I think I would now agree. It is avoidance of dysphony, not ambiguity,
that motivates the preference for et sic. There are cases where authors
mention forms which are avoided because of their ambiguity, but these are
distinct from discussions of euphony and dysphony. But then what is it
that makes -cqu- dysphonous? For I don't think that we want to say that it
is just somehow dysphonous by nature. Wilkinson, in his Golden Latin
Artistry, suggests what I think is a good explanation: "Latin tended to
discard such tongue-twisting words as the early 'stlites' and 'stlocus'...
Cicero preferred the words 'formarum', 'formis' to their synonyms
'specierum', 'speciebus' on grounds of comfort in utterance ('commoditatem
in dicendo'). Further, it has been noted that when a Latin critic or
grammarian says a word is, or is not, euphonious, he often seems to mean
that it slips more, or less, easily from the mouth... Indeed, someone
criticized by Philodemus... held that the *only* form of cacophony was that
caused by difficulty of enunciation," (p.18). So -cqu-, as a rare
consonant cluster, would be comparatively hard to pronounce, esp. in
comparison with the much more common -ts- of 'et sic'. In other words, it
is not the ear that is offended, but the tongue.
Philip Thibodeau
Brown University
>> 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.
>
>Bear in mind that it is relatively easy to avoid sicque by saying et sic (vel
>sim.), whereas quicquid is not so easily dispensed with. I would conclude that
>-cq- is avoided *where possible* for reasons of dysphony in this
>consonant-cluster per se, rather than tracing the pattern of
>avoidance/non-avoidance to concern over what the sound might or might not be
>taken to represent.
>
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