One common type is where a two-syllable word ends in a vowel which was originally long, for example volo, ibi, ego, nisi and so on.
", quod ille dīcit "what he is saying", ab exercitū "from the army", tib(i) īrātus "angry with you"; (5) more rarely, and mainly in anapaestic metres, it can occur at the end of words of cretic rhythm (– u –) such as nēminī plūra "to no one more" (this kind is known by some scholars as cretic shortening); (6) rarely it is found across word boundaries, as in ab nēmin(e) accipiēt "he will receive from no one".
[26] In his book Vox Latina, however, W. S. Allen argues that the reduction in length observed in brevis breviāns is itself one of several reasons for thinking that the Latin word-accent was a stress accent unlike that of Greek.
[27] According to this view there is no reason to reject the idea that, as in many modern languages, word accent was the cause of the syllable shortenings observed in Latin.
Another controversy which has been discussed for over a century is whether brevis breviāns was a real phenomenon of Latin speech, or simply a metrical licence heard in poetry.
Lindsay expressed his view as follows: "Brevis Brevians is not a poetic licence, not a Procrustean plan of squeezing a round peg into a square hole, but echoes exactly the pronunciation of everyday (educated) talk".
[28] The American scholar, Fortson, agreeing with Lindsay, writes: "The most likely theory in this writer’s view is that iambic shortening is linguistically real and affected iambic strings that were destressed or whose stress was subordinated to that of surrounding material, whence its most typical appearance in pronouns, particles, sentence adverbs, and strings of clitics.
Any long or anceps element, except at the line end or before the mid-point of a trochaic septenarius, can be resolved into two short syllables.
Thus a trochaic septenarius may begin in either of the following ways:[35] Resolution, and hence also brevis breviāns, is more common in some parts of the line than others.
Very rarely brevis breviāns can also be found split between two elements where the sequence – x has been resolved into a tribrach (u u u), for example quis ego sim.
However, this occurs mainly or exclusively with a small set of words of a kind labelled by Questa "quasi-pyrrhic" which are most frequently found in their shortened form.
Anapaests were sung to music, and the characters often express strong emotion, as in this passage from Plautus's Cistellaria:[40] The Reizianus and Wilamowitzianus also have frequent brevis breviāns.
[47] An example of bacchiac metre is the speech of the old lady in Plautus's Aulularia, who addresses her brother as follows, using the archaic -āī genitive: Bettini has a different explanation.
He argues that to introduce shortened syllables (e.g. velǐm in the example above) would create ambiguity and obscure the basic u – – rhythm characteristic of the metre.
Usually, in a word like amīcitia the long vowel is retained, while the shortened form occurs only once: However, the long vowels of verbs compounded with faciō or fīō are regularly shortened, possibly because these compounds were accented as if they were two separate words:[115] In the following cases, the syllable which follows the brevis brevians is unaccented.
Examples like the following are more controversial, since according to Questa and others, only pyrrhic words and quasi-pyrrhics can be split between elements in this way: From Plautus: From Terence: Raffaelli (1978), examining all the cases of the kind fīlius erit in Terence's iambic octonarii, tentatively suggested that brevis breviāns might be found here even though the word erit is not quasi-pyrrhic.
When a brevis breviāns occupies a long element in the metre, a common pattern is a kind where the accent falls on the 1st and 4th syllables of the sequence u u x – x.
They conclude that in such cases both the first and the second syllable of the brevis breviāns group were de-stressed:[251] In the following it is possible that the accent moved to -crās; otherwise the shortening is puzzling:[259] Similar is the following (which is thought to be an interpolation by some editors), in which op- similarly appears to be accented:[261] Latin spellings such as ascendo (for ad-scendō) and asporto) (for abs-portō) may give a clue as to how phrases such as quid abstulistī were actually pronounced when spoken rapidly.
[290] In some cases, editors have assumed a scribal error and have amended the lines to remove difficult scansions such as negǎtō,[291] habĕre,[292] and so on.
This is often found near the verse end, where a clash of ictus and accent are normal: A little further from the verse end are the following: But this type also sometimes comes at the beginning of a trochaic septenarius or at the beginning of the second hemistich, where a strong stress on the second syllable of the metron (e.g. argéntum) would violate Meyer's law (see Metres of Roman comedy).
[308] The whole line is as follows: However, the intonation of an ancient language cannot always be known exactly, so this example does not necessarily rule out the view that the shortened syllable must be unaccented.
[345] Similarly the words eorum, earum, eum, eam, eodem, eaedem, duorum, duobus, eamus and so on are thought usually to have had synizesis of the first two vowels.
In the elevated style of Ennius's Annals, written in dactylic hexameters, brevis breviāns hardly appears, apart from quasi, ubi, tibi, sibi (alongside unshortened ubī, tibī, sibī, and always ibī).
[356] However, there are two examples in the 11-line fragment of Ennius's hexameter work on gourmet eating, Hedyphagetica: apud Cūmās "at Cumae" and quid scarum praeteriī "why have I omitted the parrot-wrasse?"
The quasi-pyrrhic words such as bene, male, ibi, ubi, nisi, modo, ego, mihi, tibi, sibi, duo are regularly used in their shortened form.
[362] The verbs nego, amo, dabo, peto, cano, ero, scio and puto are all sometimes found in shortened form in Ovid.
There are also occasional examples of cretic shortening of words in -o, such as nescio (Catullus),[365] dīxero (Horace),[366] dēsino (Tibullus),[367] Scīpio (Ovid).
By the time of Martial, shortening of final -ō is found even in some non-iambic words such as virgo, ergo, quando, nēmo and in verbs such as mālo, nōlo, quaero, crēdo.
W. S. Allen observed that in two-syllable words ending in -ō such as ĕcho and vēto, the final vowel is more often reduced when the first syllable is short.
As Devine and Stephens note, in English and other languages words vowels are reduced or deleted both before and after a stress, e.g. d(e)vélopment, féd(e)ral.