Re: [tied] the rhythm and stress in Latin

>...in disyllabic words with a light penult the final syllable was attracted

into the stress foot .... and was no longer extrametrical.

I don't dispute your statement here, but can you give any evidence that the
final syllable "was attracted into the stress foot"?

And your statement that the final syllable was "no longer extrametrical"
puzzles me. If you mean as you used it earlier in your posting, you must
mean its presence helps determine the placing of the stress accent, which is
clearly untrue. So what did you mean?

You are of course aware of the overwhelming preponderance of iambic words at
the end of pentameter lines, where the easily avoidable pattern
<stressed-short + unstressed-long> appears to have been deliberately chosen
and enjoyed?

Peter




The phenomenon of "iambic shortening" (LH > LL, L= light, H = heavy) can be
explained as the phonological reduction of a foot-final unstressed syllable.

There is some metrical evidence that Latin stress assignment was iterative
in longer words (that is, there were secondary stresses preceding the
primary one), but the details are not quite clear.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: P&G
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2002 9:17 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] the rhythm and stress in Latin


>If we redefine these rules in terms of moras, the rule is simpler: "Stress
falls always in the >penultimate mora anteceding last vowel (conditionlas
are removed from this rule!)"

Some problems:
(a) Why should the moraic length of the last vowel be ignored, if the accent
rule is moraic? A syllabic rule does not have that problem.

(b) You also have to handle words such as illuc, with accent on the last
syllable (!)

(c) In words like deductum you apparently would count "c" as moraic, and in
words like remitto, the first "t" as moraic, which is not particularly nice.
The traditional rule which looks at open and closed syllables avoids that
problem.

(d) You would have to add a rule that a resonant (indeed any consonant!) is
"moraic" before another consonant, but non-moraic before another vowel.
There is no evidence of such different pronunciation in these contexts.

(e) In words such as "solvit" your analysis suggests so.l.vit, but we know
that in fact it was the "v", not the "l" which was liable to pick up extra
syllabicity: sol-uit.

And what do you mean by removing "conditionals" from your rule?

Peter
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