Quintilian on the Teaching of Speaking and Writing by Murphy James J.; Wiese Hugh C;

Author:Murphy, James J.; Wiese, Hugh C;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press

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1 Aeneid XII. 208; Eclogues III. 69; Eclogues I. 15.

2 Lucilius, IX. 5, 357.

3 The Halm text has ni ita pacunt.

4 De oratore XLVI. 155. Quintilian’s sarcasm in these passages is directed against those who cling blindly to rigid rules of analogy, regardless of usage.

5 Topics VIII. 35.

6 De lingua latina V. 34 and 76.

CHAPTER SEVEN

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SINCE WE have mentioned what rules are to be followed in speaking, we must now specify what are to be observed by writers. What the Greeks call orthography, we may call the art of writing correctly. This art does not consist in knowing of what letters every syllable is composed (for this study is beneath the profession even of the grammarian), but exercises

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its whole subtlety, in my opinion, on dubious points. As it is the greatest of folly to place a mark on all long syllables, since most of them are apparent from the very nature of the word that is written, yet it is at times necessary to mark them, as when the same letter gives sometimes one sense and sometimes another, according as it is short or long; thus malus is distinguished by a mark, to show whether it means “a tree”

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or “a bad man”; palus, too, signifies one thing when its first syllable is long, and another when its second is long; and when the same letter is short in the nominative and long in the ablative, we have generally to be informed by this mark which quantity we are to adopt.

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Grammarians have in like manner thought that the following distinction should be observed: namely, that we should write the preposition ex, if the word specto was compounded with it, with the addition of s in the second syllable, exspecto;

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if pecto, without the s. It has been a distinction, also, observed by many, that ad, when it was a preposition, should take the letter d, but when a conjunction, the letter t; and that cum, if it signified time, should be written with a q and two u’s

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following, but if it meant accompaniment, with a c. Some other things were even more trifling than these, as that quic-quid should have a c for the fourth letter, lest we should seem to ask a double question, and that we should write quotidie, not cotidie, to show that it was for quot diebus. But these notions have already passed away among other puerilities.

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It is however a question, in writing prepositions, whether it is proper to observe the sound which they make when joined to another word, or that which they make when separate, as, for instance, when I pronounce the word obtinuit; for our method of writing requires that the second letter should be

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b, while the ear catches rather the sound of p; or when I say immunis, for the letter n, which the composition of the word requires, is influenced by the sound of the following syllable,

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and changed into another m. It is also to be observed, in dividing compound words,

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