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Do the Latin stress rules (antepenultimate if penultimate is light, penultimate if heavy) have any known exceptions? Also, sometimes the rule assigns antepenultimate stress to a syllable belonging to a prefix — does the rule apply regardless?

Gaston Ümlaut
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jogloran
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  • Just make believe that I know the regular cases, and want to know about the special cases. – jogloran May 22 '12 at 22:14
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    Take supersum, for example, which by the rule has penultimate stress. Is the stress in the form superest antepenultimate as the rule would also predict? – jogloran Jul 30 '12 at 10:45
  • I put a bounty on this because the common reference material aimed at learners never suggests that the stress rules have exceptions. However, I have a vague recollection of cases where the rules don't hold: possibly final stress is involved. – jogloran Jan 15 '13 at 12:21
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    I wouldn't worry about exceptions so much - there is no consensus among scholars, anyway - see e.g. Sihler 1995: 240-241 (a-d). – Alex B. Jan 17 '13 at 18:00
  • I agree it may have been unclear, but I'm not asking from a student's point of view. If you are familiar with the evidence, I wonder if you could comment on the issues in the literature which make consensus difficult, some of the Latin lexical items there is disagreement on, and why candidate exceptions can't be inferred from metric evidence alone. – jogloran Jan 18 '13 at 01:03
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    Follow-ups to this question from a classics viewpoint may be found here. – jogloran Mar 23 '16 at 22:19

1 Answers1

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Here's a summary of most common exceptions (based on Belov 2007, Borovskii and Boldyrev 1975, Sihler 1995, Tronskii 2001):

word final:

  • illic (from illice), istuc (from istuce), adhuc (from adhuce), addic (from addice), adduc (from adduce);
  • NOM.SG.M. ending in -as or -is (originally, -atis and -itis respectively); e.g. nostras, Arpinas, Maecenas, Samnis etc.;
  • audit (from audivit), fumat (from fumavit), irritat (from irritavit) etc.;
  • interjections attat and papae;
  • calefacis.

penult:

  • GEN. for nouns ending in -ius and -ium;
  • enclitic -que, -ne, -ue. e.g. Musaque, uidesne, facisue. cf. itaque vs. itaque.
Alex B.
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  • I knew there were some forms derived from syncope or apocope. Thanks for the reference. – jogloran Jan 22 '13 at 22:48
  • Unfortunately none of the references apart from Sihler (1995) turn up on Google Scholar. Are those three works not in English? – jogloran Jan 23 '13 at 06:14
  • Well, I tried to find something relatively "recent" published in English (e.g. Baldi's textbook or the Blackwell Companions - there's not much written there). However, the most interesting research on Latin has been published -unsurprisingly- in languages other than English (German, French, and Russian). Tronskii was a Soviet linguist (Leningrad), Belov is at Moscow State (btw his dissertation is on Latin accent), and Borovskii and Boldyrev 1975 is a really good textbook. You may want to take a look at Weiss 2009 (in English) - I don't have a copy at hand now. – Alex B. Jan 23 '13 at 15:45
  • "GEN. for nouns ending in -ius and -ium;" — what does this mean, exactly? Genitives that end in -ius/ium are pronounced with stress on the penultimate? Or the genitives of words that end on -ius/ium in the nominative, so -ii? Probably the former? – Cerberus May 09 '13 at 06:16
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    GEN.SG. ii= >i, e.g. Vergili, imperi, consili etc., stress on the penultimate, regardless of syllable weight. – Alex B. May 10 '13 at 22:57