More on the Litterae Ramistae

On pg. 28, fn. 21 I note that the phonologically distinct use of and is found first in the earliest Spanish printed books. According to Kukenheim 1932:32, 36 it was specifically the great Spanish grammarian Antonio de Nebrija who was the first to suggest the distinction in his Gramática de la lengua castellana in 1492:

La g tiene dos oficios: uno propio, y otro prestado. Eso mismo la i tiene otros dos: uno, cuando es vocal, y otro, cuando es consonante, el cual concurre con la g, cuando después de ella se siguen e, i. Así que, dejando la g, i, en sus propias fuerzas, con una figura que añadamos para representar lo que ahora escribimos con g, i, cuando les damos ajeno oficio, queda hecho todo lo que buscamos, dándoles todavía a las letras el son de su pronunciación. Ésta podría ser la y griega, sino que está en uso de ser siempre vocal; mas sea la j luenga, porque no seamos autores de tanta novedad, y entonces quedará sin oficio la y griega.

The distinct use of u and v was suggested by the Italian printer Trissino in a 1524 letter to Pope Clement VII.

See Kukenheim, L. 1932. Contributions à l'histoire de la grammaire italienne, espagnole et française à l'époque de la renaissance. Amsterdam: Noord-hollandsche uitgevers-maatschappij.

Must, Gustav. 1965. The Symbols for /i/ and /j/ in German Orthography: An Historical Survey. Modern Language Notes. 80.5:584–95.

Lesser-known Historical Grammars of Latin III

The Croatian work pictured at left, Latinska historička gramatika (Latin Historical Grammar) was composed by Anton Mayer and published in 1939 in Zagreb by the Kluba Studenata Klasične Filologije. It is made up of two fasicles, the first on nominal and verbal forms, the second on consonantism. There doesn't seem ever to have been a third fascicle on vocalism. Mayer is best known in Latin circles for his (unsuccessful) article, Die Entstehung des lateinischen Perfektsystems. Glotta 32:261-82, but he also wrote a well known work on Illyrian, Die Sprache der alten Illyrier, in 1957 and 1959, the heyday of Illyromania.

The work in question is a pretty barebones, only about 90 large typescript pages, few citations, no bibliography, but it has some nice observations in it, and is definitely the work of a IE-ist more than a Latin linguist. For example, the Latin imperfect is analyzed as a nominal case form plus an ā-preterite of *bhuhx- and compared to the Slavic imperfect (p. 16, correctly in my view), the length of ēst 'eats' is explained by Lachmann's Law (p. 36, probable). For Croatian-readers this book has been replaced by the excellent Matasović 1997. Yale and UBC have copies of this book.

Kelabit, Madurese and the PIE Stop System

On pg. 33 and in fn. 16 thereto I cautiously mention the Malayo-Polynesian languages Kelabit and Madurese as potential parallels (currently in the case of Kelabit, or formerly in the case of Madurese) to the three-way laryngeal process contrast (voiceless, voiced, breathy) reconstructed for PIE. Since writing that, I have looked into these languages a bit more and am more confident that they really are parallels to the PIE system. My discussion can be found in the slides posted as The Cao Bang Theory (scroll down). But as Eduard Fraenkel said somewhere, "the world is full of pseudo-parallels."

Lesser-known Historical Grammars of Latin II

Dr. Vasyl' Stetsjuk (AKA Dr. Basil W. Steciuk) was a Ukranian expat scholar, who apparently live in the New York City area. He was the author of a pamphlet on Greek Borrowings in Ukranian and on the Ukranian national poet Taras Shevchenko. The book whose title page appears to the left, Istorychna hramatyka latynskoï movy (Historical Grammar of Latin), was published by the Ukranian Free University (Munich/New York) in 1953, and appears to be Stetsjuk's magnum opus. I can't pretend to be able to read this book, but from my inspection this seems to be a detailed and serious work. The volume I have before me (Vol. 2 on morphology) is almost 600 pages and includes unusual sections on derivational morphology. There is very little IE stuff which is probably a good thing.

Lesser-known Historical Grammars of Latin I

In addition to the well known works frequently cited or just mentioned in OHCGL (Baldi, Buck, Ernout, Kieckers, Lindsay, Meillet and Vendryes, Pisani, Niedermann, Meiser, Sihler) there are a number of other works that I have come across which I didn't mention in the book, either because they were hard to find, in unusual languages, or just not very good. Here I begin a series of post about these curiosities.

Emidio Panichi's Grammatica Storica della Lingua Latina. Il Vocalismo (XV, 286 p.) was published in Rome in 1977 by the Società editrice Dante Alighieri. Panichi seems to have been a productive Italian classicist who published an edition of Aratus' Phaenomena, and a number of school texts. In addition he wrote La formazione nominale in latino, Naples: Liguori, 1972 (non vidi) which I think is the only book-length treatment of the subject produced in the 20th century and is not found in any New World library at all.

The book in question is a solid, fairly accurate, and detailed account of the historical phonology of the Latin vowels with lots of textual citations. Panichi also includes introductory parts on external history, and on using epigraphical and grammatical sources. There are no particular innovations and the PIE reconstructions are shaky, but overall Panichi's Grammatica is a good book for its audience. To my knowledge there are only two copies in the New World (one at the University of Chicago, which I have by ILL, and one at the University of Alberta).

Catford on Rhotacism

On pg. 81 fn. 8 I noted an experiment by Joaquin Romero which showed that temporal reduction of an s was enough to induce subjects to perceive the segment as rhotic. The late eminent phonetician J. C. Catford also addressed the phonetics of rhotacism in a 2001 article. He claims that "it is generally assumed that the fact that intervocalic -z- (< -s-) came to be reinterpreted as an r implies that the /r/ of the language at that time must have been a fricative or approximant ɹ, or at least that such an r must have been an acceptable pronunciation of /r/." I'm not sure that I have ever run into this specific claim before, but, if true, it would imply that the Classical Latin trill pronunciation was at least in part an innovation.

The most interesting part of the Catford article, however, deals not with Latin, but with the phonetics of syllabic r in Sanskrit which is described in the native tradition as jihvamūla 'tongue-root', i.e velar. Catford argues that this refers to a "molar r" of the sort quite commonly found in American English. The upshot of the article is the claim that the various sorts of rhotacism found in IE languages are best explained if PIE *r was not, or not exclusively, a trill.

Incidentally Catford suggests the neologism paleophony for "the reconstruction and study of ancient pronunciation".

See

Catford, J.C. 2001. On Rs rhotacism and paleophony. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 31.2, 171–85.

Vocatio ~ Vacatio

On pg. 141 I catalogued the change of pretonic a to o after w with the lone example vacīvos > vocīvos, but I should also have mentioned vacātiō > vocātiō 'exemption from duty', a form which is attested a number of times in inscriptions from the Republic (CIL I2.583 pa. 77, I2.593 pa. 93, CIL 5.4148, Brixia).