> My Latin grammar says e:ius, etc. It certainly doesn't say
> "eyyus".
Older Latin grammars tend to do that, because the classical form of the word
is written with a single <i>, but the first syllable must be heavy. The do
this in order to mark the scansion for students. But although this is the
traditional thing to do, it is not linguistically correct.
There is no comfortable way of writing eyyus in Classical Latin (though
eiius does occur in early inscriptions!) The sequence -ii- is avoided
wherever possible in Classical Latin, and where it does occur, it stands for
vowel+consonant. Even the word reyyicit is written with just a single <i>,
as reicit. In inscriptions they tried using double -ii- to indiciate a
long /i:/ but that apparently caused confusion, so they went back to a
single <i>. They later tried writing it larger than the other letters, and
that practice survived longer.
Note that a couple of times in both Plautus and Terence, we have to scan the
word with a short initial vowel.
> I only claim the right
> to cite the forms as they are written in the grammars and
> dictionaries (e:ius, ma:ior).
No. You were claiming that you were citing the true classical form. You
weren't. You were citing your old-fashioned grammar book.
If you want more evidence, look at:
A L Sihler New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, p189:
"In Latin eius, cuius, maior, peior, the first syllable of each form is
heavy, but "long by position" rather than "long by nature". That is, the
forms are really eiius and the like, not e:ius, and are in fact frequently
so written in mss and inscriptions. Furthermore, Italian maggiore "bigger"
points directly to a PRom. *mayyo:rem."
G Meiser Historishe Laut- und Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache, has a
further comment on the word on p160, where he says there were two original
stems, i-/-ey and e-. "The e- + genitive ending -s is continued in the
genitive singular eius (Old Latin eiius, prosodically long-short) < *esyo,
with Latin sy > yy as [regularly intervocallically]."
Peter