Talk:Capaneus

Wrong IPA transcription for all latin lemmas borrowed by greek ending in -ĕus

Latin never avoids diphthongs when they are possible, but it's true that root and ending are separated by hiatus even if a diphthong is possible.

But in Greek root and ending usually make a diphthong if possible, like Capaneus, from Greek Καπανεύς, must actually be divided as Cắ-pă-ne͜us (like the original Greek: Κᾰ-πᾰ-νεύς) and not Că-pắ-nĕ-us. The accent is on the first syllable. Wiktionary interprets all the Greek terms ending in -ĕus that end actually with a long syllable as a term that end with a pyrrhic/dibrach. This is not a little mistake: we have metrical evidence by poetry that those terms have a long final syllable in the nominative and not two short syllables. This is crucial because in Latin is very important the correct division in syllables to interact with literature (not only poetry but prose too) and it is fundamental to determine the stress accent's position: not a secondary factor. It could be possible that some ancient Latin speakers, in a popular speech, could have pronounced Ca-pá-ne-us, but if they did it's without doubt an hypercorrectism.

However, it is true that all the inflected forms adds a syllable: even in the accusative singular that have an apparent diphthong (but this example is right for every case and number besides nominative — or vocative identical to nominative, if it exists) must actually be divided as Că-pắ-nĕ-um. I don't know for sure whether the accent in this case could have been kept in the fourth last syllable (we know cases where some nouns apparently broke the law of the penultimate syllable, like the form Valĕ́rī with the accent on the penultimate because of analogy with Valerius: the pronunciation Válĕrī is an educated hypercorrectism; the case of ca-pa-ne-um could be an example of accent's retention by analogy with the nominative. Other examples of broken accent's rules, but less pertinent with this specific case, are the oxytone words or the words ensing with a tribach or a dactyl composed with an enclitic that retains the accent in the same syllable, like lī́mĭnăque — in this case with a possible secondary accent on the enclitic -quĕ̀, but this is an other story): the three accent's laws describes with precision the accent's position of most Latin word, but not all words: linguistic phenomena could change the final product from the expectations of a only synchronic approach.

Neverthless, this is a secondary question and the certain thing is that Greek words ending in ending in -ĕ͜us scan -ĕ͜us as a long syllable. I don't have sources and I did't read sources about the possible retaining of the accent in those specific cases.

Other names are Atre͜us, Briare͜us, Eurysthe͜us, Idomene͜us, Morphe͜us, Nere͜us, Oile͜us, Prote͜us, Typhōe͜us and maybe others. Not all these nouns change their accent, like Nere͜us or Eurysthe͜us, but still the correct syllables' division is fundamental.

Please, correct this. CarloButi1902 (talk) 16:39, 1 December 2024 (UTC)