Briefly they are (1) Irregular phonetic form, judged by some Internal eviwell established law, e.g. rufus. dence of bor- (2) Irregular flexion, e.g. pelagus and other Gr. nouns; also caro carnis (contrast hominis). (3) Irregular gender, e.g. pelagus neuter, caro feminine. (4) Parallelism with some word shewing the regular form Especially (5) A peculiar limitation or 'secondarisation' of meaning which seems nearly always to attend an alien word, e.g. caro in Oscan 'a part', in Latin (a portion of) meat'; rufus in Oscan 'red', in Latin 'red-haired'; voûμμos1 in Syracusan Greek means a 'coin' (Tab. Her.), being clearly borrowed from the Oscan numso-= Lat. numerus (v. supr. § 42), in the wider signification of 'number'. None of the examples just given affect my theory, but in the course of the following pages we shall have opportunities of applying these conditions with greater relevancy. 45. It is necessary to summarise once more the evidence for the date of the change of s to r in Latin. Some Evidence as to the date of of it appears to have been misinterpreted, and one Latin Rhotaof the passages from Livy I have not seen cited cism. before. 1. Brugmann lays stress on the tradition that Appius Claudius substituted the hooked G for Z in the Appius Latin alphabet as shewing that the sound of the Claudius and voiced sibilant had disappeared from Latin at the the letter z. date of his censorship 312 B.C. 1 Quos shews the treatment of the group vowel +μ+o+vowel in pro-ethnic Greek. ώμος : νοῦμος as εἶμα : ἔννυμι. 2. On the fibula which Helbig and Dümmler have recently discovered at Praeneste there occurs the word Nu Praenestine. masioi. The alphabet fixes its date at not later than 500 B.C. and the other words are certainly Latin pure and simple. Cf. § 34, p. 48 supr. 3. On the Duenos Inscription' which is not later than 300 B.C., Duenos. a. Z certainly does not occur; B. while we have the form pacari which as being (probably, v. infr. § 55, p. 76) an analogy form would date from the end of the rhotacising period. Cicero. Change in 4. Cicero (Ep. ad Fam. 9. 21) tells us that the consul of 336 B.C. was the first of his family called Papirius instead of Papisius (v. the following section). It is sometimes said that 'proper names would yield to the change later than other words' which would seem proper names.' to imply that the change was conscious, which a real phonetic change appears never to be, though in days of the printing-press the spelling, as it remains the same, may produce a sort of retrospective consciousness. The remark seems equally superfluous if it merely means that proper names would be less frequently used than other words, seeing that the first time they were used they would be pronounced in the new fashion. It is of course quite true if applied only to the spelling of proper names, and perhaps this is all that Cicero or his authority could really vouch for. 5. So far as I can discover by the help of Halm's index there are no passages in Quintilian bearing on this point. Quintilian. 6. The following passages from Livy give us a good deal of help: Livy. a. 2. 30, Valerius Volesi filius, who was dictator in 492 B.C. B. But the consuls for the same year are given in 2. 28 as Aulus Verginius et T. Vetusius, although 1 Cf. supr. § 12, p. 16. 2 Cf. the following section. 7. in 2. 41 (486 B.C.) the mother of Coriolanus is throughout called Veturia. 8. 3. 4 Consules inde A. Postumius Albus et Sp. Furius Fuscus. Furios Fusios scripsere quidam. Id admoneo ne quis immutationem virorum ipsorum esse quae nominum est putet. This gives us the key to the enigma. It shews that Livy considered the form with r the correct one, and the spelling with s as a (perhaps) unexplained solecism. Hence the names of persons well known in history like Valerius and Veturia would appear in the form by which they were usually spoken of in Livy's own day, whereas Volesus, which had passed out of use' after giving rise to Volero, and the label of the lay figure Vetusius would be merely transcribed after Livy's incurious fashion. Sp. Furius Fuscus was consul in 462 B.C. The plural Fusios shews that Livy found the form with the s in some of his authorities and r in others at this place, and chose the r form himself as being the prevailing one, the examples of it of course occurring at later dates. We conclude therefore that the change (1) had certainly not taken place in 492 B.C. (Vetusius, Volesus); (2) probably had not taken place in 462 B.C. if we suppose Fusios to represent the genuine spelling at that date. It is possible that the variation here may really go back to a variation in the usage of the Furian family itself in 462 B.C. between the traditional and the phonetic spelling. It seems rather an early date however for disputes as to orthography, and the Papiri must, comparatively, have been ultra-conservative to have only adopted the new spelling 130 years after the change in sound. They may not however have had occasion to spell their names so often in the Consular Fasti. On the whole it is best to regard these two dates 462 B.C. and 336 B.C. as the extreme limits in either direction. The change itself must have been complete within a very much shorter 1 Until re-introduced from Sabine, v. supr. § 34, p. 48. 