence for the existence of *VVV in Latin.

A list of known phonetic tricks in Latin

I woke up and realized that there are a lot more phonetic tricks going on in Latin than had occurred to me yesterday. I'm going to use play loose with IPA here (mostly so I don't have to go fiddling with fussy characters. I'll tighten things up later when there isn't a child running amok). Part of what makes this tricky is that Latin's orthography hides the underlying representation by using the surface forms in writing.

/urbs/ → [urps]
/adfero/ → [affero]
/inperfectus/ → [imperfectus]
/adcusativus/ → [accusativus]
/obstare/ → /opstare/
/recapio/ → /recipio/
/inlatus/ → [illatus]
/abfero/ → [aufero]

This should be enough to keep my memory fresh. A lot of these tricks are mentioned in beginner textbooks, so their action is well known. The matter will be to see if there are any constraints that can be drawn out to explain the mess. Recipio could be particularly enlightening. /a/ becomes [ɪ] when the stress goes away?

The prepositions a/ab and e/ex are a trick. Which form is underlying? The worst part is that the divide is really easy to describe. Oral consonants get the short form. Everything else (i.e. /h/ and V) get the long form.

/e urbe/ → [ex urbe]

/a(b) te/ → [abs te]

Though given that the archaic form is abs te, my hunch is that [ab] is the underlying form.

Constraints in Latin phonology

In phonology we're moving away from rules, which seem to be language-specific, and towards constraints. I've got my objections to constraint-based phonology, but it also seems elegant. Or at least clean.

So here's a rule in Latin. It's not a hard rule, but it seems to be frequent enough that it works. And good enough to get to modern Spanish. Maybe some more tinkering would make it solid, but then the number of rules multiplies. Anyway, the rule. Or something really close to it. There's probably a morpheme boundary involved, but let's ignore that for now, shall we?

/w+ɪ/ ➝ Ø / Vː__

It is at least productive enough to yield parāstī from parāvistī. So that's the constraint table I'll put up. I'm going to focus on just a few forms to keep things under control.

Clearly there is a *VVV constraint in Latin. There are long vowels and diphthongs, which are effectively VV. There are short vowels, which are V. But no VVV—extra long vowels or long vowel diphthongs. Ever. So that's an easy constraint. It even seems fatal in all situations—unless you can somehow kludge in hiatus. That would violate DepIO (the constraint that says not to add things in), so I feel pretty safe in ignoring that possibility here.

There also seems to be a constraint against eliminating the conjugation's theme vowel going on. I can't put my finger on any scientific reason you'd want to do this, but it seems like a way to avoid creating ambiguity. In any case, syncopated forms in Latin preserve the conjugation's theme vowel in the perfect. If there's no theme vowel in the perfect stem, there's no syncopation.

On to the tableau.

/pɑrɑːwɪstiː/	*VVV	*theme vowel deletion	MaxIO
☞pɑrɑːwɪstiː
pɑrɑːstiː			*
pɑrɑːɪstiː	*!		*
pɑrɪstiː		*!	*

An ugly problem turns up. The tableau predicts the wrong winner. We want to get [pɑrɑːstiː] as the clear winner so that it is the favored colloquial form to get passed to Spanish. The problem is that we need to violate MaxIO by deleting [wɪ] and still get the win. Meanwhile the full form [pɑrɑːwɪstiː] violates no constraints in the above tableau, but needs to lose. 

Or maybe no such problem existed in 1st century BCE Latin. You could use either form. The MaxIO violation must have been so weak that something like [pɑrɑːstiː] could start competing with the winner [pɑrɑːwɪstiː]. After all, [pɑrɑːstiː] doesn't take information out of the verb: in fact, it eliminates redundancy. The -istī ending is unique to the perfect tense, so dropping the perfective -v- couldn't create ambiguity. From there all you've got to do is push the first i in -istī over to the stem and get an underlying second person perfect morpheme of -stī. Then there's no good reason to keep the first i. (Sounds simple when I put it that way.) But that's beyond phonology, no?

EDIT: I think there's something to all of this. Some goodies about SR in Latin orthography that may provide a springboard for further investigation. Some evidence for *VVV.

Double EDIT: Nemo Oudeis tells me that the v-deletion can also occur in other places (divitior > ditior; divitissimus > ditissimus), but not remembering these for sure I understated the matter.

Note about the table: Support for tables in Blogger poor. Nay, non-existent.

