ACCUSATIVE OBSOLETE?
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An ‘m’ in the middle of a word was similar to an English 'm'; but an 'm' at the end of a word appears to lose much of its consonantal value. From some inscriptions the final ‘m’ is left out altogether: e.g. scriptum est (it was written): appears as scriptust. Many other European languages, such as Bulgarian, Dutch and German,
have a nasalised ending (-m/-n) for their word for ‘seven’ but the Romance
languages derived directly from Latin have all lost it (septem, siete,
sept, etc.). The erosion of the final 'm' was probably taking place
throughout the classical period. Educated speakers sounded them, if openly,
but this sound tended to be reduced in ordinary speech, with its stress
on the syllable-before-last, to the point of eventual extinction in the
Romance languages. Latin continued throughout the medieval period as the
language of education and formal communication, when the final 'm' appears
to have recovered its full sound (in medieval verse the final 'm' is not
generally elided). And there were, of course, the schoolmasters who had
to be impressed that you knew silvam from silva and
so you spelt and hummed it for all it was worth with none of the halfway
nasalising of the classical sound ....
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