Accentuation of "Invicem" and Similarly Compounded Words

[Pacifica]

... that is, words that are originally a preposition followed by a noun, but came to be written as one word.

How are those words accented? Do they behave entirely as single words so that invicem would be IN-vi-cem, or do they remain accented as two words so that invicem would be the same as in vicem and so in-VI-cem? Or is in vicem accented as one word in any case (whether it's written as one or two) because the preposition is enclitic so that the prepositional phrase functions as one word? Or does it vary? Or do we even know?

Edit: Let me tag Godmy here.

 

[Quasus]

Good question. Italian invece [inˈveʧe] seems to point to in-VI-cem.

 

[Pacifica]

Interesting. Thanks for mentioning that.

 

[Pacifica]

Does Italian have any derivative of obviam, by any chance? To see if the same happened there.

 

[Matthaeus]

I've seen quemadmodum written in Cicero several times as quem ad modum, so there's a similar doubt here.

 

[Godmy]

Well, Italian does lots of weird stuff and usually creates quite a "mistaken" accent for the Italian Latinists whenever they try to pronounce Latin like Italian

The usual phonetic law is (and you can observe something similar in the Ancient Greek with the pitch accent and the words around it) that prepositions and the following words create a kind of larger unit and the accent is then placed somewhere in that unit according to the accentuation laws of the language. In Czech, it works this way too: the normal Czech accentuation law is that every word has regularly the first syllable accented, the only exception is when there is a syllabic preposition (since we have also non-syllabic prepositions like "v") which then "steals" the accent from the following word.

So then, it shouldn't matter how the word is written together, the accent will be most probably placed on what is understood phonetically as one unit, in this case on the "in". After all, what we understand as word breaks in orthography is a non-trivial issue in phonetics, it is a non-trivial thing to tell words apart "scientifically/linguistically", but humans still do it naturally/subconsciously. Linguistically, there is no way how tell words apart other than by having them take another positions, performing some tests etc. We are too used on having a language with a writing system (with orthographies that make spaces) which is a quite recent invention in comparison with tens of thousands of years of having language with no orthography and yet we still had subconsciously the concept of a word in whatever native language we had in the deep deep neolitic or pre-neolitic past.

Anyway, I digressed a bit... just some thoughts.

 

[Godmy]

(In phonetics you then have usually things like the primary accent and the secondary accent...)

 

[Pacifica]

Thanks, Godmy.

Having rummaged through Google Books, I could find little on the topic, and the few things I did find gave me the impression that the issue of whether prepositional phrases should always be stressed as single words might be controversial.

 

[Iáson]

See Vox Latina p88, with a reference to Schoell (1876), De Accentu linguae Latinae, Acta Soc. Philologiae Lipsiensis vol 6 p177ff.

 

[Pacifica]

Presumably, either the rule was never consistent or it was consistent in classical Latin but changed at some point in late Latin or early Romance for a more English-like logic of stressing nouns more than prepositions, thus giving rise to things like Italian "invece".

 

[Godmy]

I haven't read yet that cited bit in Allen, so I'll just react to the former: well, what I don't consider controversial is that the language will put the [primary] accent on what it considers a "larger phonetic unit" whether it is one or more words. The first question is what is considered a larger phonetic unit (but in this case I wouldn't hesitate with whole "in vicem" or whole "quem ad modum") and what are the accentuation rules of the given language (whether it means that the preposition is therefore accented or not, since it doesn't have to mean automatically that the accent goes to the preposition when the unit looks a bit differently). In this one case and in Latin I consider it a safe bet.

I have yet to read the bit in Allen, I wouldn't mind if that bit was excerpted in the thread for our purposes so the information is a bit more easy to access for whoever reads it.

 

[Pacifica]

 

[Godmy]

Yeah, it "sort of" (the whole page) confirms the main premise of my argument although it doesn't give a definitive answer + mentions possible exceptions due to analogy with similar phrases/words (but with a different open/close syllabification). For any practical purposes, I wouldn't be personally afraid at this point to treat the phrases (yours of Matthaeus's) as one unit, no matter their orthography.

 

[Pacifica]

Yes, I guess it's a reasonable bet.

 

[Godmy]

...stressing nouns more than prepositions, thus giving rise to things like Italian "invece".

Here I'm not fully sure it's about nouns or not-nouns. The Italian example might be this way simply because Italians will in many cases prefer the accent on the penultimate syllable (but I'm otherwise quite ignorant about the Italian phonology so I don't want to make any claims here, I only know what I "picked up" by ear in years). Also, the whole thing I talked about yesterday: that in time the singular orthographies of languages tend to date and they don't depict what a native subconsciously considers a "word" (a unit) anymore and they still maintain writing it as two or more words (in those orthographies that consistently make word breaks, which I think is most of them when it comes to the Latin or Cyrilic scripts). That "word boundary" evolves all the time, it may change in a single generation while the orthography may reflect it in the next 50,100 or 500 years... (depending on how traditionalist the nation is).

 

[Pacifica]

That reminds me of the frequent English misspellings "alot" for "a lot" and "apart of" for "a part of". I suppose, indeed, that these misspellings (which may become standard in future) indicate that some people at least "feel" those phrases as single words.

 

[Matthaeus]

Just came across eius modi for eiusmodi in de natura deorum. Happens quite often.

 

[Quasus]

So, what about in eō, in agrīs, in rē, ā lacū? Godmy, do you argue that the preposition is phonetically inseparable and is to be stressed?

I recall certain controversy about possible difference in accent between the verb adeō and the adverb adeō.

 

[Iáson]

So, what about in eō, in agrīs, in rē, ā lacū? Godmy, do you argue that the preposition is phonetically inseparable and is to be stressed?

I recall certain controversy about possible difference in accent between the verb adeō and the adverb adeō.

For what it's worth, I think we can be reasonably confident that there would be no pause between the two elements. But where the stress actually falls is a matter for the evidence.

 

[Godmy]

So, what about in eō, in agrīs, in rē, ā lacū? Godmy, do you argue that the preposition is phonetically inseparable and is to be stressed?

It seems quite possible to me... let us think how *prefixes e.g. came to be, a word with a prefix has undisputable stress position, but only because we understand it as one word, but then we get to the word boundary issue again. But I don't want to make any strong claim here, I'm just saying that it makes sense generally in accordance with the argument I laid down. I don't want to say whether it is like that or not: I merely speculate on the grounds of phonetics, phonology, some general laws.