In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Philip Thibodeau <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes >I thought the observation about ugly sounding -cq- was a very interesting >one, and when I went to check it, it seemed to be true: for a full-corpus >search on the Latin CDrom yielded about 25 instances of sicque, all fairly >late, as has been noted, vs. well over a thousand instances of the >alternative, et sic; so sicque definitely seems to have been avoided. > >But then I mentioned this to a colleague, and he suggested that I look up >plain -cq- . And there were very nearly 1500 instances of words containing >that pair -cq-; about 90% of these were the two pronouns quicquam and >quicquid, which are of course common in classical Latin authors. So this >would seem to tell against the theory that -cq- was avoided for reasons of >dysphony. My colleague, Mr. Malcolm Hyman, suggested that the reason >sicque would be avoided was in fact to prevent confusion of the following >sort: >1) quicquam is analyzed as quid + quam, and quicquid as quid + quid. >2) Thus, most of the time when a Latin speaker heard -cqu-, they would >understand that this pair of sounds was substituting for -d + qu-.
True; perhaps for that reason it didn't really count; morphological derivation might have excused quicquid and quicquam, whereas adding -que to sic or nunc or tunc was a wanton act without justification. Or one could imagine that the cqu from dqu (or rather tque) sounded like a single long consonant, whereas when the c was original it would have remained separate. May one compare the French poets' rule on hiatus, which forbids 'tu as' _habes_ but permits 'tuas' _interfecisti_? >3) So, sicque would be avoided because it would be confusing, i.e. the >listener might momentarily confuse it with a form *sidque, or perhaps >sitque. >Philip Thibodeau >Brown University > But the i of `sic' is long, that of `sit' short. Leofranc Holford-Strevens *_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_* Leofranc Holford-Strevens 67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone Oxford scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter? OX2 6EJ tel. +44 (0)1865 552808(home)/267865(work) fax +44 (0)1865 512237 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) *_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_* ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
