# Need help with latin pronunciation

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-help-with-latin-pronunciation/541146>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [May 29, 2010, 4:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-help-with-latin-pronunciation/541146 "2010-05-29T04:25:59Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![CJJ](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ecc23a/32.png) [@CJJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CJJ)\
**Post date:** [June 7, 2010, 5:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-help-with-latin-pronunciation/541146/21 "2010-06-07T05:38:44Z")

</div>

> [@Johnny\_Angel](#):
>
> Well, this is helpful, except that I am now confused again. First of all, by ictus do you mean stress? Because my _Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics_ is inconsistent on whether stress determines the ictus in Latin.

In the iambic meters of both Greek and Latin plays, if the final syllable of a foot is long, the ictus falls there–otherwise it falls on the penultimate.

Although there are typically six feet in a Latin iambic, editors customarily place an accent mark only on the odd feet of the verse, e.g. from the first line of Terence’s _Andria_:

_Poéta quom primum ánimum ad scribendum ádpulit,_

(I’ve never heard a good explanation for this, but I suspect these ictuses are what drive proper recitation; note in this line that _quom, scri-,_ and the final syllable _-lit_ also receive an ictus, and none of these can be said to have the natural stress accent). A later line in the play starts with _in mémoria habeo…_, a clear example where the primary ictus does not conicide with word stress. From my reading, I’d say that the primary ictus usually matches a stress-accent, but not always…

> [@](#):
>
> And would this mean that stress in one word influences quantity in nearby words? I mean, I would say that stress in english modulates according to the stress in nearby words, but such forces are not as strong as other influences within the word.

The evidence is strong that pronunciation was influenced by nearby words (at least in poetry and other metrical forms). But these are comic plays, and they may have deliberately mispronounced a few words as part of the fun. The one point I am absolutely convinced on is that enclitics like _-que, -ve, -ce, -met, etc._ changed the accent of the word to which they were attached; there are far too many examples of verse accent changing for enclitics to be simply chance.

> [@](#):
>
> Also, is vowel quantity always yoked to quality – the actual place of articulation. Could or would they say ī but hold it for only one mora?

Not sure, but there’s likely a bit of To-MAY-to/To-Mah-to in this. And even in Rome itself, pronunciation varied with class and tribe, so a writer might be “borrowing” a form that isn’t universal, much like how a modern English writer can use two different pronunciations of the word “route” to fill out a rhyme.

I’d bet these exceptions–like an ī falling in a naturally short place in the verse–were glossed over in several different ways depending on the speaker (synaresis, shortening, pronouncing them like “grace notes”, or emphasizing the incongruity for comic effect).

[Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-help-with-latin-pronunciation/541146.md?page=1)