Creeping ergativity in English

Once again, I heard Rick Kogan on the radio. It's like a habit or something. Anyway, one of his guests said something like this (and I wish I could remember the exact quote, but it was like this).

Both me and her went to work.

I'm going to guess that in reading you wanted to * this. And indeed, if it hadn't been "me and her" this would pass muster. Tense is right. General arrangement of constituents is right. Case marking on the pronouns is wrong. Or is it? Here are some more examples.

*Me went to work.
*Her went to work.

I would bet that even the radio guest would reject that. I also suspect that this would be considered wrong too.

*Us went to work.

I also seriously doubt that this would pass muster too.

*Me and him saw the dog.

EDIT: Or maybe it would in non-standard varieties of English. Now that I think of it, I can't think of a situation where "me and him" is so outrageously wrong that you can't use it. So much for the notion of ergativity in English. Because…

But here my lack of corpus fails me, and I don't have a recent speech example. I'm not even sure that my native-speaker intuition will help me here. I wish it did. I'd love to be able to show that this is ergativity creeping in to English.

It looks like it is sensitive to pronouns, which would be the only place Ergativity could rear its head in English anyway, but not any old pronouns. It looks like it needs to be a compound subject with a first or third person (probably singular) in one of the subject slots. I also have a strong suspicion that it is sensitive to conjunctions.

Throw this into the just another thesis idea category.

Monologist

I was driving home today and heard Rick Kogan interviewing Mike Daisey [ˈdiʲzi] on WBEZ about his current exhibit at the MCA in Chicago. During the interview they talked about monologues. Natural enough, since Daisey is a monlogist. And therein lies a tale.

I'm trying to figure out the Greek for it, so bear with me here. Here are the parts, with accents in place.

μόνο-λόγ-ιστής

Which means that as a "native" Greek word might be something like:

μονολογιστής

With a pronunciation of something like:

[monologis'tɛːs]

Which brings us to English. We aren't going to pronounce that last [ɛːs] as it seems to have been lost for us English speakers. If it patterns like philologist—and I see no reason why it wouldn't—we would expect the accent to fall on the first lo.

[fəˈlɑləˌdʒɪst]

And Kogan patterned monologist like that.

[məˈnɑləˌdʒɪst]

Daisey on the other hand said something else.

[ˈmɑnəˌlɔgɪst]

Now, I've never heard the word said before today. I knew exactly what Kogan meant the first time he said it. I knew that Daisey was using the same word when he said it differently too. Yet they both said it differently. Some background: Kogan is a white, Chicago native in his 60s. Though he doesn't have a college degree, he's been steeped in words via his parents and profession (or so the Wikipedia article would lead me to believe). Daisey on the other hand is a white, (presumably) East Coast native in his 30s. He apparently has a college degree from a small liberal-arts college (or so his Wikipedia article would lead me to believe).

Anyway I'm still not sure how to say monologist, though I'm strongly tempted by Kogan's pronunciation. It at least builds on the analogy of words I already know. Daisey maintains the /g/ as [g], which is no small appeal. All I know for sure is that the primary stress and secondary stress are separated by an unstressed syllable—like most polysyllabic English works. Oh well. Better than nothing.

Of lice and men

Life again impinges on the blog. Since my daughter managed to get a few lice. It got me to thinking. Obviously delousing has given some interesting lexical items to English.

• Lousy – denoting poor quality, initially implied lice-infested; it also shows the same voicing between vowels as knives and wolves
• Nitty-gritty – the core of an idea; but the etymology is disputed and is early 20th century African-American, but may reduplicate gritty as easily as nitty
• Nit-picky – overly pedantic, the way you'd want someone who is picking nits to be
• Go over it with a fine-toothed comb – to really check the details, because this is how you catch lice and nits
• Nitwit – a fool, though whether it means someone who has the wit of a nit, or is a nit (under another definition of a useless person) is disputed
• Louse up – to screw something up, as in you've added lice to it

No less than Jonathan Swift give us this gem.

• Three skips of a louse – something worthless

But this isn't all that interesting. It's fun coincidences of culture on the lexicon. So where did louse and nit come from that they've infested the language? Mind you, lice are a common phenomenon across mammals and birds, so people have managed to turn up not one, but three species of lice specific to us.

Looking at the OED, we get this as the progression of the word louse over time:

lús OE > lous ME > louse ModE

Looking at the other Germanic languages we see this at Wiktionary—and it's no real surprise.

