Disputatio:tigris

Length of vowel

Encyclopetey editsummaried: the syllable is heavy either way; my dictionaries mark the vowel itself as long.

Which dictionaries would those be? Traupman's Latin & English dictionary gives it as short unambiguously; the online Lewis and Short marks it with the same short-and-long mark it generally uses for cases of muta cum liquida, a notation (Sihler, 1995, §81.6.a) describes thus:

"The L phenomenon known as 'muta cum liquida' is misrepresented as a question of vowel length when the forms involved are cited--as some authorities do--as pā̆tria 'fatherland', dū̆plex 'twofold', and so on. What is at stake here is scansion and syllable weight rather than vowel length; in such forms the vowel is always phonetically short, but in poetry sometimes scanned as 'long by position' (better, 'heavy by position'), like the first syllables of captus and omnis, whose first syllables are always metrically heavy but contain vowels that are phonetically short."

And examples in dactylic hexameter of the syllable being light, indicating that the vowel is short:

dīctŭs ŏb | hōc lē|nīrĕ tĭ|grīs răbĭ|dōsquĕ lĕ|ōnēs (Horace, Ars Poetica)

ēxō|rārĕ tĭ|grēs răbĭ|ēmque āu|fērrĕ lĕ|ōnī (Manilius, Astronomicon)

īllĕ tĭ|grīm răbĭ|ē sōl|vēt pā|cīquĕ dŏ|mābīt (ibid.)

Hȳrcā|nāequĕ tĭ|grēs ēt | iūssī | stārĕ dră|cōnēs (Petronius, Satyricon)

—Mucius Tever 15:34, 1 Augusti 2008 (UTC)