One of the most fun things about learning the language for me is getting those native-level insights despite the fact that I've never met a native speaker of it. So I was having one of those phonetics-pondering moments, right? specifically about vowel lengthening before -nct-, and I thought about this word, and it came up in my head as plănctus. I'm like, wait, it's sānctus, pānctus, right? Why do I think plănctus with a short vowel then? Is it really the past participle of plangere? Naturally I check the dictionaries and wiktionary, and fair enough, everything on Logeion and OLD do seem to cite such a form instead of saying "no participle" as in some cases they do.
But it looks off, that is to say I've never seen it in use and it doesn't make sense that it should ever be used other than as a frequent noun meaning "noisy beating; bewailing", despite the fact that obviously there are many parallel cases where both the noun and the participle exist. Any way, after an overview of obique forms on PHI I've found no such forms in existence. OLD has no headword, no participle forms in the entry for plangō, and therefore no citations. I've skimmed through the TLL entry and found no occurrences there either. Now they might just be giving the generic "third principle part" which in this case only exsists as a supine - and even that theoretically! - but not as a participle.
So, is this a ghost form? Can you offer something approaching a first attestation, say, in Medieval Latin? One would at least expect to find some impersonal forms (*plānctum est), or mediopassives/reflexives (*plāncta est)...
By the way, the technical explanation for why I came up with a short vowel is that the vowel lengthening only operates on participles of transitive verbs within the verbal paradigm, but not e.g. on nouns (lassus, tussis), and not even on intransitives (gressus, sessus). The funny thing is I read it elsewhere independently as an explanation for the absence of the expected lengthening in the above 4 forms via the so-called Lachmann's law (this subject has generated miles of scholarly text). Now Lachmann's law is specifically not about forms in -nct- which must have a different (and also contested) explanation, but maybe they were onto something xD
But it looks off, that is to say I've never seen it in use and it doesn't make sense that it should ever be used other than as a frequent noun meaning "noisy beating; bewailing", despite the fact that obviously there are many parallel cases where both the noun and the participle exist. Any way, after an overview of obique forms on PHI I've found no such forms in existence. OLD has no headword, no participle forms in the entry for plangō, and therefore no citations. I've skimmed through the TLL entry and found no occurrences there either. Now they might just be giving the generic "third principle part" which in this case only exsists as a supine - and even that theoretically! - but not as a participle.
So, is this a ghost form? Can you offer something approaching a first attestation, say, in Medieval Latin? One would at least expect to find some impersonal forms (*plānctum est), or mediopassives/reflexives (*plāncta est)...
By the way, the technical explanation for why I came up with a short vowel is that the vowel lengthening only operates on participles of transitive verbs within the verbal paradigm, but not e.g. on nouns (lassus, tussis), and not even on intransitives (gressus, sessus). The funny thing is I read it elsewhere independently as an explanation for the absence of the expected lengthening in the above 4 forms via the so-called Lachmann's law (this subject has generated miles of scholarly text). Now Lachmann's law is specifically not about forms in -nct- which must have a different (and also contested) explanation, but maybe they were onto something xD
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