Talk:insapiens

Phonology and stress
I am surprised the Classical Latin phonological representation of this word is, as I would have expected with only three syllables and the stress on the first, now antepenultimate, syllable (due to the short vowel  in the open syllable that constitutes the penultimate).

The Latin letter ‹i› is, of course, phonologically ambiguous; it may represent either a syllabic (i.e., a vocoid that constitutes the nucleus of a syllable), or an unsyllabic  (a non-nuclear vocoid, or “semi-vowel”), the latter occurring only in front of a (syllabic, or “full”) vowel, as in ‹Iuppiter›  “Jupiter”. What sources is this interpretation of pre-vocalic ‹i› as a syllabic based on? Don't the Romance daughter languages of Latin provide ample evidence in favour of unsyllabic ? —LiliCharlie (talk) 02:47, 31 July 2019 (UTC)