General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1895 Original Publisher: Allyn and Bacon Subjects: Latin language Foreign Language Study / Latin Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III. HIDDEN QUANTITY. 36. A hidden quantity is the quantity of a vowel before two consonants. Such a quantity is called hidden, as distinguished from the quantity of a vowel before a single consonant, where the metrical employment of the word at once indicates whether the vowel is long or short. The quantity of a vowel before a mute with / or r is hidden unless the syllable containing it appear in verse used as short. The methods of determining hidden quantity are the following : 1. Express testimony of ancient Roman writers, e. g. Cicero, Orator, 48. 159, where the principle for the length of vowels before nf, ns is laid down (see § 37); Aulus Gellius, Nodes Atti- cae, ii. 17; iv. 17; ix. 6; xii. 3. Nearly every Roman gram marian furnishes some little testimony of this kind, and though some of them belong to a comparatively late period, their evidence often preserves the tradition of earlier usage, and hence is entitled to weight. 2. The versification of the earlier Roman dramatists, especially Plautus and Terence, with whom a mute before a liquid never lengthens a syllable whose vowel is short. Hence, before a mute followed by a liquid, the quantity of the vowel always appears in these writers, being the same as the quantity of the syllable, just as in case of a vowel followed by a single consonant. Furthermore, Plautus and Terence not infrequently employ as short many syllables which in classical poetry would be invariably long by position. Examples are the following : juventus, Plautus, Most...