Patterns of prosodic distribution of Latin long vowels

In Classical Latin, vowel quantity (VQ) plays a fundamental role in stress assignment, since it contributes to the assignment of lexical stress in polysyllabic words. However, no Romance languages inherited the original VQ contrast. In this contribution, we aim to find quantitative evidence for the tendency of Latin long vowels to occur in stressed syllables more frequently than in unstressed syllables, a tendency that possibly correlates with the progressive loss of the length contrast in the evolution of the language. Our research is based on the Latin lexicon annotated with a number of prosodic features, related to vowel length, syllable structure, syllable weight, and lexical stress. The empirical evidence presented in this chapter indicates that the distribution of Latin long vowels was not entirely independent from syllable structure (long vowels are mainly found in open syllables rather than in closed ones), nor from stress (long vowels are more frequent in stressed than in unstressed syllables). Vowel length still had a contrastive value in the age of Classical Latin (at least, in the higher varieties of the language), and hence in one sense should be independent of stress and syllable structure. However, our analysis reveals a strong preference for long vowels to occur in stressed syllables, especially in the open ones, i.e. in the same context in which many Romance languages (like Italian) present long vowels. The lexicon of Classical Latin, therefore, already contained the seeds of the long drift towards the loss of vowel quantity along the typologically unmarked path already highlighted in various natural languages.