Lesser-known Historical Grammars of Latin VII

Mariano Bassols de Climent was a professor of Latin at Barcelona, best known for his two volume Sintaxis latina (1956).  The work pictured at left is not quite as ambitious. It's a mid-sized review of the standard subjects.  It is thorough and accurate as far as Latin goes (forms from Sanskrit are often incorrect or missing diacritics). Fonetica latina was first published in 1962 and included an appendix on "fonematica latina", i.e. a structuralist sketch of the sound system by Sebastian Mariner Bigorra.

The 8th edition (1992) has 4 pages of addenda, mostly devoted to the laryngeal theory—the non-standard model of Rodriguez Adrados gets an endorsement.  It is interesting to compare this work and Faria's work, both published about the same time with the same scope.  Personally, I find Faria a more thought-provoking  book.  But that is not a knock on Bassols de Climent's book, which serves its purpose and audience well.


Bassols de Climent, Mariano, 1992. Fonetica latina, 8th ed. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.

Prisican on the Stress of calefacit.

On pg. 127 fn. 16 I mention that calēfacit was probably accented as if two words, i.e. cálē fácit, which allowed the ē to undergo Iambic Shortening.  In support of this I note the failure of the a of facit to weaken and the occasional inversion and/or separation of the two parts. In addition I should have mentioned the explicit testimony of Priscian (Keil 2:402):

si uero facio uerbo uel fio integris manentibus aliud uerbum infinitum ante ea componatur, non solum significationes et coniugationes integras eis seruamus, sed etiam accentus, ut calefácio calefácis calefácit, tepefácio tepefácis tepefácit. in secunda enim et tertia persona paenultimas acuimus, quamuis sunt breues. similiter calefio calefís calefít, tepefio tepefís tepefít finales seruant accentus |in secunda et tertia persona, quos habent in simplicibus. 

If another non-finite verb form is compounded with facio or fio, which remain unweakened, these verbs retain not only their meaning and conjugation type, but also their stresses, e.g. calefácio calefácis calefácit, tepefácio tepefácis tapefácit.  In the 2nd and 3rd person we stress the penult although they are short.  Similarly, calefio calefís calefít, tepefio tepefís tepefít  preserve in the 2nd and 3rd person the oxytone accent that they have in the simplex.

New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax

To the basic Latin syntax bibliography on pg. 448 fn. 2 add:

Baldi, Philip and Pierluigi Cuzzolin, eds. 2009. New perspectives on historical Latin syntax. Syntax of the sentence.  New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

This volume, the first of four projected volumes, covers a number of topics including Greek and Semitic influence on Latin syntax (Calboli and Rubio respectively), word order (Bauer), coordination (Torrego), coherence (Rosén), and questions (Brown, Joseph, Wallace). The approach is non-generative.

Elementos básicos de filología y lingüística latinas

The book pictured at left published in 1985 by Pere Quetglas i Nicolau, professor at the Universidad de Barcelona (now apparently the Vice-Rector for Information and Communication of the same university) should be added to the bibliography.  This book is made up of two parts. The first part is devoted chiefly to textual criticism.  The second half, more relevant for our purposes, includes two useful and insightful chapters on structuralist and generative approaches to Latin grammar.  Personally, I'd say that most of the structuralist explanations in phonology are pretty unconvincing.  The structuralist discussions of syntax and semantics, on the other hand, are still worth thinking about.  I'm not sure how much of early TG works like Robin Lakoff's Abstract syntax and Latin complementation can be translated into more modern paradigms. Neverthless, for an overview of synchronic work on Latin from the 40s to the 80s, Quetglas is a great place to start.


Update: A second edition, not much changed, was published in 2006.

Quetglas i Nicolau, Pere. 2006. Elementos básicos de filología y lingüística latinas, 2nd ed. 

Barcelona: Editorial Teide.

Valérī vs. Válerī

On pg. 221 I mention that according to Nigidius Figulus (apud. Aul. Gell. 13.26.1) the vocative of Valerius was Válerī, but the genitive was Valérī. Should we take this testimony seriously and if so how is it to be interpreted?

First, it is interesting to note that Gellius himself clearly did not accent the vocative of Valerius in this way since he says that anybody who pronounced the vocative as Válerī would be laughed at (Sed si quis nunc Valerium appellans, in casu vocandi, secundum id praeceptum Nigidii, acuerit primam, non aberit quin rideatur). Presumably this means that Gellius said Valérī for both the genitive and the vocative.

