Philip Thibodeau wrote:
> 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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