Grammatice

Mille Fabulae et Una: 1001 Aesop's Fables in Latin

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Gibbs) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:18:00 +0000

This blog is not currently active but you can find lots of new materials at the blog for the new Mille Fabulae book: MilleFabulae.blogspot.com.

Available now from Lulu.com

Download a free copy of Mille Fabulae et Una.

PDF.BestLatin.net

Chiasmus: Correspondence and Reversal

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Gibbs) — Sun, 10 May 2009 13:43:00 +0000

Chiasmus: Correspondence and Reversal

The following materials provide definitions of chiasmus from traditional Latin grammars; for a more user-friendly set of chiasmus materials, check out the Chiasmus page at the Latin Via Proverbs wiki - and write your own chiastic proverbs!

The Latin reference grammar by Allen and Greenough 598f provides the following terminology to describe two important parallel patterns: "Antithesis between two pairs of ideas is indicated by placing the pairs either (1) in the same order (anaphora) or (2) in exactly the opposite order (chiasmus)." In section 641 , Allen and Greenough define chiasmus as "a reversing of the order of words in corresponding pairs of phrases."

[So too in other reference grammars; see the addenda below for Gildersleeve and Lodge; Madvig (Woods); Harkness; Sonnenschein; Chase; Hale and Buck; Bennett; Burton; and D'Ooge.]

So, the crucial elements in the definition of chiasmus are as follows: a corresponding pair of ideas (pair of phrases), and a reversal of the order (opposite order).

To express this situation formally, we can use the symbols A1-A2 (a pair), B1-B2 (a corresponding pair), B2-B1 (a reversal of the order).

The CORRESPONDENCE between the pairs is based on the nature of A1-B1 and A2-B2, that is on what is "1" and what is "2" in the definition of the pairs. These correspondences can be morphological, syntactic, lexical, etc. There is no specific limitation placed on the nature of the correspondence.

Here are ALL five examples provided by Allen and Greenough. I have put A1, A2, B1 and B2 in bold. I have put B1 and B2 in ALL CAPS. In addition, I have marked A1 and B1 as blue, and A2 and B2 as red in order to reveal the chiastic pattern visually.

The most common pattern for chiasmus has the red items together in the middle, A1-A2-B2-B1 or A1-B2-A2-B1, as you can see below, although it is also theoretically possible for the red items to be interlaced as in A1-B2-B1-A2 (see Example 6: can anyone help find an example of this?).

Example 1: A1-A2-B2-B1

leges supplicio improbos afficiunt, DEFENDUNT AC TUENTUR BONOS

CORRESPONDENCE:
1: accusative object
2: verb
PAIRS:
A1-A2: improbos afficiunt
B1-B2: BONOS DEFENDUNT AC TUENTUR
REVERSAL:
B2-B1 DEFENDUNT AC TUENTUR BONOS

Comments: This example shows that the parallelism is not limited by the number of words, as there is a compound verb phrase in B2.

Example 2

Lucius Catilina nobili genere natus fuit, magna vi et animi et corporis, sed INGENIO MALO PRAVOQUE

CORRESPONDENCE:
1: modifier
2: noun
PAIRS:
A1-A2: magna vi
B1-B2: MALO PRAVOQUE INGENIO
REVERSAL:
B2-B1 INGENIO MALO PRAVOQUE

Comments: Here there is a compound modifier phrase in B1.

Example 3

non igitur utilitatem amicitia sed UTILITAS AMICITIAM consecuta est

CORRESPONDENCE:
1: accusative object
2: nominative subject
PAIRS:
A1-A2: utilitatem amicitia
B1-B2: AMICITIAM UTILITAS
REVERSAL:
B2-B1 UTILITAS AMICITIAM

Comments: This example is especially elegant because the reversed correspondence is grammatical, and the resulting pattern now has a lexical correspondence.

Example 4

a cultu atque humanitate provinciae longissime absunt, MINIMEque AD EOS mercatores saepe commeant

CORRESPONDENCE:
1: prepositional phrase
2: adverb
PAIRS:
A1-A2: a cultu atque humanitate longissime
B1-B2: AD EOS MINIME
REVERSAL:
B2-B1 MINIME AD EOS

Comments: This example shows that a considerable number of words can intervene between the pairs, and also between the individual items of each pair. Note also that it is possible to have many patterns operating at once in a complex sentence like this; the adverbs are also involved in an anaphora construction involving the adverb-verb pairs in the sentence: longissime absunt... minime commeant

Example 5: A1-B2-A2-B1

It is also possible, although not common, for the pairs to be interwoven, while the inversion takes place. To see how that works, let's look at this example, which according to Allen and Greenough combines synchesis (interlocking order) with chiasmus (inverted pair). Here is the example given by Allen and Greenough:

arma nondum EXPIATIS uncta CRUORIBUS

CORRESPONDENCE
1: noun (A1: arma; B1: cruoribus)
2: modifier (A2: uncta, B2: expiatibus)
PAIRS:
A1-A2: arma uncta
B1-B2: CRUORIBUS EXPIATIS
REVERSAL
B2-B1 EXPIATIS CRUORIBUS
INTERLOCKING
Now, with interlocking (synchesis) of the phrases, we get this result:
A1-B2-A2-B1
arma EXPIATIS uncta CRUORIBUS

Comments: Note that A1-A2 and B2-B1 are still here; the only difference from a typical chiasmus is that they are now interwoven (a process called synchesis). You can also think about the process unfolding by this simple process:
A1-A2-B2-B1 (chiasmus)
Advance the A2 term one position in the chain:
A1-B2-A2-B1 (chiasmus with synchesis)

Example 6: A1-B2-B1-A2.

Allen and Greenough do not provide an example of the one other theoretically possible reversal pattern which can be created, when the pairs are not interlocked, but instead one pair wraps around the other. That would yield:
A1-B2-B1-A2

[paragraph removed: I thought there was an example of this provided in one of the emails to the LatinTeach listserve; but I stand corrected! Does anybody know of an example of this type of chiasmus that could be cited here? The absence of any ready examples of this type seems to me to further undermine the contention of the AP Board below that ABBA is the general type which can stand for all chiastic structures; see below.]

The AP Question in Question

Let's now look at the AP Question:
provenient causa carmina digna sua

The two pairs are clearly the phrases causa sua and carmina digna. In what way is there a correspondence between these two noun phrases?

causa: starts with letter c; ablative singular feminine; noun; complement to digna
sua: starts with letter s; ablative singular feminine; modifier; complement to digna

carmina: starts with letter c; nominative plural neuter; noun; subject of verb
digna: starts with letter d; nominative plural neuter; modifier; subject of verb

There is only one way in which these two phrases correspond:
1: noun
2: modifier
So the pairs are
A1-A2: causa sua
B1-B2: CARMINA DIGNA

This, then, is the analysis of the AP Question in question - the red items appear at the end, which is not a chiastic pattern.
causa CARMINA DIGNA sua
A1-B1-B2-A2

There is no reversal of order because in both phrases, 2 follows 1. The pattern A1-B1-B2-A2 consists of two pairs, A1-A2, and B1-B2, with A1-A2 wrapped around B1-B2. The order is parallel, 1-1-2-2.

