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Juncture and Syllable Division in Latin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Archibald A. Hill
Archibald A. Hill*
Affiliation:
Georgetown University
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Abstract

There have been a number of successful attempts, such as Kent's, to explain variations in scansion or in the development of Vulgar Latin forms in terms of variations in syllable division. It is also rather commonly accepted that Latin had some means of marking word boundaries—that is to say, had a juncture phoneme. There has not been (to my knowledge at least) any attempt to put syllable division and juncture together in a systematic fashion, to see what each can tell us about the other and what both can tell us about the phonemic structure of the language. Such a synthesis is the task here attempted. It is the contention of this paper that when the two are put together, three situation types emerge: normal syllable division, normal syllable division accompanied by juncture, and syllable division of a type that requires juncture.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 30 , Issue 4: October-December , December 1954 , pp. 439 - 447
Copyright
Copyright © 1954 by the Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 Roland G. Kent, The sounds of Latin2 §62 (Baltimore, 1932).

2 Unfamiliar symbols used in this paper are /l/ for length and /+/ for juncture. A hyphen marks the point of syllable division; it appears in some otherwise phonemic transcriptions, but is not a phoneme.

3 Henry M. Hoenigswald, A note on Latin prosody: Initial s impure after short vowel, Proceedings of the American Philological Association 80.272, 276 (1949).

4 Kent, loc.cit.

5 Hoenigswald 273.

6 Such a definition of juncture as a half-unit lengthening is in accord with measurements secured by Martin Joos for English, using the sound spectrograph. (Private communication) .

7 Ferdinand Sommer, Handbuch der lateinischen Laut- und Formenlehrr 3 276 (Heidelberg, 1914).

8 Hoenigswald 276 fn. summarizes metrical practice as follows: /V CV/, /VCV/, /VC V/. He writes a space for word boundary, and /C/ means any stop. In all three of these situations the first syllable is short. Such scansion can be understood only if we assume that poetical convention suppressed the juncture in /VC V/.

9 See the discussion of hoc erat above.

10 Sommer 282.

11 There is no proof that normal syllable division fell between consonants unless juncture upset the situation, which is the assumption made here. The orthodox interpretation is one of different divisions in the various clusters. If, however, the situation is such as to permit of a general rule, with variations referred to juncture, such a view seems both more consistent and in the long run simpler. It should be emphasized, therefore, that common syllable division and normal syllable division are not the same things.

12 Sommer 284 denies this kind of division in Romance. My statement I owe to a private communication from Robert P. Stockwell.

13 Sommer 133.

14 The pronunciation of cui and huic, Transactions of the American Philological Association 43.57-66, (1912).

15 Robert A. Hall, Jr., Classical Latin noun inflection, Classical philology 41.84 (1946).