Roberto Batisti

Nearest book—page 42—second sentence

"testi diversissimi fra loro, ma che realizzano e soddisfano le convenzioni che costituiscono il racconto"

That's not a problem. That's an achievement.

Old Tuscan/archaic and literary Italian has spirto, but I don't know how old the syncope is in this word. Rohlfs (1966 vol. 1, 172) mentions it among cases of Tuscan medial vowel syncope whose age cannot be easily determined.

I think that what happened in Latin is that /ă/ weakened to /ĕ/ before i̯ just like before tautosyllabic C, then /ei/ was monophthongized to /ẹ̄/ and finally raised to /ī/. The intermediate stage is attested by archaic spellings like INCEIDERITIS (< *-kaid-) in the Senatus consultum de bacchanalibus

Don't give me ideas...

Cf. also (non-Attic) Glossa (a journal for general linguistics) vs. (Attic) Glotta (a journal for Ancient Greek and Latin linguistics) 👅

...often depending on the precise form used in the locus classicus that the lexicographer had in mind

I'm currently studying the Atticists' prescriptions on verbal morphology and I can confirm that the infinitive is Pollux' default choice. Other lexica are more varied, lemmatising all sorts of finite forms (most often but by no means exclusively the 1. & 3sg.ind.pres.) as well as infinitives...

Congratulations!

*bʰreh₂...

Yes! Less of an issue in the Italian university system since it traditionally relies very little on written assignments (a bug turned feature?), but generally speaking this is the only sensible policy right now.

Gang of Three

...But this strikes me as somewhat faulty reasoning, and note that many scholars now claim that ε ο were realized as open(ish) vowels as in Modern Greek.

BTW, the notion that ε ο were closer than η ω in Classical Attic (let's not go into the other dialects) seems mostly based on the fact that their lengthening produced the secondary long vowels <ει> /e:/ <ου> /o:/ which were, indeed, closer than η ω...

...since, when length distinctions were lost for good, η would have otherwise merged with ε, αι, just like ω merged with ο. In fact, it seems the main reason that ω is also assumed to have been higher than its short counterpart in post-classical Greek is the assumed parallelism with η.

Basically, there is evidence that η remained distinct from both ε /ε/, αι /ε(:)/ *and* ι, ει /i(:)/ for some time in (at least some varieties of) post-classical Greek, before eventually merging with the latter, so the logical conclusion is that it must have been intermediate in height...

There is a good discussion of this issue (at least with regard to η), with references to earlier scholarship, in Vessella, Carlo (2018), Sophisticated Speakers: Atticistic Pronunciation in the Atticist Lexica. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 54-57.

Hmm... Speaking from the crossroads between Classics (part of the humanities almost by definition) and (Historical) Linguistics, it is perhaps true that Classics people do tend to read papers aloud word-for-word a bit more than Linguistics people, but tbh I never noticed much of a difference.

Every Western epic from the Odyssey onwards is just Iliad fanfiction 😜

Typical examples (both with proper names and common nouns) would be Alessandro > Alessà!, Silvia > Sì'! dottore > dottò!, avvocato > avvocà!

In my neck of the woods (i..e in the dialect of Bologna), the contrast is enhanced by added labial protrusion on the apical sibilants.

South Italian vocatives omit *all* phonological material following the stressed vowel, thus ending up with an accented final syllable.

Mind: blown.

Oh yes, I love this episode (related by Ammianus Marcellinus 19.10.11; the emperor was Constantius II). Wrote about it a student paper back when the Bush incident happened.

Btw, Canadiano is a linguistic abomination -- the Italian for 'Canadian' is 'canadese'.

On the origin of the Semitic and Greek letter names see this 2008 paper by Andreas Willi. The prop-vowel -α and the loss of -n, -š in νῦ, ῥῶ are discussed on p. 413; the vocalism of ῥῶ, on p. 414.

www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2...

A panel from Watchmen. Doctor Manhattan appears in a kitchen on November 10 as a circulatory system as he is reconstituting himself. Art by Dave Gibbons.

Happy Circulatory System Walking Through The Kitchen Day to those who celebrate.