The chiastic arrangement of these words would be:
causa sua DIGNA CARMINA
A1-A2 causa sua
B2-B1 digna carmina

If that chiastic structure were interlocked:
causa DIGNA sua CARMINA
A1-B2-A2-B1

If that chiastic structure were wrapped:
causa DIGNA CARMINA sua
A1-B2-B1-A2

The argument given by the AP examiners is that "causa carmina digna sua" is an example of chiasmus because of the ABBA structure. This is simply a misunderstanding of the symbols used in ABBA.

If by ABBA they mean a chiastic structure AB-BA, that would be all well and good. That would be exactly the same as the 12-21 structure which you find in the most basic chiastic pattern, 1-2-2-1 (A1-A2-B2-B1): causa sua digna carmina.

But the line reads: causa carmina digna sua.

If that were analyzed as AB-BA (= A1-A2-B2-B1), then the first phrase would be "causa carmina" which is nonsensical as a phrase ("digna sua" is workable as an ablative-complement phrase, but the nonsensical "causa carmina" renders that a moot point).

[this paragraph added in response to an email query] If that were analyzed as A-BB-A (= A1-B2-B1-A2), then the first phrase would be "causa sua" and the second phrase would be "digna carmina." I suppose this is what has misled the examiners: both of these are grammatically correct phrases, but they are not corresponding phrases; instead, they are already inverted phrases: "noun-modifier" and "modifier-noun."

So it looks like the AP examiners have confused AB-BA (= A1-A2-B2-B1, basic chiasmus) with A-BB-A (not necessarily chiasmus, UNLESS the B2-B1 shows a reversal of the correspondences on which the pair is based, A1-B2-B1-A2).

[this paragraph added in response to a LatinTeach post] This same confusion is also apparently found in the 2001 Latin AP Teacher's Guide which offers this supposed definition of chiasmus, "Arrangement of words, usually adjectives and nouns, in the pattern ABBA" - a definition that simply ignores the definition of chiastic in the Allen & Greenough, where there is indeed an ABBA pattern but one formed on the reversal of correspondences. Pity the poor student who actually relied on Allen & Greenough in learning about chiasmus! Allen & Greenough is apparently not a reliable reference for the AP Exam - an ominous sign indeed. In the example provided in the Teacher's Guide, there is, as in the test question, no reversal of the correspondences:
innumeris TUMIDUM PYTHONA sagittis,
CORRESPONDENCE:
1: modifier
2: noun
PAIRS:
A1-A2 innumeris sagittis
B1-B2 TUMIDUM PYTHONA
The three chiastic arrangements WOULD be:
innumeris sagittis PYTHONA TUMIDUM
innumeris PYTHONA sagittis TUMIDUM
innumeris PYTHONA TUMIDUM sagittis

Chiasmus must involve, according to Allen & Greenough, corresponding pairs AND a reversal of order in the correspondences. The AP question in question involves corresponding pairs, but there is no reversal of order in the correspondences. Therefore, there is no chiasmus in the question in question. So too in the example cited from the Teacher's Guide.

I would urge the AP folks to take heed of this chiastic proverb from Publilius Syrus:
invitat culpam qui PECCATUM PRAETERIT.
CORRESPONDENCE:
1: verb
2: object
PAIRS:
A1-A2: invitat culpam
B1-B2: PRAETERIT PECCATUM
REVERSAL:
B2-B1 PECCATUM PRAETERIT

I will take heed of the same warning, so if I have made an error here, or neglected an important type of chiasmus, please let me know! You can add a comment to the post below.

ADDENDUM 1: Gildersleeve and Lodge

Gildersleeve and Lodge provide this definition in section 682:
When pairs are contrasted, the second is put in the same order as the first, but often in inverse order. The employment of the same order is called Anaphora (repetition). The inverse order is called Chiasmus, or crosswise position, and gives alternate stress.

Example 7: A1-A2-B2-B1

Ante videmus fulgorem quam SONUM AUDIAMUS.
CORRESPONDENCE:
1: verb
2: object
PAIRS:
A1-A2: videmus fulgorem
B1-B2: AUDIAMUS SONUM
REVERSAL:
B2-B1: SONUM AUDIAMUS

ADDENDUM 2: Madvig (Woods)

Madvig (Woods) provide this definition in section 473b:
If two coordinate propositions or two series of connected words form an antithesis, in which the separate words correspond, the second proposition or series is sometimes inverted, instead of repeating the same arrangement, in order to make the antithesis more striking; so that the word which stands at the beginning of the first member finds its counterpart at the end of the last (Chiasmus).

Example 8: A1-A2-B2-B1

Cum summa testificatione tuorum in se officiorum et AMORIS erga te SUI.
CORRESPONDENCE:
1: modifiers
2: noun
PAIRS:
A1-A2: tuorum officiorum
B1-B2: SUI AMORIS
REVERSAL:
B2-B1: AMORIS SUI
Comment: This is an especially artful arrangement, with the parallel prepositional phrases, "in se" and "erga te," inserted into the corresponding phrases.

Example 9

ratio nostra consentit, REPUGNAT ORATIO.
CORRESPONDENCE:
1: noun
2: verb
PAIRS:
A1-A2: ratio nostra consentit
B1-B2: ORATIO REPUGNAT
REVERSAL:
B2-B1: REPUGNAT ORATIO

Example 10: A1-A2-A3-B3-B2-B1

Clariorem inter Romanos deditio Postumium quam PONTIUM INCRUENTA VICTORIA INTER SAMNITES fecit.
CORRESPONDENCE:
1: prepositional phrase
2: nominative noun
3: accusative noun - I have made that GREEN
PAIRS:
A1-A2-A3: inter Romanos deditio Postumium
B1-B2-B3: INTER SAMNITES INCRUENTA VICTORIA PONTIUM
REVERSAL:
B3-B2-B1: PONTIUM INCRUENTA VICTORIA INTER SAMNITES
Comments: This is a lovely example of a chiastic pair based on a triple correspondence.

ADDENDUM 3: Harkness

Harkness provides this definition in section 666.
Two groups of words may be made prominent and emphatic either by Anaphora or by Chiasmus.
1. Anaphora. Here the order of words in the second group is identical with that in the first.
2. Chiasmus. Here the order of the words in the first group is reversed in the second.

Example 11: A1-A2-B2-B1

fragile corpus ANIMUS SEMPITERNUS movet.
CORRESPONDENCE:
1: modifier
2: noun
PAIRS:
A1-A2: fragile corpus
B1-B2: SEMPITERNUS ANIMUS
REVERSAL:
B2-B1: ANIMUS SEMPITERNUS

Example 12

satis eloquentiae, SAPIENTIAE PARUM.
CORRESPONDENCE:
1: adjective (quantity)
2: partitive genitive
PAIRS:
A1-A2: satis eloquentiae
B1-B2: PARUM SAPIENTIAE
REVERSAL:
B2-B1: SAPIENTIAE PARUM

ADDENDUM 4: Sonnenschein

Sonnenschein provides this definition in section 601:
When two similar groups of words are contrasted, the order may be either (i), the same (Anaphora), or (ii) the opposite (Chiasmus). Anaphora and Chiasmus have been called "the two chief forces which control the order of the Latin sentence." (Nagelsbach.)

