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When a stress falls on a long vowel or a diphthong as in, for example:

dīcō (IPA /ˈdiː.koː/)
coepiō (IPA: /ˈkoe̯.pi.oː/)

should I think that the emphasis:

  1. falls on the first mora,
  2. falls on the second mora,
  3. is evenly distributed between the two, or
  4. can do one of them or something else, but it depends.

Which one of these is the case in classical Latin?

BACKGROUND

I am trying to make sure that I am not overlooking some distinction similar to:

λύων vs. λῦον

Joonas Ilmavirta
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Catomic
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  • Are you interested in classical pronunciation or some later variant? I can tell you where my stress is, but Cicero might disagree. – Joonas Ilmavirta Feb 23 '17 at 10:39
  • Yes, I am thinking classical--insofar as we know what that was like. Thank you for pointing out this ambiguity. – Catomic Feb 23 '17 at 11:05
  • Thanks! I edited your question a bit to include that, but feel free to edit further. And a +1 for an interesting question! – Joonas Ilmavirta Feb 23 '17 at 11:09
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    imho in dīcō the first mora is stressed (CVV.CVV), whereas in coepiō the second mora is stressed (CVV.CV.VV). – Alex B. Feb 23 '17 at 16:31
  • I'm not sure this is a meaningful question to ask about a language that doesn't distinguish the between the possibilities phonologically, as Greek does. Latin doesn't make a grammatical distinction equivalent to e.g. ῶ vs. ώ, so this is a bit like asking where the stress falls in a language that lacks phonological stress. – TKR Feb 23 '17 at 18:39
  • @sumelic. I am glad I happen to light on that 'confusing' example because that's just the sort of thing I want to be on the look out for. From the other post you link, it seems however that the irregularity is confined to that word? – Catomic Feb 24 '17 at 01:12
  • @TKR. Saying that there is no distinction--is this a way of saying that the emphasis consistently falls one way or another, that the answer is consistently one of 1 through 3? If so, I would like to know which. / I am not sure what is being excluded by 'phonological' stress; that is, what other kind of stress do we have in mind? – Catomic Feb 24 '17 at 01:17
  • @Catomic: A language lacks "phonological" stress if stress is entirely predicatable from the form of a word. An example of such a language is modern French (as long as word-final "mute e" is treated as a different vowel from /œ/ or /ø/). So TKR is saying that it would either be consistent (and based purely on the form of the word in which the diphthong occurs), or consistently inconsistent. – Asteroides Feb 24 '17 at 01:44
  • @sumelic. Thank you. I thought I followed you until I saw 'consistently inconsistent.' If stress is merely 'inconsistent' (and thus unpredictable) in a language, I presume we want to say it has phonological stress? But when stress is 'consistently inconsistent' we are back to lacking it? Can you kindly point me to some further resource e.g. a Web page on 'phonological stress'? (I tried, but could not turn up anything helpful.) – Catomic Feb 24 '17 at 02:29
  • @sumelic. Thanks again. Is there a term for stress predictable from from? E.g. Latin only has (random guess) morphological stress. Also, a term for shifting stress? In language X, stress is only (random guess) incidental. / On shifting stress, see entry by 'pktopp' in this on Korean (maybe it qualifies, I don't know): https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/korean-stress.1947298/ – Catomic Feb 24 '17 at 03:07
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    What I mean is that in Greek, a long vowel or diphthong always has one of two possible pitch contours, and the difference is grammatically significant. In other words, accent (phonetically expressed by high pitch) is linked to individual moras. In Latin, this isn't the case -- accent (expressed most probably by a combination of volume and pitch prominence) is only linked to syllables, so it doesn't make sense to ask the question "which mora is accented?". Latin doesn't have a distinction of the kind you describe in the last part of the question. – TKR Feb 24 '17 at 03:22
  • As an analogue, imagine asking the same question for English: which part of an English long vowel or diphthong does the "emphasis" fall on? That doesn't seem to me to be a meaningful question, because English doesn't have a phonological contrast of the Greek variety. – TKR Feb 24 '17 at 03:29
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    @TKR. That was the sort of thing I wanted to find out; that some distinction I neglected was not going to rear its head later and bite me. Thanks. – Catomic Feb 24 '17 at 03:53
  • @TKR with all due respect, have you read anything written after Allen 1973, especially accentologogical research critical of his accentual matrix theory? – Alex B. Feb 24 '17 at 04:09
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    @AlexB., not with specific reference to Latin accentuation, I don't think. But I'd certainly be interested in hearing more if you know of recent work that contradicts what I said above. – TKR Feb 24 '17 at 04:14
  • @TKR Ok, I'll try to summarize what I know already. – Alex B. Feb 24 '17 at 04:25

1 Answers1

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We don't know any phonetic details about Latin stress/accentuation.

The phonology of Latin stress is also somewhat uncertain, but it is not thought that there was a phonologically distinctive contrast in Latin between different types of stress contours for a syllable.

("Coepio" might be a confusing example since apparently there is evidence that the "o" and "e" in this word were sometimes were pronounced as separate syllables. I would guess pronunciation as separate syllables might be theoretically possible wherever "oe" is derived from separate morphemes, rather than from an Old Latin diphthong. An example of "oe" that Lewis and Short seems to indicate was never pronounced as a diphthong is "coemo"—although there was a contracted form "como". Another similarly ambiguous sequence of letters is "eu" as in "neuter" < "ne + uter".)

Some ancient grammarians alleged there was a difference between "acute" and "circumflex" accentuation that was conditioned by the word's phonological form

Some Latin authors describe Latin syllables as being able to be pronounced with either an "acute" or "circumflex" accent, as in Greek, but there doesn't actually seem to have been a contrast in any context between acute and circumflex accentuation in Latin the way that there could be in Greek ultima syllables with long vowels. Rather, the described distribution of acute and circumflex accents in Latin is apparently predictable based on the vowel length and the position of the accent.

Sturtevent 1920 (p. 216) cites Donatus iv, p. 371 8 ff. K. as giving the following rules. The acute accent is used in most contexts; the circumflex accent was only supposed to be used when the accented vowel was long and occurred in a monosyllable or in the penult syllable of a word with a short vowel in the ultima.

Based on these rules, dīcō and coepiō would both have an acute accent, while pīla and rēs would have a circumflex accent.

But modern scholars tend to dismiss these accounts as misrepresentations based on the model of Greek accentuation.

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