Word-final -s in Ennius’ Annales: a sociolinguistic approach
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Nicholas Zair
Abstract
In Ennius’ Annales, as in other Roman poetry of the third, second, and to some extent first centuries BC, a word-final syllable consisting of a short vowel followed by -s can scan as light even when followed by a word beginning with a consonant. In the Annales, light scansion is the norm in the second part of the foot (thesis), but heavy scansion is found four times. I argue that attempts to emend away these instances of heavy scansion are not founded on strong arguments. Rather, the infrequency of final -s making position in thesis can be put down to the sociolinguistic situation of the time, in which deletion or weakening of final -s co-existed with its presence, with the latter being characteristic of more formal speech.
Acknowledgements
I am most grateful to Simon Fries for providing me with a copy of one of his articles, and to David Butterfield, who read a draft of this article and provided much useful advice. It was written while I held a Pro Futura Scientia Fellowship based at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities in Cambridge, funded by the Stiftelsen Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- The complementary distribution between nē and nōn revisited: a semantic approach to wish and result clauses
- Semantic analysis and frequency effects of conceptual metaphors of emotions in Latin. From a corpus-based approach to a dictionary of Latin metaphors
- Vowel deletion before sibilant-stop clusters in Latin: issues of syllabification, lexicon and diachrony
- The lexicographical approach to remittere in the Thesaurus linguae Latinae (compared with dimittere and mittere)
- Word-final -s in Ennius’ Annales: a sociolinguistic approach
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- The complementary distribution between nē and nōn revisited: a semantic approach to wish and result clauses
- Semantic analysis and frequency effects of conceptual metaphors of emotions in Latin. From a corpus-based approach to a dictionary of Latin metaphors
- Vowel deletion before sibilant-stop clusters in Latin: issues of syllabification, lexicon and diachrony
- The lexicographical approach to remittere in the Thesaurus linguae Latinae (compared with dimittere and mittere)
- Word-final -s in Ennius’ Annales: a sociolinguistic approach