Example 13: A1-A2-B2-B1

multos defendi, LAESI NEMINEM
CORRESPONDENCE:
1: accusative object
2: verb
PAIRS:
A1-A2: multos defendi
B1-B2: NEMINEM LAESI
REVERSAL:
B2-B1: LAESI NEMINEM

Example 14

oratio pugnat , REPUGNAT RATIO.
CORRESPONDENCE:
1: nominative subject
2: verb
PAIRS:
A1-A2: oratio pugnat
B1-B2: RATIO REPUGNAT
REVERSAL:
B2-B1: REPUGNAT RATIO

ADDENDUM 5: Chase

Chase provides this definition in section 260:
5. Contrasted and kindred words are put next to one another.
6. Contrasted pairs of words are often put with the words in one pair in a reverse order to that of the other pair; two of the contrasted words still often being together as by last rule. This figure is called chiasmus, i.e. crossing, from the Greek letter X.

Example 15: A1-A2-B2-B1

cum spe vincendi simul abiecisti CERTANDI etiam CUPIDITATEM
CORRESPONDENCE:
1: noun
2: genitive of gerund
PAIRS:
A1-A2: spe vincendi
B1-B2: CUPIDITATEM CERTANDI
REVERSAL:
B2-B1: CERTANDI CUPIDITATEM

Example 16

cedere alius, ALIUS OBTRUNCARI
CORRESPONDENCE:
1: infinitive
2: alius
PAIRS:
A1-A2: cedere alius
B1-B2: OBTRUNCARI ALIUS
REVERSAL:
B2-B1: ALIUS OBTRUNCARI

ADDENDUM 6: Hale and Buck

Hale and Buck provide this definition in section 628:
When two pairs of words are in contrast with each other, the members may be arranged either in Parallel Order or in Cross Order (called chiasmus, from the Greek letter X, in which the lines are crossed).

Example 17: A1-A2-B2-B1

pro vita hominis nisi HOMINIS VITA reddatur
CORRESPONDENCE:
1: vita
2: hominis
PAIRS:
A1-A2: vita hominis
B1-B2: VITA HOMINIS
REVERSAL:
B2-B1: HOMINIS VITA

ADDENDUM 7: Bennett

Bennett provides this definition in section 350.11.c:
Chiasmus (so named from a fancied analogy to the strokes of the Greek letter X, chi), which consists in changing the relative order of words in two antithetical phrases.

Example 18: A1-A2-B2-B1

horribilem illum diem aliis, NOBIS faustum
CORRESPONDENCE:
1: adjective (modifier of diem)
2: dative
PAIRS:
A1-A2: horribilem aliis
B1-B2: faustum NOBIS
REVERSAL:
B2-B1: NOBIS faustum

ADDENDUM 8: Burton

Burton provides this definition in section 1067:
Emphasis is secured in the following ways:
1067. By reversing the order of words in the second pair, when one pair is contrasted with another. This is called Chiasmus. The use of the same order in the second pair is called Anaphora.

Example 19: A1-A2-B2-B1

finis et Gallis territandi et PAVENDI fuit ROMANIS
CORRESPONDENCE:
1: dative
2: genitive (of gerund)
PAIRS:
A1-A2: Gallis territandi
B1-B2: ROMANIS PAVENDI
REVERSAL:
B2-B1: PAVENDI ROMANIS

ADDENDUM 9: D'Ooge

D'Ooge provides this definition in section 934. Emphasis is secured by putting words in unusual positions, as follows:
f. By reversing the order of words in the second of two contrasted expressions. This is called chiasmus and is very common. Chiasmus is named from the Greek letter chi (X), in which the lines are crossed.

Example 20: A1-A2-B2-B1

quam diu vixit, VIXIT IN LUCTU
CORRESPONDENCE:
1: adverbial phrase
2: vixit
PAIRS:
A1-A2: quam diu vixit
B1-B2: IN LUCTU VIXIT
REVERSAL:
B2-B1: VIXIT IN LUCTU

Subjunctive: It's not indicative!

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Gibbs) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:37:00 +0000

Hi everybody, and sorry for the long pause. The summer disappeared in a flurry of Aesop, but now the manuscript is safely in the hands of the editor at Bolchazy-Carducci, and she has been very encouraging about my including lots of grammar material in the book. I'll be using this blog over the next few months to expand on some of the ideas I presented in the book, providing more detail and showing how those issues connect up to a larger linguistic picture.

Gotta love the subjunctive. Today I'd like to begin what is going to be the first in what will probably turn into quite a long list of posts about the Latin subjunctive. The Latin subjunctive is a vital, expressive, extremely significant dimension of the Latin language, and the poor quality of the presentation of the Latin subjunctive is one of my biggest beefs with Latin language textbooks. The textbook by Moreland & Fleischer, Latin: An Intensive Course, earned my admiration by presenting the subjunctive very early on, in Chapter 2 of the book! Kudos to Moreland & Fleischer for doing that! In the venerable Wheelock's Latin, the subjunctive is not presented until Chapter 28 (out of 40 chapters), which I've seen do nearly irreparable damage to many people who learn Latin from that book: they remain hesitant about the subjunctive forever after.

Part of the hesitation in presenting the subjunctive derives from the fact that English, while it does have a subjunctive mood, does not rely on the subjunctive to do the same kind of work that the Latin subjunctive does. So, English is going to be of almost no help.

Subjunctive: it's not indicative. In the absence of English translations to help you, how then can you proceed? Well, structural linguistics provides a great clue: in language, the way to understand something is by recognizing what it is NOT. This principle of binary opposition or contrasts is one of the crucial insights at the heart of structural linguistics, and it provides the perfect gateway to the Latin subjunctive.

When you ask what the subjunctive is, just start by understanding that it is NOT the indicative. If the indicative gives you the statement of fact (that's a pretty easy concept to grasp, and one which is familiar to English speakers), then the subjunctive is something OTHER than that. The subjunctive covers a whole wide range of functions in Latin, but the key thing to understand about the subjunctive is just that it is NOT indicative.

Some examples. The way I'd like to illustrate that is with this little fable which will be Fable #1 in the Barlow Aesop book. You can find additional comments on the fable over at the Latin Via Fables blog; for now, I'll provide the text of the fable and then comment on the two uses of the subjunctive that you can find here:

Leaena, cum a Vulpe saepe exprobraretur quod, quolibet partu, unum dumtaxat catulum parturiret, respondit, “Unum sane, at pol Leonem!"

I'll provide a quick translation into English: "Since the fox kept on criticizing the lioness again and again because, with each litter, she gave birth to no more than one cub, the lioness replied: "One, it's true - but by god he's a lion." Notice that I'm not trying to teach you about Latin grammar with the English translation (that way danger lies!). I just want you to understand the story before we plunge into the grammar.