From the historical point of view, however, the vocative Válerī could make sense: since the change of *-ije to -ī (the fīlī rule, Weiss 2009:122) was probably Proto-Italic, this word would have been a trisyllable at the time of the emergence of the Classical Latin stress rules.

On the other hand, explaining the position of the stress in the genitive as phonologically regular is difficult: if in the genitive *-ijī contracted to -ī before the emergence of the CL stress rules then we should expect Válerī just like the vocative; on the other hand, if *-ijī contracted to -ī after the emergence of the CL stress rules we would still expect Válerī since *Valerijī would have been stressed on the the first syllable by the facilius rule still operative in Plautus' day. Thus it seems that Valérī can only be the result of a columnar accent.

This still leaves open the possibility that the vocative Válerī simply escaped the analogy until sometime after Nigidius and before Gellius. But there is perhaps another possible explanation. Nigidius says: in casu vocandi summo tonost prima, deinde gradatim descendunt. He seems to be describing a gradual (gradatim) tonal downglide. Could Nigidius be describing the so-called vocative chant? In English and other languages there is a special tonal contour for calling people or animals, e.g. to supper. In English this is typically realized as a H(igh) tone associated with the primary stress of the word followed by a M(id) tone on the following unstressed syllables. See Hammond 1999:156.

See Hammond, Michael. 1999. The phonology of English. A prosodic optimality-theoretic approach. New York: Oxford University Press.

The Grammarians on Latin Stress

On pg. 110 I give a few simple statements about calculating the position of the word stress in Latin and in fn. 21 I quote a Cicero passage (Orat. 58) which is normally taken as explicit testimony for the antepenult limitation—although it should be noted that it is not entirely clear that Cicero is talking specifically about Latin, the context could suggest a reference to Greek. I should also have quoted statements of other native speakers supporting the other parts of the system.

Quintilian (Inst. 12.10.33) notes that there are (with a few exceptions) no oxytones in Latin:

ultima syllaba nec acuta umquam excitatur nec flexa circumducitur.

"The last syllable is never accented either as an acute or a circumflex."

Donatus (Keil 4.371) remarks that in bisyllabic words the penult is stressed no matter whether it is short or long (the description is complicated by the grammarian's theory that long vowels in the penult could be either circumflex or acute as in Greek):

in disyllabis, quae priorem productam habuerint et posteriorem correptam, priorem |syllabam circumflectemus, ut meta, Creta; ubi posterior syllaba producta fuerit, acuemus |priorem, siue illa correpta fuerit siue producta, ut nepos, leges; ubi ambae breues fuerint, |acuemus priorem, ut bonus, malus.

"In bisyllables which have a long first syllable and a short final syllable we give the first syllable a circumflex, as in mêta and Crêta; When the second syllable is long, we give the first syllable an acute, whether it is short or long, as in népōs and l'ēgēs; when both syllables are short we give the first an acute as in bónus and málus."

Donatus also provides explicit testimony about the importance of the weight of the penult (Keil 4.371):

In trisyllabis et tetrasyllabis et deinceps, si paenultima correpta fuerit, acuemus |antepaenultimam, ut Tullius Hostilius; si paenultima positione longa fuerit, ipsa acuetur |et antepaenultima graui accentu pronuntiabitur.

"In three- and four-syllables and so on, if the penult is short we the give the antepenult an acute, as in Túllius and Hostílius; if the penult is long by position, it gets an acute and the antepenult not accented."

Lesser-known Historical Grammars of Latin VI

The book pictured at left is the 2nd edition of Ernesto Faria's Fonética Histórica do Latim, published by Livraria Academica in Rio De Janeiro in 1957. According to the preface this was intended to be the first of a three volume work, but the projected tomes on morphology and syntax never appeared as far as I know. Faria was a pioneering professor of Latin linguistics in Brazil, whose centenary was celebrated in April 2006. The work is bem feito as Faria would have said. In addition to the typical subjects there is an interesting and detailed section on the history of the development of the scholarly reconstruction of Latin pronunciation and a long chapter on the Latin accent. The commented bibliography is pretty thorough. IE is not treated except tangentially. This work is, to the best of my knowledge, the only extensive treatment of Latin historical phonology existing in Portuguese. Reader from Portugal, am I wrong?


Update:  No, there does not seem to be any comparable book in Portuguese.