2 Illustrated in this case by the fact that he does not mention the variation of spelling until he has committed himself in a preceding book to both alternatives in a similar case. 1 Conclusion. period than 130 years in so small a community as the Latins. The old date 450-350 B.C. may therefore be retained with confidence until further evidence. enables us to determine its limits more narrowly. Date of the change of the 46. The last point to be discussed is by far the most important, the bearing of the evidence of rhotacism on the date of the change in the Latin accent. Has it Latin accent. been already pointed out that the stock passage in Proper names. Quintilian (1. 5. 22) might be quoted to shew that the old accent lasted longest in proper names1? In a very brief notice of the subject he selects as typical solecisms the accentuation of the two names Camillus and Cethegus on the first syllable. 'Adhuc difficilior observatio est per tenores vel adcentus, quas Graeci poo@días vocant cum acuta et gravis alia pro alia ponuntur ut in hoc Camillus' si acuitur prima, aut gravis pro flexa, ut Cethegus, et hic primă acută (nam sic media mutatur).' It may of course merely represent a natural mistake of non-Latin Italians pronouncing their adopted tongue in the same fashion as their own; but if so it is a very curious coincidence that both the examples should be proper names, which are not often quoted elsewhere as illustrations. If the view of accent-change as largely analogical be correct, it is easy to see that the old pronunciation would last longest in personal names which are a kind of personal property, it being almost as great a wrong to mispronounce a man's name as to steal his 1 A general shifting of accent, as distinguished from the change in the few individual words in which it may have begun, does not seem, strictly speaking, to be a purely phonetic change, but to involve a certain proportion of arbitrary analogical influence. There is no a priori evidence that any one method of accentuation is intrinsically easier than another, and hence when the accent in a particular language was changing there must have been a certain amount of volition exercised on the part of those who first set the fashion. The contrast of classical Latin where accent has become bound by quantity with Oscan and Umbrian and late Latin where quantity has been more or less suppressed in favour of accent seems to point to the wish to pronounce syllables with the length that was felt properly to belong to them, as the motive power of the change. The steady retrogression of accent in modern English, e.g. in such words as indisputable indisputable, seems certainly analogical. purse. The ll of the modern Falleri seems to indicate that in spite of its long è Falerii was accented on the first syllable. The r in Valerius Veturius Masurius Rabirius Papirius Etruria Pinārius may be due to an accent on the first syllable retained for this reason, but they are not conclusive since, as we shall see, they can all be explained quite regularly without this hypothesis. cent. Direct rhotacism. 47. In order to shew as clearly as may be the unmistakable conclusion which is forced upon us by the evidence of rhotacism if we accept the arrangement of the Change of acphenomena suggested in this essay, I have arranged evidence of in five classes all the words (1) in which the change of s to r cannot be due to the influence of i or u, and (2) in which it need not, i.e. in which it might conceivably have been caused by the absence of accent in the preceding syllable, and (3) in which s is retained between vowels; the inclusion of the second class of words enables us to muster all that can possibly be admitted as evidence on the question. I. Words whose form is explicable only on the assumption of the oldest accent. Method of II. Words whose form is explicable on the proof. assumption of either the oldest or the intermediate system but not of the latest. III. Words whose form is explicable on the assumption of either the oldest or the intermediate or the latest. IV. Words whose form is explicable not on the assumption of the oldest but on that of either the intermediate or the latest. V. Words whose form is explicable not on the assumption of the oldest nor of the intermediate but only of the latest. By the intermediate stage of accentuation I mean that in which the accent had become bound by quantity in so far that it could not go back behind a long syllable in the penult, or if the penult was short, behind a long syllable in the antepenult, but could go back to the fourth from the end or to the initial syllable, if all that intervened between it and the last were short. |