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Consider the words sūs and sŭŭs. The former has one long u, the latter has two short ones in two syllables. For another similar pair with a different vowel, consider īmus and ĭĭmus. I wonder how easy it was for the Romans to confuse a long vowel with two short ones of the same quality, like ū vs. ŭŭ.

To make the question more concrete, I would like to know (some of) the following:

  • Are there examples of word plays with ū/ŭŭ or other such combinations? I can imagine how confusing sūs and sŭŭs could make a decent joke.
  • Are there misspellings that indicate that it might have been difficult to make the distinction?
  • Is the distinction considered by ancient grammarians?

For me personally it is much easier to confuse ū with ŭŭ than with ŭ, although I can distinguish all three.

Joonas Ilmavirta
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    Interesting question! It is possible, by the way -- though this is a debated point -- that the difference between (at least some) short and long vowels was not solely one of quantity but also of quality: e.g. that short i was [ɪ] while long i was [i:] – TKR Dec 10 '16 at 20:50
  • @TKR, interesting. Then the question arises whether or not the difference in quality helped make the distinction between a long and a double short vowel. – Joonas Ilmavirta Dec 10 '16 at 20:53

2 Answers2

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Well, there is some fairly simple evidence that a sequence of two identical short vowels could in some cases be treated as equivalent to a single long vowel, namely that the former can contract into the latter: e.g. ĭĭt ~ īt, nĭhĭl ~ nīl.

This does not necessarily imply that the pronunciations were identical, of course, but it does show that the two could be easily conflated. That said, it's not clear if this was a generally productive process: for example, I don't know of any cases where suus is written or scanned as a monosyllable.

TKR
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sūs has a long vowel, but the other cases (suis etc.) have a short vowel in the stem, so I suppose the genitive plural suum would look and sound just like the acc. sing. m. and nom./acc. s. n. of suus. But otherwise sūs and suus sound quite different.

fdb
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    sūs and suus sound quite different -- what makes you say that? It seems to me that they would most likely be phonetically identical in normal speech, unless there was an inserted glide between the two vowels of suus (I don't know if there's any evidence for or against that possibility). – TKR Dec 10 '16 at 20:54
  • @TKR To me sūs and sŭŭs sound different, but it might be something inherited from Finnish. The sounds are pretty close and especially in quick speech there is a risk of confusion. My question, however, was not whether the sounds were different but about the distinction or confusion between the two among Romans (and written evidence of it). – Joonas Ilmavirta Dec 10 '16 at 21:01
  • @JoonasIlmavirta, does Finnish allow a disyllabic sequence of identical short vowels like in suus? – TKR Dec 10 '16 at 21:17
  • @TKR. In Finnish the long vowels /i:/, /u:/ etc. are represented orthographically as doubled vowels , etc. They are, however, not articulated as two separate vowels. – fdb Dec 10 '16 at 21:30
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    @TKR Finnish allows that in compound words and otherwise at word boundaries, and the distinction is clear and easy for a Finn. However, Finnish does not have truly word-internal double shot vowels. As fdb writes, long vowels are written as two vowels but articulated as a single long one. – Joonas Ilmavirta Dec 10 '16 at 21:35
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    As in "Joonas" (for Ιωνας) of course. – fdb Dec 10 '16 at 21:54
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    @TKR I have a contrast of /kre:/ /kre.e/ and /kre.e:/ in my native language (créent/craie, créé and créée), as well as /ni.il/ and /ni:l/ (nihil and the Nile). Glide insertion is possible but rare and stigmatized (at least in sequences of identical vowels) and I've never heard even a sign of ongoing merger. – Eau qui dort Dec 11 '16 at 12:33
  • @Eauquidort, do you really distinguish /e/ and /e:/? What variety of French do you speak? My point about sūs / sŭŭs is not that they wouldn't be phonologically distinct, which of course they are, but that assuming a normal degree of variation in production, many tokens would very likely be phonetically indistinguishable. – TKR Dec 12 '16 at 01:34
  • @TKR. The retention of the historic distinction between final [e] and [e:] is a feature of Belgian French. – fdb Dec 12 '16 at 09:47
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    @TKR I'm Belgian, yes. Your initial statement was a bit stronger than that, so I wanted to offer an example of a similar contrast that was synchronically stable. Based on my experience, I don't think the number of ambiguous tokens would be that high, although there's always the danger I might hear what I'm expecting to hear rather than what's actually being said – Eau qui dort Dec 13 '16 at 21:35
  • @Eauquidort, the way to test this would be to have native speakers try to identify tokens of /kre:/ and /kre.e/ in isolation. My sense is that such studies usually show a high rate of confusion, though I don't have a directly relevant example to cite. – TKR Dec 13 '16 at 21:39