Does that imply that et is used as an enclitic? That seems very doubtful to me since, as I said, this sort of postposition occurs in poetry with all conjuctions and relative pronouns. I don't see why you'd have to take et as an enclitic anymore than, say, aut or sed when they're used in the same kind of word order.
I was talking about
et that way because the various times I've seen "enclitic"
et in poetry it has always been after the first word of the item being joined, as if imitating
-que. This seems different from the ways hyperbaton is applied on relative pronouns and subordinating conjunctions like
ut and
cum, where you see the likes of (
prōgeniem...)
Tyriās ōlim quae verteret arcēs (Aeneid I.20), where two or more words are fronted.
To answer Rothbard's question, if this observation of mine (which I'm not confident about) is true, then it could be brought forth as evidence that
et was attached in poetry in a similar way to
-que. In fact, in linguistics, the writing system is ideally (but not always) ignored, so even if the Romans consistently separated words and
et was always separated (as we do), this could be an argument that
et was treated as an enclitic.
Cf. the use of spaces to separate the pieces of compound words in English when they have two syllables or more (Latin forum, cellphone charger, not *Latinforum or *cellphonecharger), and occasionally even monosyllabic ones (hot dog, stir-fry, snail mail, sin bin, chick-flick, Tex-Mex; but normally: textbook, mouthpiece, grassroots, redhead, housewife, wheelchair, earphones...). There is phonetic merit for the spelling patterns used (when components have 2+ syllables they tend to each carry a lot of stress almost as if they were adjectives piled before a noun, most of the separated monosyllabic compounds involve rhyming as
sin bin or a repeated vowel as in
hot dog which seems to distribute stress more equally, and
stir-fry is probably affected by being mostly a verb), but grammatically they're all compounds.
Thanks for the examples from Horace!