As you will see from my highlighting of the verbs, this little Latin story features two subjunctive verbs, and just one indicative verb. No surprise: Latin loads up on subjunctives and passives and participles and all kinds of things that are difficult for English speakers to comprehend - all the more reason to leave English behind, since it is not going to give you a lot of insight into the Latin grammar.

Let's look at the indicative verb first. It provides the core of the story, if you will: Leaena (vulpi) respondit, "The lioness replied (to the fox)." That is the central event of the story and it is appropriate told in the indicative. Everything else is just elaborating on that one, single indicative statement.

Now, for the subjunctives.

Exprobraretur. The first subjunctive, exprobraretur, is introduced by the word cum. Excellent! The word cum is a great place to start because it is a word that can introduce an indicative OR a subjunctive verb. So how does the Latin speaker choose which mood to use? The indicative tells you WHEN something happened. That's it: pure and simple. Now, the subjunctive is something different - that's the point of having a choice here. Does the subjunctive mean that something did NOT happen. No, the binary opposition is not so simple as that. This is what the Prague linguists would call a case of marked and unmarked. The indicative in Latin is marked for being a factual event; the subjunctive is not marked as factual - which is definitely not the same as being marked as unfactual, if you see what I mean.

This distinction is very relevant for exprobraretur here. Using the subjunctive does not mean that the fox did not criticize the lioness over and over again: she did! It would have been possible to use the indicative here, if the author had wanted to do so. That would have told us when the lioness made her reply. The subjunctive, however, takes out of the realm of fact and into the realm of speculation: not when, but WHY. The English word "since" gives a nice way to think about how something temporal can slip easily into the realm of the causal. Since the fox kept nagging her, the lioness finally spoke up! This would be labeled a "causal" use of the subjunctive. I'm really not interested in such labels. I just want to feel confident in my recognition that this verb is not indicative, and in my feeling for what different meaning is being conveyed in Latin through this use of the subjunctive.

Parturiret. The second subjunctive, parturiret, works in much the same way. There is nothing non-factual about this statement - the lioness really does give birth to only one cub each time she has a litter. (Well, that is not true in the biological world - but in the world of Aesop, it's as good as fact - and is essential for the punchline of the fable!) What then is the point of using the subjunctive here? What this subjunctive does is to get us into the mind of the fox. This is why the fox thinks she is justified in criticizing the lioness - why on earth does the fox think she can get away with criticizing the lioness like this? She thinks she can do that because of the lioness giving birth to one cub at a time. If the indicative were used here, we would not learn anything "behind the scenes," so to speak - no explanation of the inner logic of the story; in this instance, the inner logic of the fox's thoughts.

(A Romance digression: As someone who has always had a hard time wrapping my mind around the use of the subjunctive in modern Italian in an expression like penso che..., this is a great Latin sentence for me to keep in mind. It is exactly this kind of Latin sentence with quod - later to become Italian che - that gives me a clue about the Latin origins of the Italian use of the subjunctive.)

Conclusion. With this first post on the Latin subjunctive, I hope to have persuaded you that the first question always to ask yourself when confronting the Latin subjunctive is: could the speaker have used an indicative here? and, if so, why didn't they do that? It's always a good first question to ask, because it allows you to apply your firm knowledge of the indicative mood as a launching board in which you can then leap off into the wide open spaces of the Latin subjunctive. :-)

Final -M and Nasalized Vowels in Latin

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Gibbs) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:38:00 +0000

Last time I posted about some vowels that are sometimes consonants, or so-called semivowels: I (written J when it is a semivowel), and U (written V when it is a semivowel). In this post, I want to write about a consonant that is not always a consonant, and instead serves as a nasal vowel marker: the letter M. (In my next post, I'll write about another consonant that is not really a consonant either, but a breathing marker: the letter H.)

Of course, if you look at a typical discussion of Latin pronunciation, you will find that M is listed as a consonant, and that it is pronounced like English M. Yet you probably also have a clue that all is not as it seems with the letter M when it follows a Latin vowel. Remember the rules for elision in Latin poetry...?

If two words are on the same poetic line, and the first ends with a vowel OR M, and the second begins with a vowel OR H (I'll write about H next time), the last syllable of the first word and the first syllable of the second word elide, forming a single consonant, which has the value of the longer of the two syllables.

Unfortunately, most Latin students are presented this as a rule to memorize with no discussion of just why M and H, of all the letters in Latin, are subject to this special treatment. I distinctly remember thinking as a beginning Latin student that the M was simply being "skipped" for some reason, and I had no idea why M would be skipped. I memorized the rule, marked out the final M's in my Vergil, and elided without further ado.

Well, if you think about the rule, you can see what it strongly suggests about final M in Latin words: somehow a vowel followed by final M is equivalent to a final vowel. A word that ends in final M is just like a word that ends in a final vowel for the purposes of elision in Latin poetry. That is the vital clue: a vowel plus following M really is a vowel, and that M is not a consonant at all. Instead of functioning as a consonant, that M is the marker of a nasal vowel.

Just imagine if the nasalization of the vowel were indicated with a diacritic, instead of the letter M being appropriated for the purpose. Then, all of a sudden, the rules for elision would not look so strange. For example, in this line from the opening passage of Vergils' Aeneid, you see an example of elision with a nasalized vowel, as well as a typical final vowel elision:

litora, multum_ille_et terris iactatus et alto

If the -um were instead written with a diacritic such as a tilde, then the elision would be clearly vowel to vowel:

litora, multũ_ille_et terris iactatus et alto

Some advocates of Latin pronunciation pronounce Latin nasalized vowels, treating the M as a vowel marker rather than as a consonant, and that is something I commend them for! Most Latin teachers, however, teach Latin M as a consonant, instead of distinguishing between Latin preceding a vowel (when it is a consonant), and Latin M following a vowel (when it is a marker of nasalization). That is the Latin pronunciation which I was taught, and it is the pronunciation I continue to use; although I know that ancient Latin clearly had nasalized vowels (the rules for elision in poetry make that absolutely clear), I still pronounce the letter M as a consonantal M following a vowel, and I always have to prod myself to remember the elision rule when I am reading Latin poetry aloud. If I nasalized the final vowel plus M, of course, the rule for elision would be obvious; the elision would take place naturally, as the nasalized vowel and the following vowel came into contact with one another.

There is a great deal of discussion (even bitter invective) among Latin teachers about the quantity of Latin vowels, but I see relatively little discussion of the need to distinguish nasalized vowels when reading Latin aloud. To be honest, I would be much more sympathetic to the advocates of nasalized vowels than to the advocates of Latin vowel quantity. For English speakers, vowel quantity is very difficult to hear, much less to produce. Nasalization of vowels, however, is something that is easy for us to hear, and easy to produce.

In Allen's Vox Latina, it clearly states that M is to be pronounced as English m at the beginning or in the middle of a word, but at the end of a word, after a vowel, it is a nasalized vowel, as in French.

