Is huic one syllable or two?

[QMF]

Is huic one syllable (pronounced hweek) or two (pronounced hoo-ick)? The words for a diphthong ui aren't very clear cut (e.g., cui uses it, posuit does not) and my teacher never actually told us this.

Also, are fui (and the other perfect forms of esse) the same way? Looking at the cognate in Spanish, which uses the diphthong, I would think it is, but I'm not sure.

 

[Cato]

The poets generally scan huic as a single long syllable, though there are enough exceptions where it is scanned as two separate long vowels, (Plautus is the only example I have readily available), and later writers (e.g. Statius) scan it short-long.

My general sense is that the perfect forms keep the u and i separate, so fui, posui etc. are disyllabic.

 

[QMF]

Two long vowels in a word like that? I assumed it was two short vowels, which would make sense, but two long...weird.

 

[Andy]

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Perhaps it can be pronounced either way and it means the same thing. I pronounce it like Spanish: húic. As I do it, there's a bit of separation between hú and ic, but not enough to be considered two distinct syllables.

 

[Andy]

Ok, little update here.

There's this webpage - http://dekart.f.bg.ac.yu/~vnedeljk/VV/ - and basically it's a collection of Latin poetry that is read out loud. It contains mainly mp3 files.

There are two specific entries that contain the word 'huic' which is the singular dative of all three, hic, haec and hoc.

First is the entry Virgil, Eclogue 1, vv. 1–25 and then is the entry Virgil, Aeneid 4, vv. 9–29, one following the other.

In the first entry, the huic is barely pronounced, and sounds like a quick 'hweek'. In the second one, because of the metre, it is pronounced slowly, but it still sounds like 'hweek'.

Does this help, QMF?