I thought the observation about ugly sounding -cq- was a very interesting
one, and when I went to check it, it seemed to be true: 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. My colleague, Mr. Malcolm Hyman, suggested that the reason
sicque would be avoided was in fact to prevent confusion of the following
sort:
1) quicquam is analyzed as quid + quam, and quicquid as quid + quid.
2) Thus, most of the time when a Latin speaker heard -cqu-, they would
understand that this pair of sounds was substituting for -d + qu-.
3) So, sicque would be avoided because it would be confusing, i.e. the
listener might momentarily confuse it with a form *sidque, or perhaps
sitque.
Philip Thibodeau
Brown University
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED]
du, RANDI C ELDEVIK [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
I'd be interested to know why sicque is objectionable by classical
standards; and if Ovid did use this phrase once in the _Fasti_, can it
really be called non-classical? Rare, maybe, but not non-classical. At
any rate, why should classical poets have avoided sicque?
Randi Eldevik
Because of the ugly combination of sounds, -c qu-. Both Greek and Latin
authors are far more sensitive to such matters than speakers of Germanic
languages; Dionysius of Halicarnassus wrote a whole treatise on them,
and he wasn't the only one, though actual rules have to be inducted from
usage.
Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ
tel. +44 (0)1865 552808(home)/267865(work) fax +44 (0)1865 512237
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