When I was a lad, I learned a rule about length in metrical poetry called muta cum liquida, wherein the first category of consonants followed by the second could be considered long or short, depending on the needs of the poet. These terms are are no longer as useful as they once were, even to literates - the former is obsolete, while the latter appropriately has changed its shoreline. The modern meaning of 'liquid' is restricted to lambda and rho, but the older meaning encompassed nasals, mu and nu. A more nuanced understanding is not that the vowel before these consonants may be long and short, but that the short vowels may be lengthened. This revelation enables further nuance: the voiceless consonants of Greek display the fluidity of this rule, but the voiced consonants delta and gamma do not admit it. Beta is omitted, perhaps because it is more likely to assimilate to the following nasals. A potential reason for delta and gamma to deny this variability is that vowels, even short ones, are ever so slightly lengthened before a voiced consonant; this lengthening is enough (in Greek) to create an impediment. Such incomplete transitions are common among languages and go a long way to creating their individual flavors.
No comments:
Post a Comment