Philip Thibodeau wrote: > for a full-corpus search on the Latin CDrom yielded about 25 instances of > sicque, all fairly late, as has been noted, vs. well over a thousand > instances of the alternative, et sic; so sicque definitely seems to have > been avoided.... But then I mentioned this to a colleague, and he suggested > that I look up plain -cq- . And there were very nearly 1500 instances of > words containing that pair -cq-; about 90% of these were the two pronouns > quicquam and quicquid, which are of course common in classical Latin > authors. So this would seem to tell against the theory that -cq- was > avoided for reasons of dysphony.
Bear in mind that it is relatively easy to avoid sicque by saying et sic (vel sim.), whereas quicquid is not so easily dispensed with. I would conclude that -cq- is avoided *where possible* for reasons of dysphony in this consonant-cluster per se, rather than tracing the pattern of avoidance/non-avoidance to concern over what the sound might or might not be taken to represent. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