Dutch, luis; German, Laus; Swedish, lus

Common roots for a common problem. Seems all the Germans had lice. Latin on the other hand gives us pediculus. What's this? A diminuitive of pes? And lice do have nasty feet, but no common root. Hmm. Or as its synonym, it could be serpens—but really that's any animal that creeps. Greek doesn't supply any likely candidates either: φθείρ. Oh well.

And nit at the OED shows this history in English.

hnitu OE >  nites ME > nit ModE

The other Germanic languages are likewise fellow travelers.

Dutch, neet; German, Nisse; Swedish, gnet

All of the Germanic languages seemed to have noticed lice eggs too—or rather our linguistic ancestors did and thus gave us the word. (And catch the English/German doublets: nit/Nisse, shit/Scheisse.) What about Latin? Lens. No dice. Grek is another story. The modern Greek for nit is (apparently) κονίδα. I see an /nit/ or more accurately /nið/. In any case, this could potentially be a really old word. Let's take a peek at some other Indo-European languages (and I kind of wish there were a better tool than Wiktionary for this, but there you have it).

Polish, gnida; Armenian, aniç (as Romanized); Latvian, gnīda

Here's the pattern I see (and I'm not going to get into Persian or Hindi as they screw up my point):

/_nid_/ or /_nit_/ – and /t/ and /d/ are the same except for voice

So this one looks to be a common Indo-European affliction. But enough nit picking, no?

Ørberg for Ancient Greek

I've thought a bit about this sort of thing. I've written a few passages, but nothing good enough to share. And I realize that the project needs to be approached quite a bit differently than Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. In part this is an intellectual challenge. Polis, Athenaze and Reading Greek are all creditable books—and probably hard to really make an improvement on.

Some challenges

• the alphabet
• the pronunciation to use—though probably ignorable
• not so many obvious derivatives
• the dialects
• contracts

I'm really not quite sure how to deal with the alphabet. It's not hard to learn, but teaching it through context is another story. Pronunciation is somewhat a moot point, as Ancient Greek isn't really a spoken language. On the other hand, sound recordings are valuable resources.

The derivatives are a major problem. Ørberg uses the preposition in on the first page. English, German, Italian, Dutch and Swedish use the same word to mean the same thing. Spanish is one letter off. There are no diacritics. Place names add yet another layer of familiarity to the first chapter. The fact that Latin's ablative case in the first declension looks like the nominative with a diacritic also helps too.

Greek on the other hand presents a challenge. ἐν looks more like ev—nonsense, unless you've thoroughly mastered the alphabet. While not difficult, beginning students will occasionally slip. Ἑλλάδα, on the other hand, doesn't look like any work a non-Greek student knows. Then there's the morphology involved with the dative case in Greek…

But that's no real matter. I don't think Ørberg's first chapter works with Greek. It would probably have to look more like Ørberg's chapter 2, but without the genetive case. I suspect that a different entry point would be necessary anyway.

The dialect situation is also a concern. Attic Greek is probably the best place to aim at. Epic has fierce morphology, since it is somewhat an amalgam of several dialects. It also has the disadvantage of being entirely in verse, which isn't the easiest way to present material to beginners. On the other hand, you can't completely ignore Epic either. Authors will quote it and figure you know what they're quoting. Koine is straightforward after Attic Greek, so no need to worry about it after Attic. Either Koine or Attic would work well, given that there are lots of examples of both written down. Lots of fodder for corpus mining. In any case, Attic is the best given the ease of entry into Koine and the availability of stuff to read. But the Attic dialect presents its own challenge.

Verb contracts. This is a major wrinkle. Verb contracts have to be taught and mastered. On the other hand, some dialects—Epic and Ionic in particular—don't contract. I think I know how to get around it: start with Ionic Greek. Herodotus, among others, is written in this dialect, and it solves the contract problem for a few chapters.

The angle

The story should probably start in Asia Minor and follow the characters across the Aegean to Athens. This story angle allows for a start in non-contracting Ionic Greek but also builds in the eventual shift to contracting Attic Greek. One problem solved.

Another story angle would be to work the Greek gods into the narrative in some way. From the beginning. If for no other reason than people are familiar, at least passingly, with Greek myth. It also solves, to some degree, the derivative problem mentioned earlier. People may not know Δημήτηρ right off hand, but at least sounding the word out will give them a chance. Ζεύς will be transparent to the newbiest newb. So that's got to be a consideration.

