Origin of the term liquid .. (Stuart Rosen )

Subject: Origin of the term liquid ..
From:    Stuart Rosen  <stuart@xxxxxxxx>
Date:    Tue, 31 Jan 2006 11:09:57 +0000

from John Wells, Phonetics & Linguistics, UCL <wells@xxxxxxxx>:

The origin of the term 'liquid' is a Latin (mis)translation of a Greek 
technical term. The Greek grammarians used _hygros_ 'fluid' for r, l, n, m, 
in reference to the fact that when they follow a plosive (as in tr) they 
permit the quantity of the preceding syllable containing a short vowel to 
be "doubtful" (ie it can count as either short or long for metric purposes, 
as in Greek _patros_, Latin _patris_). This term was translated into Latin 
as _liquidus_. In Latin, however, this metric principle does not apply to m 
and n, so the term 'liquid' has come to have a more restricted sense.

See Allen, W.S., 1965, Vox Latina: a guide to the pronunciation of 
Classical Latin, CUP, p. 32.

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Stuart Rosen, PhD
Professor of Speech and Hearing Science
Dept of Phonetics & Linguistics
University College London
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