Yet Traupman's Latin dictionary, my own favorite among the paperback dictionaries, will not go that far, and instead treats the poetry evidence as a freak circumstance, rather than as an indication of actual Latin pronunciation: M is "English m, but in verse final m before an initial vowel or h in the following word was presumably not pronounced." Traupman makes it seem as if this was a specifically poetic practice (why on earth would it be limited to poetry only?), and he does not even mention nasalization, making it sound simply as if the M were a silent letter, having no phonological function at all.

I am not someone who advocates strongly for one style of Latin pronunciation over another; instead, I simply urge people to devise their own system, based on the many possible options, and then to stick to the system they have devised. Yet what intrigues me here in the case of final M is the fact that so many people who are willing to tell other people how Latin should be pronounced seem to be uninterested in the nasalization of Latin vowels as indicated by the letter M. I'm sure if a diacritic had evolved to indicate nasalization, instead of final M, everybody would be nasalizing very happily. The problem is that the letter M has been enlisted to do double-duty, sometimes as a consonant and sometimes as a vowel nasalization marker - and we have thus been seduced into pronouncing M as if it were always a consonant.

Luckily, the rules for elision in Latin poetry make it perfectly plain that M was a special letter, serving both as a consonant and as a nasal vowel marker. In my next post, I'll say something about the letter H, which had another special function as a marker of breathing. By understanding the phonological function of these two special letters, M and H, you can approach the rules for elision not as arbitrary, but instead as something very logical, linguistically speaking.

Finally, here's another big plus when if you are willing to teach your students about nasalized vowels! The final vowel indicated with -um was probably more of a nasalized O rather than a nasalized U (with O and U being vowels that slide easily into one another in the mouth, after all, as I discussed in a previous post). So, the nasalized -um of the Latin accusative case ending provides the key for how we got from Latin amicus to Spanish amigo or Italian amico. Many students assume (as I did!) that for some bizarre reason it is the Latin ablative or dative case, amico, which gave rise to these Latin Romance words. Not at all! It was the accusative case, amicum, pronounced amico(m) which ultimately gave us amigo and amico. The Roman word amicum did not rhyme with the English word "hum" or "gum" but instead ended with a nasalized vowel: just have your students say "amico" and squeeze their noses for the final vowel. Instant nasalization: that is the final -um in Latin!

Pointy Nose

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Latin Semivowels, and the letters J and U

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Gibbs) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:57:00 +0000

My apologies for not posting last week! If you read the Bestiaria Latina blog round-ups, you know that I've been working on harvesting all the Latin Aesopic fables I could find at Google Books and other online sources... finally telling myself to stop when I reached 4000 fables! You can see the results of those efforts at the Latin Aesopus wiki. I'm going to try to get back to my regular blogging schedule this week!

Last time, I wrote about the diphthongs in which the vowel sounds go from low (or open) vowels, such as [a], [e] and [o], to high (or closed) vowels, such as [i] and [u], producing diphthongs like [ai] or [au].

This week, I want to say something about what happens when the vowel sound begins with the high, closed vowels [i] and [u] and then modulates into a following vowel sound. The result is what is sometimes called a "semivowel" sound, because the [i] sound becomes what you might transcribe as an English "y" (Latin "j") and the [u] sound becomes what you might transcribe as an English "w" (Latin "v").

Does that pair "y and w" sound familiar? You probably learned a little rhyme in elementary school, about the vowels being "a e i o u and sometimes y and w"...? Well, the reason that y and w are put in a special category in English is because they represent the two high, closed vowels, [i] and [u], which regularly take on the quality of semivowels when they are followed by a vowel sound. If only they would teach about high, closed vowels, so that the little rhyme would make sense! Why "sometimes y and w"...? Because when the high, closed vowels are followed by another vowel, they take on the quality of a semivowel, and that quality is indicated by the English letters "y" (a variant of "i") and "w" (a variant of "u" - as the name of the letter itself tells you, "double-u").

Unlike the diphthongs I discussed last week, these diphthongs with an initial [i] or [u] sound have caused a real crisis for the history of Latin orthography, and there is still not a single approach to this problem today when it comes to Latin printing.

In the ancient Roman alphabet, which consisted of all capital letters, there was a letter I and there was a letter V. You would use these letters when the vowel stood alone, when it followed another vowel, or when it preceded another vowel. I was always written I, and V and was always written V (even when their pronunciation shifted, based on context.

Then, in the Middle Ages, a lower-case alphabet evolved, side by side with the upper-case alphabet, and new spelling conventions were introduced into Latin which had not been part of the old Roman spelling. This is when the letters "j" and "u" - which were not originally part of the Latin alphabet in ancient Rome - made their appearance. For a detailed history of how this came about and its consequences for the spelling of various languages, not just Latin, check out the wikipedia history of J along with the wikipedia history of U, wikipedia history of V and also the wikipedia history of W (the "w" has never been used in writing Latin, but the evolution of this letter is a result of the same process that gave rise to the introduction of the letter "u" into the Latin alphabet).

Although printing conventions vary from century to century, and by country, there was a considerable period of time during which the Latin letter u/v was always printed "V" when it was an upper-case letter, and "u" when it was a lower-case letter, as in the opening words of Vergil's Aeneid: Arma uirumque cano.

This can sometimes be very confusing for beginning Latin students, because in more modern times (I'm not sure just when!), the convention shifted. In most modern Latin texts, the letters u/U are used for the vowel "u" when it is not preceding another vowel, while the letters v/V are used to indicate the way the vowel [u] takes on the quality of a semivowel before another vowel: Arma virumque cano. Here the Latin word vir is spelling with a "v" because the vowel is followed by another vowel, "i" and is pronounced as a semivowel in combination with that following vowel: vir (rather than the older spelling, uir).

What is interesting is that the use of the letter pairs i/I and j/J is much less widely spread. Some Latin texts and Latin dictionaries use the letters j/J for the same purpose as the letters v/V, that is, whenever the vowel [i] takes on the quality of a semivowel because it is followed by another vowel, the letters j/J are used: for example, major instead of maior. Yet you will also frequently see maior, even in Latin texts that regularly use the letter "v" as a semivowel (e.g., vir).

I'll confess that in my own writing of Latin, I freely use the letters v/V and find it rather odd when u/U is used as a semivowel (e.g., uirumque), but I usually never employ the letters j/J when I am writing in Latin. You can see the disarray in modern Latin spelling conventions if you compare different books in print. For example, the paperback Latin dictionary which I like best, John Traupman's Latin & English Dictionary, promotes the use of the letters j/J. Traupman includes "J" as a letter in the alphabet and Latin words that begin with [i] followed by another vowel are listed under the "J" category, rather than the "I" category. Yet in Wheelock's Latin, one of the most popular textbooks, the glossary in the back of the book does not include "J" as a letter, so you find a word like iuvenis, listed under "I" (while in Traupman you will find it under "J").

I am wondering if anybody reading this blog might have a clue about why the use of the letters v/V is so firmly entrenched (even Wheelock spells the word iuvenis with a "v", rather than iuuenis, a spelling you can find in many older texts), while the use of the letters j/J would be less widespread. It's an inconsistency that really troubled me when I was a Latin student - and here I am, over twenty years later, without a good answer to that question. If anybody has a clue about the history of "j/J" in modern Latin orthography, I'd love to know more!