The other nice thing that the journey across the Aegean would solve is the sheer volume of nautical terminology that seems to pervade Ancient Greek.

The sequence

Here's one point that I've not gotten as far with. Or at least I've not gotten answers that satisfy me. The sequence of learning Greek is going to be much different than Latin's sequence. Naturally: it's another language. Indirect speech? No problem. Greek is virtually English on that point. The article is a problem. You've got to use it, but defining it isn't very transparent in an Ørberg-style environment. Since the article lines up so nicely with the first and second declensions, morphology on that point won't be too vicious. Same with the 3rd declension—the article to the rescue again.

I'm also not quite sure how to present verb tense. Clearly present at first. But which first? -μι verbs? Or add on the imperfect and aorist? Which of those two first? Imperfect seems obvious, but aorist is frequent and useful. The whole mess of the verb's principal parts is an ugly question too. 

Latin vowels—do macrons tense vowels mark?

I've done some trawling around the internet and have yet to find any satisfactory answers.

So far as I can gather from Allen's Vox Latina the Latin's vowel space is something like this:


 i+y--------------+---+u

    \             |   |

     \   ɪ        | ʊ |

      \           |   |

      e+----------+---+o

        \         |   |

         \        |   |

          \       |   |

          ɛ+------+---+ɔ

            \     |   |

             \    |   |

              \   |   |

               +--+--a+

The only true long/short difference would seem to be the difference between a and ā, represented as /a/ and /aː/ in IPA (at least in native Latin words). All the other seem to be a quality difference. e and ē are /ɛ/ and /e/. i and ī are /ɪ/ and /i/. o and ō are /o/ and /ɔ/. u and ū are /u/ and /ʊ/. (Or at least I think that's what it is. Allen didn't use IPA.)

Again, as far as I can tell, Italian doesn't make a tense/lax distinction the way English does. (Of course I can't find the source right now.) I mention Italian because it has the vowel space most similar to Latin—as well as some similar contrasts going on. This is, it uses e to mark both /e/ and /ɛ/ and o to mark both /o/ and /ɔ/ in the way that Latin did. Or course macrons are an addition by later scholars—no native Latin writer would have used them.

The reason I'm curious is that some consonant clusters can trigger the change of a vowel from one vowel to its long equivalent. Here's the easiest to follow situation.

/a/ -> [aː] / _ns

No problem. It happens pretty clearly when shifting from the root of something like amant- to the nominative of amāns. We've made the vowel longer when it occurs before an ns cluster. All good to go. Here's the hitch.

/ɛ/ -> [e] / _ns

So in a root form of vident-, we get vidēns when shifting to the nominative. Again, nothing unusual when you know about this particular macron rule. The problem is that we're going from /wɪdɛnt/ to /wɪdens/. If it were  */wɪdɛːns/, it would be a clear example of vowel (duration) lengthening.

Now, if Latin employed vowel tenseness, it would be really clear, and simple too, to state the rule like this:

/V-tense/ -> [V+tense] / _ns

But alas, there are not recordings or sonograms of Latin speakers… We may never know.

Using the language vs linguistics

I find myself struggling with a balance. Maybe you don't, but I do. Here it is: I'm fascinated by language, but I also enjoy learning new/firming up already-known languages to put to use. And it's hard to say which is more fruitful—personally and professionally. 

I've got some skill with Latin. One of my things with Latin is teaching it. And I'm exactly self-important enough to think you might want my help in reading Latin. What follows is a treatment of Cicero's de senectute chapters 6 through 9 (if the title didn't give it away) aimed at Latin students just wading into their first bit of classical Latin. 

Let me know what you think.

de senectute 6 through 9

One year

This is the first anniversary of the blog. Hooray blog!

Congratulations on me? Why not. Here are the statistics for those you who are curious:

•3,099 page views
•79 posts
•15 comments
•A G+ count of +1—thank you to whomever you are
•2 followers—thank you to both of you
•My most popular post is "Quid est hoc?", but it's not going viral yet.

I'm flattered that my ramblings about language, most of 'em dead, have rated this much attention. My degree is progressing—one class finished, enrolled in two, nine more after that. The kids are growing like weeds: Little Girl in school and Little Boy starting to talk. The road, while long doesn't seem so lost today.

I leave you with Dante:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.