Apex (character)

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Different shapes of the apex

The apex (plural apices or apices ) is a from the middle of the 1st century BC. BC diacritical mark appearing in Latin inscriptions , with which the length of vowels ( vowel quantity ) was marked. It is a line or a flat curve curved downwards over the vowel mark, often shifted slightly to the right, from bottom left to top right, that is, its shape largely corresponds to the acute through which it is represented in modern romanization can be. Examples: TRÁXI , PRÍSCVS , ÓLLA .

Easily confused with accidental scratches: apices on an inscription from the Augustales shrine in Herculaneum , for example in AUGUSTÓ .

The appearance of the apex in inscriptions is often very inconspicuous, as the line is often very thin. In fact, it corresponds to the proverbial icing on the cake as something that symbolizes an easily overlooked little thing. For example, a phrase is called nullum apicem quaestionis praemittere (“not even the icing on the cake”) or Arnobius speaks of apicibus iuris in the sense of “legal delicacies ”.

The marking of the long vowel "ī" was not initially realized by apex, but by extending the character upwards. This form of the letter is therefore called I longa ("long I"). Examples: QU ꟾ NQVE , M ꟾ LLIA

Before using the apex, the character was doubled to indicate a long vowel: PAASTORES , PEQVLATVV .

This handling of marking the duplication with a diacritical mark corresponds to the so-called Sicilicus in the case of duplicated consonants . The sign is similar to the apex, but is more curved, which is where the name comes from, since sicilis means "sickle" in Latin. Revilo Oliver has argued that Apex and Sicilicus are a sign with one and the same function, namely to mark a duplication. The Sicilicus can be represented in Unicode by U + 0357 COMBINING RIGHT HALF RING ABOVE .

Today, when rendering Latin texts, the vowel length is marked with a macron , so PRÍSCVS will appear as prīscus , while the acute accent is used to mark stressed syllables .

literature

  • Charles E. Bennett: The Latin Language. A Historical Outline of its Sounds, Inflections, and Syntax. Allyn and Bacon, Boston MA 1907, p. 37 .
  • Revilo P. Oliver : Apex and Sicilicus. In: American Journal of Philology. Vol. 87, No. 2 = No. 346, April 1966, pp. 129-170, JSTOR 292702 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ CIL X, 2311
  2. ^ CIL XI, 1940
  3. ↑ CIL VI, 10006
  4. ^ Karl Ernst Georges : Latin-German concise dictionary . Vol. 1, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1998, p. 491
  5. ↑ CIL VI, 3539
  6. ↑ Monumentum Ancyranum , 1.17
  7. ↑ CIL I, 551
  8. ↑ CIL I, 202