Meanwhile, if I have answered a nagging question you might have had since elementary school about "sometimes y and w," I will have accomplished my goal for this post! :-)

Latin Vowels and Diphthongs

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Gibbs) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:38:00 +0000

Last week, I posted something about the incompleteness of the written record - both in Latin and in English - for the reproduction of speech. Although alphabetic writing is pretty good at recording word items consistently, in the flow of speech, words change in context, and there are often sound alterations that take place based on that context. When words and endings come into contact, and when one word and another word come into contact, there is a tendency for assimilation to take place at those contact boundaries. One common form of assimilation is voicing, that is, when a devoiced consonant becomes voiced (the "s" at the end of the English word "drags"). Another type of assimilation is devoicing, when a voiced consonant becomes voiceless (like the "d" at the word boundary in the English phrase "used to"). Because we have plenty of examples of English speakers to listen to, we can see how the English written record does not perfectly reflect English pronounciation. In Latin, we are in a bind - there are some clues about the kinds of assimilation that were found in Latin speech, but the clues are few and indirect. In the absence of direct oral evidence, any attempts to reproduce Latin speech are a guess on our part - which is why I am an enthusiast about speaking Latin, but not especially interested in the competing claims for what constitutes "authentic" ancient pronunciation.

The unhelpful alphabet. In this post, I thought I would say a bit more about phonetics, since that is something usually not very well addressed in beginning language textbooks, especially Latin. Again, it is the tyranny of the written language which tends to get in the way of our doing a good job with phonetics. The way we usually introduce students to the sounds of Latin is by working our way through the alphabet from start to finish. Perhaps we separate out the vowels, but that is usually the only concession made to phonetic structure. It is the order of the alphabet which dominates, and the order of the alphabet bears no relationship to the underlying phonetic structure of the Latin language. (Note for a later post: the Semitic origins of the Latin alphabet.)

If you look at the pronunciation guide in the front of your Latin textbook or dictionary, I would bet money that it is organized by alphabet. All the information is there - but it is very hard to process because it is basically chaotic. A non-phonetic organizing principle - the alphabet - is being used to organize something that really does have structure. It's as if you were to organize the food in your pantry shelves based on the price of the item, or the books on your bookshelves based on the colors of the cover - the items are "organized" but the nature of the organization is such that the result is actually chaos. Organizing Latin phonetic material by the order of the Roman alphabet is just as chaotic.

Vowels. Luckily, this one concession is usually made to linguistic structure: the vowels are treated separately from the consonants. Despite the dearth of linguistic instruction in our schools today, people do still learn the difference between vowels and consonants, although they usually memorize the list of vowels without learning just what it is that makes a vowel a vowel. What does the word itself mean? The origin of the word "vowel" gives a clue: it is ultimately derived from the Latin adjective vocalis, meaning "voiced," something pronounced with the vox, a "voice" or "sound." A vowel is something that sounds, a sound that you can make. Try it: you can make what we call an "a sound," an "e sound," an "i sound, etc., and sustain that sound for as long as your breath holds out. Just try it: like when the doctor tells you to say "aaaaaaaa," you can say "aaaaa" for as long as you have breath. When you are cooing with delight at something, you can say "ooooo" or "uuuuuuu" for as long as your breath lasts. (You cannot make consonant sound by itself; that is why they are called "con-sonants," something that has to be pronounced with a vowel; I'll have more to say about that in a later post.)

More technically, a vowel is a sustained sound you can make by letting breath move through your vocal apparatus (throat, mouth, lips and also nose). The quality of the individual vowel depends on the vertical position of the tongue in your mouth: vowels like [i] and [u] are made with the tongue up high, while a vowel like [a] is made with the tongue lowered. You can also think of it in terms of how open your jaw is; for a high vowel your jaw is more closed, and for a low vowel your jaw is more open. The mid-vowels, such as [e] and [o], which are in-between the range of high/closed and low/open vowels.

The position of the tongue towards the back or front of your mouth is also a factor in vowel production, with the vowels [e] and [i] being towards the front and [o] and [u] towards the back, and [a] more centrally. Other factors involved in vowel quality are the roundedness of your lips and whether or not any air is let out through your nose ("nasalized" vowels).

"Feel" the triangle. Taking the most basic vowel features into account - high (closed) versus low (open), and front versus back - you end up with a kind of triangle of vowels in your mouth. The [a] sound is low (open), and more or less central, not really front or back. As you move up from [a] towards the high front [i] you get one side of the triangle, passing through [e]. As you move up from [a] towards the high back [u], you get the other side of the triangle, passing through [o]. Moving from the high back [u] to the high front [i] gives you the third side of the triangle. For a nice diagram, see the Wikipedia article about vowels.

You can actually "feel" this in your mouth. It's easy to slide from one vowel into another without breaking the flow of air. It's just a matter of moving the tongue and jaw. Just try making a sustained [a] sound and then shift into making the [i] sound. Can you feel how the vowel moves "up" and your jaw "closes" at the same time, with the sound transitioning through [e] on the way up to [i]? It should feel like you are moving up from [a] through [e] through [i]. Now trying moving up from [a] to the [u] sound. Can you feel how the vowel is moving up and your jaw closing, while you pass though the [o] sound on your way up to [u]? There are basically two trajectories, moving up from [a] to [i] through [e] and moving up from [a] to [u] through [o].

Now try the reverse, going from [i] down to [a]. See how different that feels from going up from [a] to [i]? For most people, their jaw tends to drop quickly, without much of a glide. It's easy to get a glide going up [a-i], but harder to sustain the glide as your jaw drops going down [i-a]. Now try the back version, going from [u] down to [a]. See how different that feels from going up from [a] to [u]? Again, it's easy to get a glide going up [a-i], but harder to sustain the glide as your jaw drops going down [i-a].

That then leads us naturally to the phenomenon of diphthongs (ai, au, etc.) and to the phenomenon of semivowels (i becoming y/j, and u becoming v/w). In more technical terms, the sounds I am calling diphthongs here - ai, au, etc. - are classed more specifically as "closing" diphthongs. This is because the high vowels [i] and [u] are also considered "closed" vowels, based on the way your jaw tends to close as you pronounce them. I'll have more to say about closing versus opening diphthongs in my next post.

Latin diphthongs. Meanwhile, I hope I can persuade you today that it is useful thinking about the natural way diphthongs are formed in the mouth, as opposed to the arbitrary way they are listed in most Latin pronunciation guides. Usually, diphthongs are presented as an alphabetical list of letter combinations without any attention to how and why diphthongs result from the natural physiology of voice production. Now that you understand the [a] to [i] trajectory in the front of your mouth, and the [a] to [u] trajectory in the back of your mouth, I hope you will find it easier to see the Latin diphthongs as a system, and to have a good understanding of just why some diphthongs are more common than others.

