Re: VIRGIL: sicque/quicquid
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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VIRGIL: MAGNA PECUNIA NUNC!!!!!
Okay - now that I have your attention Can someone confirm or deny that ars est celere artem is from Ovid's Art of Love. Many thanks, Jane Cates --- 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
VIRGIL: source of quotation please
Re: Sic mihi contingat vivere sicque mori. Many thanks to all of you for your various suggestions -- that my quotation is almost certainly post-classical, perhaps even from a Renaissance source, and possibly to be found in Ariosto's own Latin verse, some of which is written in elegiacs. I haven't access at present to a library that would enable me to follow up that last suggestion, but I have passed it on to Jason Scott-Warren, the author of the article I was reading, and he also is going to try to find the source of the quotation. If he or I ever manage to find it, I'll let all know. Inn the mean time I now know a lot more than I did about sicque and the possible reasons for its avoidance by classical writers! Simon Cauchi, Freelance Editor and Indexer Hamilton, New Zealand [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- 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
Re: VIRGIL: MAGNA PECUNIA NUNC!!!!!
Can someone confirm or deny that ars est celere artem is from Ovid's Art of Love. It's celare. I haven't got Ovid's Art of Love to hand, but the Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs cites the Latin merely as L., with no reference to a literary source, and so I suspect it's merely proverbial. Similarly a densely annotated edition of Sidney's Apology for Poetry, in which references to original sources are given for practically all the classical quotations and allusions, has no note for the passage that goes using art to show art, and not to hide art, as ... he [an orator] should do. If I remember rightly, Ovid does say something about the need for a seducer to conceal his intentions at the start of a seduction, but even if he does use those very words, how do you know he wasn't simply repeating a well-known proverb? Simon Cauchi, Freelance Editor and Indexer Hamilton, New Zealand [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- 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
