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Latin C&G with I&E | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6363 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 9 of 16 11 July 2011 at 10:03am | IP Logged | ||
Just thinking out loud, but couldn't this be a prescriptivism? That is, all the grammarians agree on it and it's expressly pointed out because people are already beginning to differentiate hard and soft 'c'. Just like if you look up any book on Cantonese pronunciation, "me" in Canto is "ngo5" and if you ask anyone on the street, that's how they'll say it's pronounced. But listen to their speech and you'll hear almost everyone pronouncing it "o5". When confronted with this, people say that's "lazy sounds" and claim that they themselves don't use it, but they do. Everyone who hasn't has special training (like newsreaders) or consciously change their speech (which often leads to hypercorrection in adding the 'ng' initial where it doesn't belong, like in *"ngaam1") do. Could this sort of thing be going on in late Roman times? Are there any texts talking about linguistic pet peeves like the stuff dealing with split infinitives and "passive" voice in English? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5792 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 10 of 16 11 July 2011 at 10:26am | IP Logged | ||
Ooh, a sort of Lynne Truss of the Roman Empire? That would be an interesting book^H^H^H^Hcodex. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6484 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 16 11 July 2011 at 1:30pm | IP Logged | ||
It certainly could. And that is also why I wrote this: "If there actually was a distinction in archaic Latin, could it have lived on without being documented in the spoken language of the lower classes?". It is actually hard to understand why the development went so uniformly all over the Roman empire if 'soft' c and g didn't already exist (or evolve) during the expansionist period. But then you would expect to find grafitti and other 'uncensored' sources with tell-tale spelling errors, and I am not aware of such errors. However there are lots of things I'm not aware of so my ignorance doesn't prove anything. Edited by Iversen on 11 July 2011 at 1:33pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5043 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 12 of 16 11 July 2011 at 2:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ah to be able to time-travel! Where's Doctor Who and his Tardis when you need them?
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5792 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 13 of 16 11 July 2011 at 3:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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Lord says "Quintilian expressly states that the sound of c is always the same". This could possibly be interpreted as prescriptivism. The question is: why mention it? As I understand it, Ancient Greek didn't make any change like this, so why did it seem pertinent to say explicity that it never changes? I can't imagine saying this without there being some counterexample -- and that counterexample would have to come from either a written language or a spoken variety of Latin.
Now, Lord makes his justification thus "Without the best of evidence we should hardly believe that words written indifferently with ae or e after c would be so differently pronounced by those using the diphthong and those using the simple vowel, that, to take the instance already given, in the time of Lucilius, the rustic said Sesilius for Kaekilius." But if the the hard-C/soft-C distinction was non-phonemic (or almost non-phonemic), then would it really be that hard to believe? Furthermore, Lord also overstates the counter-argument by assuming that when we talk about soft-C, we're talking about S. What if it was like the Italian ci/ce, or like the English CH (where did we get that digraph from, anyway?), an /x/ like the lenited form of [k] in the modern Celtic languages, or even something approximating the English SH/French CH sound (I think one of the minor Romance languages has this sound)? But it's all theoretical and there'll never be a clear answer anyway. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| m89 Diglot Newbie Argentina Joined 4478 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English | Message 14 of 16 16 January 2012 at 10:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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The Sardinian language is the only current Romance language that has retained the hard C and G in all positions.
Besides Latin loans in Greek, we have also loans in Germanic languages and Basque, to name a few. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5007 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 15 of 16 30 January 2012 at 4:26am | IP Logged | ||
An extremely interesting subject indeed, even if it's of little practical value nowadays. However, I find it rather ironic that
unless Lord is referring to the final 'c', modern day English speakers don't agree if the first one should sound as /k/ or /s/. Some splits are just recurrent, apparently... Edited by mrwarper on 30 January 2012 at 4:27am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Itikar Groupie Italy Joined 4450 days ago 94 posts - 158 votes Speaks: Italian* | Message 16 of 16 13 February 2012 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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Once ago I went in Sardinia and I heard a farmer speaking in Sardinian. I simply felt as if my version book from high school had acquired the ability to speak! I remember he said things like "ulterioris impegno" or "dominus", "domus" and so on. Were it not for those strange alien roots that appear randomly in Sardinian I would have bet he was an ancient Roman in disguise.
Regarding the pronunciation of Latin, especially C and G, there is another pronunciation, called "ecclesiastical pronunciation", where those letters are pronounced as in modern Italian. This is the pronunciation adopted by the Catholic Church and by most of Italian Latin teachers in high schools in Italy. It is also more suited to read Latin texts composed long after the classical age, such as Scholastica, Latin works of Petrarch or even Dog Latin. :) Needless to say this pronunciation does not really reflect the complete evolution of Latin, since, while it is obvious that some of its features were reflected in the evolution of romance language, others clearly did not. I.e. In Italian the plural of "amica" (female friend) keeps the hard "c" --> "amiche" (female friends), while in the ecclesiastical pronounciation "amicae" sounds /aˈmi.ʧe/. I apologise for my poor command of the English language and my slightly tortuous sentences. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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