First, there is the trajectory from low [a] up to the high front [i]. There is where you will find the Latin vowel sound represented by the spelling "ae" in Latin. In classical Latin, this sound is though to have tended more to a high front direction [a-i], rhyming with English "by," despite the spelling "ae" (it might have been better spelled as "ai"). As an aside, you can also use this knowledge of physiology to get a clue here about the tendency that led us English-speakers to pronounce "Caesar" as we do: we have taken the Latin diphthong "ae" (really more like [a-i]) and pushed it to the absolute extreme, so that the [a] component is completely gone, and we end up with just the [i]. Caesar.

Along that same [a] to [i] trajectory, there is another Latin diphthong, represented by the spelling "ei" and pronounced like the sound in English "they." This diphthong, however, is not very common at all in Latin. Along the [a] to [i] trajectory, the "ae" is the dominant diphthong in Latin.

Now think about the glide trajectory from [a] up to [u]. This is where you will find the Latin diphthong represented by "au" and pronounced like the vowel sound in English "now." This is a very common sound in Latin. Together, the sounds "ae" and "au" represent the most commonly found diphthongs in Latin.

In addition to these glides moving up from [a] towards the high front [i] and the high back [u], there are also glides that cross from back to front and vice versa, although these are less common. The glide from [e] to high back [u] is spelling "eu" and is notoriously difficult for English speakers to pronounce, since it is not commonly found in English. It is also not that common in Latin, and is usually found in borrowings from Greek.

The glide from [o] to high front [i] is written "oe" in Latin, and it is pronounced to rhyme with English "boy." Just as the Latin "ae" was probably pronounced in a range between [a-e] and [a-i], the sound represented by "oe" was probably pronounced in a range between [o-e] and [o-i], and could just as easily have been spelling "oi." If you have studied Greek, you will know from that Greek does not use the spelling "ae" and "oe" for its diphthongs, but spells them instead as αι and οι, with the letter "i" instead of the letter "e" as the second element.

So, I'll leave it at that for now, and next week I'll turn to the literally "jaw-dropping" phenomenon of semivowels or, as they are sometimes called, opening diphthongs. Meanwhile, I hope you have enjoyed this romp through the vowel sounds back to front and low to high. The way we use our mouth and tongues to create these sounds is quite amazing. We can do so without thinking exactly about what we are doing, but when you go to study a foreign language, I believe it helps to use this formal knowledge to compensate for the lack of "natural" language acquisition opportunities - the kind that babies do so well!

Finally, I thought I would close with an interesting item here from the Wikipedia article. In addition to the standard charts showing vowel articulation, I was fascinated to see these X-ray images by the linguist Daniel Jones, who was a pioneer in the field of the scientific study of pronunciation in the early 20th century (According to some, Jones is the man who provided George Bernard Shaw with the model for Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady.) In addition to "feeling" what is happening with your tongue and jaw, you can actually take a look at it here in the pictures; click on the image for a larger view:

A Caveat and a Mea Culpa, if need be

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Gibbs) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:32:00 +0000

As you can see from the first real post I've written here at this new blog - Spoken Latin and Assimilation - I am not writing as a linguist (because I am not one) for linguists (who already know this stuff inside and out). Instead, I am a Latin teacher who finds it helpful to explain basic linguistic concepts in the process of teaching Latin.

So, I hope very much that the material really will be useful to Latin students and teachers.

Meanwhile, my apologies to any serious linguists who find the level of presentation here to be overly simplified. In teaching, you usually cannot simplify enough, at least in my experience... which is just the opposite of the kind of complexification on which scholarship depends.

In any case, as I write more of these posts I hope to find a solid middle ground between the delightful rigor of real linguistic science and the practical, everyday needs of language students and teachers! As they say in Latin: medium certum. Thank you for your patience as I seek out that middle ground. :-)

Spoken Latin and Assimilation

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Gibbs) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:14:00 +0000

Every few months, a discussion arises at the LatinTeach listserv about the use of oral Latin. Feelings run high, and this past weekend the discussion was even more acrimonious than usual. For my own part, I am a big believer in the use of oral Latin in the classroom. I am not a big believer in the use of oral Latin outside of the classroom (this sets me apart from the more enthusiastic users of oral Latin), and I am also not a believer in "authentic" oral Latin, that is, the effort (doomed, in my opinion) to reproduce the actual sounds of ancient Roman speech.

The reason, quite simply, is that the alphabetic writing system, for all its great phonetic qualities, is not robust enough to convey to us the sounds of actual speech. The limited number of symbols in the alphabet is one obvious problem, hence the use of diacritics to indicate long vowels in Latin (vowel length itself being a thorny subject which I will address some other time). The more complex and interesting problem, however, is the dynamic, contextual nature of human speech as opposed to the rigid use of the alphabet to spell words and word elements consistently.

When we speak, our pronunciation is tremendously influenced by context, but alphabetic spelling does not reflect those changes. At the boundaries inside words and at the boundaries between words, sounds are in flux. The sounds shift in the natural flow of human speech and alphabetic writing rarely even tries to reflect those changes, except, say, in a language like Sanskrit, where oral expression trumps the tyranny of the dictionary-makers (I'll explain the joys of Sanskrit sandhi in a later post.)

For now, let me give some examples from English, which I think will make the problem much more clear. Just take the English verb "track" and make it third person singular: track+s = tracks. The "s" at the end is pronounced as we would expect an "s" to be pronounced: tracks.

But now take the English verb "drag" and make it third person singular: drag+s = drags. The "s" at the end is pronounced LIKE A Z instead of like an s. You write "drags" but you are saying: dragz.

Now, as an English speaker, you adjust your pronunciation of the word effortlessly. You do not even hesitate when you look at the word "drags" and pronounce it "dragz" - it would be difficult to do otherwise (just try saying "drag-s" with a voiced "g" and a voiceless "s" and you'll see what I mean). Yet, while you certainly "know" this in some sense, it is not conscious knowledge for most speakers. Nobody taught you this in school ... because we do a terrible job of teaching linguistics in school. I was never taught in elementary school or in high school that there is a system of voiced and unvoiced consonants in English, even though this is actually quite useful knowledge to have!

What is happening when you write "drags" and say "dragz" is assimilation of the "s" to the "g" - more specifically, the voicing of the "s" assimilates to the voicedness of "g" ("g" is a voiced consonant, while "s" is not). As a result, the "s" is pronounced "z" (the voiced version of "s"), because that "z" sound is more similar to the "g" sound than "s" would be. In other words, assimilation.

Once you start looking for this kind of thing in a language, you will find it everywhere! Just do the past tense form in English, and you'll see something similar. The past tense of track is "tracked" - but it is pronounced nowadays as "track't" - the "e" has fallen out in the pronounciation, which means that it cannot protect the "d" from devoicing, so that it is pronounced as if it were "t" (the unvoiced sound which is paired with "d"). Meanwhile, the past tense of drag is "dragged" - pronounced nowadays as "dragg'd." The "e" sound has fallen out (yes, the notorious Silent E!), and the "d" sound is perfectly happy after the voiced consonant at the end of "drag").

