Talk:limonata
Add topicLatest comment: 4 months ago by Imbricitor in topic limon and limonata
limon and limonata
[edit]- Discussion moved from User talk:J3133.
I am fine with the i having indefinite vowel length, but the o definitely is long. You see, when you build the word limonata from limo or limon, o must be long - this is what the dictionaries mean when they write -ōnis for the genetive form of limo or limon, which contains the true stem, thus, the combining form. Also, please note that many dictionaries no not mark lengthes in all vowels. In the second citation in the limonata entry, there it says "Limonade, etwa aqua limonāta, ae, f.; oder potus citreus refrigĕrans, us, i, tis, m", with only the a marked long, although pōtus and refrīgerāns have lengthes too. So, you should not take this citation as evidence that o was marked as short, because in fact, it isn't marked as short anywhere, and a Latinist knows that a short o is impossible in that place. Imbricitor (talk) 14:26, 15 September 2024 (UTC)
- @Imbricitor: If, as you state, the 2009 reference (Nunc Loquāmur) is also wrong, then I do not oppose providing the correct vowel length. J3133 (talk) 14:31, 15 September 2024 (UTC)
- I see your point. In this citation, the lengthes of other words are given, thus you might think that the o is explicitly marked as short here. But I am fairly sure that the author just omitted it because there is no real "proof" for it to be long and he was unsure about this word, the vowel quantities of which were not of much relevance in the time it was introduced into Latin, but as I said, all surface on-stems in Latin have long ō.
- The reason for this is as follows: In Latin, middle syllables suffer vowel weakening, which turns short vowels into /i/. Thus arose the genetive of Apollō: originally *Apollŏnis with short o, it had to turn into Apollĭnis. This law erased all traces of short middle o, rendering its surfacing extra latinitatem, basically un-Latin. Imbricitor (talk) 14:56, 15 September 2024 (UTC)
- @J3133, Imbricitor: Vowel weakening as a sound change occurred before Classical Latin, and limo(n) is a post-Classical word. Stems ending in short -ŏn- were not invariably adapted to the native Latin pattern, as shown by the inflection of words like cănōn, cănŏnis, so I don't agree that we can in principle exclude the possibility of a form such as limŏnis. However, I also don't think it's safe to interpret unmarked vowels as short in dictionaries of New Latin terms: many resources are not strict about marking long vowels with a macron, or might not be very concerned with correcting this information if it happened to be left out in whatever source they got the word from. I'm not aware of any etymological reason for the vowel to be short, whereas the position of the stress in Romance forms such as limone and the forms of related non-Romance words such as ليمون, لیمو all seem to point to long ō (and the quality of the i would point towards long ī). There also seems to have been a (seemingly false) etymology connecting the fruit name to Greek Λειμών, which would imply long vowels in both syllables. So my preference would be not to mark either vowel as short (even optionally so) unless it is marked with a breve in some source, or is attested as being short in scansion in some poem.--Urszag (talk) 19:17, 15 September 2024 (UTC)
- To be fair,canōn is a Greek loanword , and wouldn't take a Latin suffix this way. A derivation from canōn would not take place in Latin itself, but in Greek, e.g. canŏnicus < κανονικός. Greek definitely has some kind of special treatment here, the reason being that educated (and certainly many uneducated) Romans understood Greek. Imbricitor (talk) 22:41, 15 September 2024 (UTC)
- @Imbricitor, Urszag: A Google search for either limōnāta or līmōnāta returns no results (except Lexicon Bohemo-Latinum voces antiquae et recentioris Latinitatis continens at Google Books for the former, with no preview). If you both think that the i would correctly be indicated as only long instead, I will not intervene as a non-Latinist. J3133 (talk) 05:40, 16 September 2024 (UTC)
- The given vowel lengthes in the results for līmōnāda can also be applied to limonata, as long as they are in a Latin dictionary, because from a Latin perspective, the former is merely pronounced in a dialectal or "vulgar" way, still being the same word. Imbricitor (talk) 13:00, 16 September 2024 (UTC)
- @J3133, Imbricitor: Vowel weakening as a sound change occurred before Classical Latin, and limo(n) is a post-Classical word. Stems ending in short -ŏn- were not invariably adapted to the native Latin pattern, as shown by the inflection of words like cănōn, cănŏnis, so I don't agree that we can in principle exclude the possibility of a form such as limŏnis. However, I also don't think it's safe to interpret unmarked vowels as short in dictionaries of New Latin terms: many resources are not strict about marking long vowels with a macron, or might not be very concerned with correcting this information if it happened to be left out in whatever source they got the word from. I'm not aware of any etymological reason for the vowel to be short, whereas the position of the stress in Romance forms such as limone and the forms of related non-Romance words such as ليمون, لیمو all seem to point to long ō (and the quality of the i would point towards long ī). There also seems to have been a (seemingly false) etymology connecting the fruit name to Greek Λειμών, which would imply long vowels in both syllables. So my preference would be not to mark either vowel as short (even optionally so) unless it is marked with a breve in some source, or is attested as being short in scansion in some poem.--Urszag (talk) 19:17, 15 September 2024 (UTC)