Show of force

In the morphology class the professor dropped the first two lines of the Aeneid on me to analyse for morphology. And I realized a few things in the process.

1. I don't use a consistent parsing order. Case, number and gender were never ordered the same way twice.
2. I'm not sure how transparent compounds were to native Latin speakers.
3. I have absolutely no idea how to analyse qui.

For #1, that's probably just me being put on the spot. I don't think I'd do that in writing. For #2 I suggested a morphological breakdown of profugus as follows.

pro-fug-us

But would a Latin speaker say that pro- had some specific meaning in the same way that re- or ad- had when prefixed to a verb? I know we're taught about Latin compounds as being this way, so I suspect so. I'll leave it at that. #3 was by far the most interesting. The professor was trying to get me to analyse qui (nom, s, masc). Now, if it had been qui (nom, pl, masc), I'd have had it. Obviously.

qu-i
who-nom.pl.masc

But how does the singular version break up? One possible solution.

qu-i
who-nom.s.masc

But it's not very satisfying. After all, how does -i signal nom.s.masc? I'm not thinking of anything off hand. So the solution I took in class was to not analyze it. Qui (nom, s, masc) is qui is qui. The professor pushed a bit, but I couldn't justify it so it stood as unanalyzable. 

Spring semester 2013

I'm taking First Language Acquisition and Morphology. Excitement. Well, maybe not, but I've got small children so I'll have informants at hand. In fact, I administered the one and only Wug Test to Little Girl. Even though I explained what she was supposed to do, some items were really vexing. Others were "Daddy, why are you asking such obviously easy questions?" sorts of questions.

So anyway. Get ready for me to blather on about those two fields. I'm still somewhat stumped by the whole v-deletion thing in Latin, so maybe I'll do more with that. I've also got a student project I want to work up for the research symposium in April. Fun times.

An invitation?

Well, I think I've just been invited to write something up for the Dickinson College Commentaries' Blog.

I wonder what he is doing with the list? Perhaps a guest blog post is in order. Peter?

I'll have to think of something. Maybe present my workflow. 

Dickinson College Commentaries

Ok, if you have a sick love of Latin the way I do, you need to know about the Dickinson College Commentaries. Especially their vocabulary list. Especially that. To that end, I've made a spreadsheet version available for download and thus offline access.

Since discovering it, I've made good use of it in student materials. It also provides a manageable list for (high-school level) students to master over their two years of introductory courses. The DCC blog says this about the list:

The Latin list contains about 1000 of the most common words in Latin. These are the lemmas or dictionary headwords that generate approximately 70% of the word forms in a typical Latin text.

Mind you, 70% is not enough to get fluent reading going on, but it's a good start. I've seen a video that shows that 95% coverage is needed for a student to guess at unknown words. So the DCC list, in conjunction with same page vocabulary support, is a good starting point for students to build their vocabulary.

Given that I've written a three-year curriculum for the younger students at the school I work at, I should probably give a look-see at my vocabulary list and see how it matches up. My gut feeling is that in some ways it matches up pretty well, but in others it doesn't. 

haud violates *μμμ

hau máli videntur (Pseudolus 141)

So what's going on with haud? Is it that hinky first syllable allows for violations of *μμμ rule? I'd say so, given that it's monosyllabic. But then along comes Plautus, and throughout Pseudolus he routinely clips the d off of haud. Once he does that, he prevents a *μμμ violation. I wonder if the clipping is an artifact of stress in spoken Latin. Does haud carry no stress in ordinary speech? Does the lack of stress make it desirable to clip a mora off? Or is haud somehow clitic in the same way that Greek particles are thus making it desirable to clip off a mora? If haud is somehow clitic, why didn't the ancient grammarians mention this?

I hate it. More questions than answers.

Stress-based meter in Latin

It's not all about complicated mora stuff. Post-classical Latin uses a simple stress-based meter. Here's an overview of stress-based meter before I get into how mora might be a better way at figuring out meter in Latin.

Reading Plautus

I've read Plautus before, but this time I'm doing it 21st century style: on a computer. Well, not entirely. I'm also using a Bristol commentary. Anyway, it's new for me.

My problem is that I really like reading on paper. I grossly prefer a book. Call me old school. But I've also been spoiled by Geoffrey Steadman. Have you seen his Greek commentaries? While I don't need the extensive support in Latin, I like having it available. Especially for vocabulary. I understand the value of looking up words, though the power of extensive reading outweighs that. Call me crazy.

Anyway, I'm reading Pseudolus. For fun. My goal is to finish it this week. Here's my progress bar, so you can hold me to my goal. I'll be updating.

1337 / 1337
(100%)

So why do we set up our readers in such a way as to discourage reading for fun? Why do the very people who love Latin the most seem to be publicly hostile to reading for fun?

End note:
75 / 1335 on Monday
137/1335 end of night Monday (not strong progress, is it?)
230/1335 end of night Tuesday
370/1335 end of night Wednesday, I may not finish this week
537/1337 Thursday evening, I may read a bit more tonight
766/1337 end of night Friday
904/1337 Saturday evening
1337/1337 following Wednesday, holidays got in the way, but I'm done.