You can see the same kinds of effects at word boundaries as well. Take the English phrase "used to," for example. It takes a real effort to pronounce the final "d" in "used" as a fully voiced "d" while also being able to pronounce the following "t" in "to" without any voicing. So, assimilation happens here as well. You could assimilate the "d" to the following "t" (devoicing), or you could assimilate the "t" to the preceding "d" (voicing). In the variety of English that I speak, I devoice the "d" and say "us't-to" - and naturally this leads to a very common spelling problem that I see in my students' writing. Instead of "used to," they write "use to" - because that looks like what they say, even if it is not correct. (The spellchecker, alas, approves of this spelling completely!)

Why is this phenomenon of voicing and consonant assimilation important for people who want to read Latin out loud or, even more ambitiously, to speak Latin? It is important because we actually know very little about what happened at sound boundaries in Roman speech, either at the boundaries within words or at the boundaries between words. We have some clues, of course - just look at the things that happen to verbal prefixes as they are attached to words! (More about that in a future post, too.) If assimilation took place within words, as the spelling of compound words demonstrates, there is reason to believe that all kinds of assimilation was happening at word boundaries as well, but our evidence is very limited, because a word-oriented alphabetic writing system rarely reflects the pronunciation changes, such as assimilation, that naturally take place at word boundaries.

Of course, the topic of Latin pronunciation is a huge one, and I will return to it again in later posts, but I wanted to start out today by introducing this one element - consonant assimilation at boundaries - which should give all of us considerable pause before we claim to be able to speak like the ancient Romans based solely on what the written record has left us. That does not mean we should not speak Latin. On the contrary! I always urge people to speak Latin often... and to speak it as loudly as possible! Yet I would never claim any serious authenticity for the quality of my spoken Latin, and I am always surprised by people who strive to speak as the ancient Romans did. In the absence of living native speakers or direct oral evidence from antiquity, what kind of authenticity could I really hope for? And, to be honest, why would that even matter, without any Romans to speak with in either case?

Of course, other people do think differently on this topic, and the indirect evidence for ancient Roman pronunciation is indeed fascinating; I certainly don't want to disparage the work of people trying to create models of pronunciation based on that evidence - including evidence for assimilation at word boundaries. Indeed, the word "assimilated" is itself an example of assimilation, where the prefix ad- has become as- when it comes into contact with the stem "simil" - but those wonderful Latin verb prefixes deserve several posts of their own, which I promise to write soon. Meanwhile, I hope that you are happily assimilating the consonants at your word boundaries without feeling too much like Locutus (!), Picard's Latin-named assimilated Borg persona. :-)

Click the picture for some Borg sounds!

Coming to Latin via Eastern Europe

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Gibbs) — Sat, 31 May 2008 13:37:00 +0000

As one of my various summer projects, I decided to start this blog, Grammatice, about Latin grammar, although it will probably also involve considerable English grammar, too. I'm a big fan of learning about grammar and teaching grammar, although grammar-based language learning is definitely under a cloud these days. Hopefully in this blog I can provide some good examples of why I feel that grammar is a great form of knowledge, something that promotes language use and language understanding, both when studying foreign languages and in appreciating one's own native language.

In reading the debates about grammar that regularly flare up at the Latin teachers' listserve and other online venues, I notice that people's passionate feelings often seem to be a reflection of the kind of educational experience they themselves have had. People who suffered from stultifying dull exposition of Latin paradigms, labeled as "grammar," may rebel against grammar completely and attempt to teach Latin without anything they would label as grammar. Other people, who became Latin teachers precisely because they responded so well to the traditional grammar-based teaching of years gone by, may seek to reproduce for their own students the kind of instruction which they themselves embraced in their own learning of Latin.

So, what were my own formative language-learning experiences, and how do they influence the choices I make in my study and teaching of Latin? In the interests of full disclosure, here are some of the elements that have determined my own formation as a Latinist.

First: The Latin tradition. I never set out to be a Latinist, and I never had any real interest in the ancient world. I did not take Latin in high school (did not even contemplate doing so), and I knew precious little about the ancient world. Instead, as a college freshman, I discovered that I needed to learn Latin in order to read the Renaissance Latin works of the writers who really interested me - the leading lights of the Polish Renaissance, such as Jan Kochanowski. So, right from the start, my interest in Latin has been in the cultural traditions spawned by Latin, not by the attractions of ancient Rome itself.

Second: A Slavic perspective. My language learning has been completely dominated by Slavic languages, which were the first foreign languages that I studied. I majored in Russian and Polish in college, and Polish was the first foreign language I truly learned to speak, living in Poland when I was in my 20s. Like Latin, both Polish and Russian have a rich case structure (six cases), and the phonology and morphology is much more complex than Latin. In Polish, in particular, there is a whole series of sound changes that take place at the boundary between the stem and the ending - very often in Polish, you cannot just add the ending on to what you recognize as the stem, but you must also shift the stem's final consonant. In addition, the verb systems of Polish and Russian are based not on tense, but on verbal aspect. It's very daunting - but at the same time hardly something intellectual; everyone in Poland was speaking Polish, after all, not just the intellectuals! So, the Slavic language courses I took in college had a strong element of communication, since Polish and Russian are living languages, and anybody studying them had many opportunities to converse with native speakers, both in the U.S. and also through studying abroad. At the same time, there was a good deal of grammar material covered in class, given the sheer grammatical complexity of the languages involved and their tremendous differences from English. I loved both the grammar study and the conversation. My Latin classes in college, by comparison, were very tedious and limited, since all we ever did was translate into English.

Third: Linguistics and literature. This is probably the most important point I need to make here: studying grammar informed by linguistics, even casually, is far more valuable, in my experience, than studying a rule-based grammar (which, unfortunately, is what most people have in mind when they invoke "grammar"). Because some of the most important linguistic advances in the 20th century were made by Slavic scholars or in association with the study of the Slavic languages, I was able to pick up a good deal of linguistics in the course of my studies. Even more importantly, these Slavic scholars (Jakobson, Lotman, Bakhtin, etc.) often worked jointly on linguistic and literary topics, producing incredible insights that mutually informed both fields of endeavor.

Based on the great contributions that linguistics made to my own formation as a thinking person, I am very sad that linguistics is something that is little taught and studied in schools - not just in college (where precious few students take linguistics courses), but even more so in elementary and in high school, where linguistics is pretty much completely absent. I think that a linguistics-based approach could make an enormous contribution to the teaching not just of foreign languages, but also to the teaching of English itself (reading, writing, literature, language use in all its forms). So, one of the tasks I have set myself in this blog is to explain just how it is that a smattering of linguistics has benefited my own study of Latin. I'm not a professional linguist by any means - and for the purposes of this blog, I hope that can actually turn out to be a plus. My goal here is not to turn anybody (much less myself) into a linguist, but just to share some of the linguistic insights from my Slavic education which have helped make the experience of reading Latin into something very rich and rewarding for me personally!

Please feel free to leave comments at the blog here about your own encounters with linguistics in your education - I'm very curious to learn what, if anything, the term "linguistics" might conjure up for people! For me, it conjures up nothing but good things, and I hope I will be able to share some of those good things each week here at this blog.

Test

noreply@blogger.com (Laura Gibbs) — Tue, 27 May 2008 01:47:00 +0000

Testing 1 - 2 - 3