An interesting talk by Scorpio Martialis
Those lines are supposed to rhyme? Wow. I had no idea. I thought it was the early medieval equivalent of blank verse.Venantius Fortunatus (530-609) is able to rhyme prodeunt and mysterium in the first lines of his two famous hymns
Late Latin poetry can make a little more sense when you know about what historical linguists have been saying regarding spoken Late Latin / early Romance.Those lines are supposed to rhyme? Wow. I had no idea. I thought it was the early medieval equivalent of blank verse.
Likely it's just this, mentioned in my first post here:What about lines 3 and 4?
quo carne carnis conditor
suspensus est patibulo.
Was that final "r" of conditor just not pronounced?
In Romance, words with -Cor at the end undergo metathesis (a switch of two sounds) to become -Cro. Further examples:Ser dixit:He transcribes -ur (tenēbantur) with [or], but this suffix probably had the -> [ro] metathesis (sound switch) that is so widespread in Romance. Just as quattuor ends up as quattro in Tuscan, and imperātor as *[empeˈɾaðɾo] > emperaire [empeˈɾaiɾə] in Old Occitan, tenēbantur was probably [teneˈβantɾo].
Historical linguistics has enough trouble trying to figure out how languages evolve as it is, now, to figure out why... Sometimes it's possible to explain changes happening because some sound or sequence of sounds or forms or constructions are uncommon, so the language gets rid of them replacing them with something else, or conversely a language reduces very common ones to a shorter form and reinterprets everything. But more often it just looks like random entropy/chaos and changes in fashion. Who knows...Do you have any idea why this particular shift happened in the Romance languages (and not, say, in Old Latin)?
I would hazard the almighty phenomenon of 'analogy' of, in this case, the inherited o-stems.Do you have any idea why this particular shift happened in the Romance languages (and not, say, in Old Latin)?
Most Romance languages seem to lack good not-so-old syntheses of their history in English, but fortunately for you, Italian is one of the two languages that do: Martin Maiden's A Linguistic History of Italian (2013). Most of the 300 pages of content are about Florentine, but there's some 15 pages of general comments about other Italo-Romance varieties. You can find a discussion of 3PL -no in pages 130-132, with more details than my little paragraph. Do note that like most linguistic histories, there's not much of syntax. (Then again, we don't really know a lot about historical syntax in most languages, even in the more heavily studied ones like the Germanic and Romance languages. It's a lot harder to do research on.)@Ser
Do you know of a historical/comparative Italian grammar (possibly in English) or something like it you could recommend?
Thou'rt among friends, reordcyningæs sunu.I've been learning a lot of Proto West Romance recently and Old Latin, so to see oþers into þinges like it, 'tis a goode þinge indeed!
Think you've got 'im confused with Imber Ranae, but they're both heroes.hefenfrogge
Ah, meþinks þat Í be ycursed tó confuse two, for þis has happened before.Think you've got 'im confused with Imber Ranae, but they're both heroes.
Are you reading it in the original, or in translation?Kind of funny 'cause I just recently got to the vexilla regis in Dante, & Fortunatus came up. I find Ser's addendum in #4 particularly interesting.