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 analysis of our data clearly reveals a strong preference for long vowels to occur in stressed syllables, and in particular in the open ones, i.e. in the same context in which many Romance languages show long vowels. Quantitative evidence therefore indicates that in Classical Latin, the contrast of VQ, although still prevalent, was already prefiguring the prosodic system of the Romance languages, in which the inherited vowel quantity is no longer phonologically relevant and vowel length is largely determined by stress.