Mora and accent

Since I'm on about Latin phonology as of late, I might as well talk about accent and mora. I found a paper talking about it. Lehman says this:

P12.  Latin word accentuation
     1. The weight of the last syllable is stipulated to be one mora.
     2. Word accent falls on the third-last mora.
     3. If the word is shorter, word accent falls on the first mora.
While this does not answer the question of whether the mora is a primitive or a derived unit of Latin phonology…

But I don't like the notion of counting the last syllable as one mora for accentuation purposes. It screws up poetic scanning and junks up the whole rest of the system of mora counting. It also fails to account for words that have exceptional accent locations, like illūc.

Making a slight modification to Lehman's rules clears the whole mess up. I propose this:

1. From the last syllable onset position (whether filled or not), count back two moras.
2. Stress the syllable with the mora penultimate to the last onset.
3. If no penultimate mora, stress the mora before the last onset. 

Here's why I like this: No exceptions. Here it is in action. To make things clear, I've turned the ultimate syllable onset red as well as the moras that are counted.

	Standard orthography	IPA with syllables	IPA with moras indicated	Onsets and mora count	Stress placed
Antepenultimate stressed syllable	paenitet	paɪ.nɪ.tɛt	paɪμμ.nɪμ.tɛμt	paɪμμ.nɪμ.tɛμt	'paɪ.nɪ.tɛt
Penultimate stressed syllable	amāre	a.maː.rɛ	aμ.maːμμ.rɛμ	aμ.maːμμ.rɛμ	a.'maː.rɛ
Ultimate stressed syllable	illūc	ɪ.lːuːk	ɪμlμ.luːμμkμ	ɪμlμ.luːμμkμ	ɪ.'lːuːk

Presumably the first two rows look like standard action. The last row needs some explaining. First, the /lː/ is part of the second syllable, but it is also a participant in the previous syllable for the purpose of mora. I split it in the IPA with moras indicated column to make the bisyllabic participation explicit. So where do I get off on calling the final /k/ the onset of the ultimate syllable?

Well, for those of you paying attention to your Bennett's, check this:

6.3. When the enclitics… -ce… are appended to words…

And that is exactly what the situation with illūc is. The -c at the end is a remnant of the -ce enclitic. So the actual situation is that the word was originally illucce. Both the ll and the cc, as /lː/ and /kː/, would be ambisyllabic. Ok, so there's some sleight of hand going on by invoking the /k/ at the end of illūc as part of the onset of a non-pronounced syllable, but it kills the irregularity in Lehman's mora-based rule and syllable-based accentuation rules generally. (That said, now we've got a violation of *μμμ. Dammit, nothing works.)

Or am I missing something? I can't help but feel like I'm missing something when I'm putting forward a new idea.

Tense/lax vowels redux

Well. Here's an expert speaking. Or rather writing. Here's the quote to save you the trouble of clicking through.

Short vowels (except a) were generally more lax, and were nearer to each other in articulatory space than their long counterparts. They form a non-peripheral group. The long vowel system was more spread out, and the individual vowels (except ā) had a generally tenser articulation. They form a peripheral group. (p. 251)

Now, I don't know who Philip Baldi is, but I may have to find out. I'm deeply curious to find out what he is basing his suggestion of a tense/lax distinction on. It's a very clean and uses a preexisting phonological distinction. The other nice thing is that it makes Allen's double triangles in Vox Latina make much better sense.

*VVV? No, *μμμ

Well, I found what I was looking for. I was down the right trail with my suggestion that *VVV was a constraint in Latin. The problem is that I wasn't going far enough: I needed to take it all the way to the mora.

While searching, I found a research paper that focuses on six constraints. Brennan, the author, clearly has sunk more time in than I have. He went far enough to get to *μμμ (at least in syllables that aren't word initial). Makes sense to me. What's cool is that it fits in nicely with what Allen suggests for syllable weights.

canem ➝ [kanẽ:]

And that is ok. The [e] is one mora and the [:] is the other. But then

canēs ➝ [kane:s]

Wait. Isn't that last syllable e_μμs_μ? No. According to Brennan, /s/ and /n/ aren't moraic. So we've really got is e_μμs. And that's not violating *μμμ. So far so good. It gets better. Sort of.

*μμμ solves the [ju:li:] problem quite nicely. In the nominative we lose nothing, and the constraints explain it all.

/juːlɪʊs/	* μμμ	MaxIO
☞juːlɪʊs
juːlʊs		*

After all [ju_μμlɪ_μʊ_μs] never has more than three moras in a row—even if the /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ are in separate syllables. But in the genitive we violate * μμμ, though admittedly across the syllable line.

/juːlɪiː/	* μμμ	MaxIO
☞juːliː		*
juːlɪiː	*!

So /ju_μμlɪ_μi_μμ/ packs three moras into the last two syllables, which, while it is allowed, seems not to be favored. But when we move to the dative we get this.

/juːlɪoː/	* μμμ	MaxIO
☞juːlɪoː
juːloː		*

Three moras. No deletion. My suggestion is that /ɪ/ and /i:/ are somehow considered to be the same. And their orthography and presentation in textbooks would suggest that. The existence of stuff like nihil/nīl, pronounced [nɪhɪl̴] and [ni:l̴], also suggests that /ɪ/ and /i:/ are related quite closely.

The constraint of *μμμ  answers some questions, but brings me back to my initial question of just what is the nature of the relationship between long and short vowels in Latin? Something is afoot.