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Is spoken Latin the same across Europe ? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5226 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 25 of 45 03 August 2011 at 10:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Latin pronunciation is, relatively, quite easy. If you want a good reconstruction of the phonology, see Wheelock's. A current controversy deals with the extent of nasal vowels--but there are many settled aspects.
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| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5226 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 26 of 45 04 August 2011 at 3:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I haven't found that at all. Most Latin resources I use have broad agreement on the phonology of the language.
When people speak of learning Latin, they usually refer to Classical Latin, that spoken somewhere between the first century BC and the second century AD. The phonology of that language is vastly different from modern Italian, and most of the descendant languages I'm familiar with. It's got some things in common with Italian, but also with Spanish, French, etc. However, sometimes people learning Latin, especially for musical purposes, will learn Italianate Latin, which was/is the Latin spoken by the Catholic church in Rome, and essentially is just applying Italian pronunciation to Latin words. But again, this is not Cicero's Latin.
Sure we can. Actually, it's already been fixed. A healthy literature is what will usually freeze a language. Hence the Latin afficionados during the Renaissance aimed to learn Latin as it was used by Cicero. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Dragomanno Triglot Groupie Zimbabwe Joined 5001 days ago 80 posts - 98 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2, GermanB2 Studies: Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Latin, Lithuanian, Albanian, Ancient Greek | Message 27 of 45 04 August 2011 at 4:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think it's quite pointless to look for the "right" pronunciation of Latin. It is a language which has been so widespread and so widely used, that it doesn't make much sense to look for a supposed sacred source of the Latin pronounciation.
Classical Latin? It is surely the best standard as far as grammar is concerned, but none of us has ever heard Cicero or Caesar speaking - scholars will keep on arguing about it until the end of the world. Moreover, it must be noted that even at the time of the Roman Empire Latin was quite variegated in terms of pronounciation: the great author Lucianus of Samostata was of Syriac origin, and it's hard to think that he pronounced Latin exactly like Cicero did. But it didn't prevent him from being a great Latin writer. One may add other examples. The Vatican? Priests don't speak among themselves in Latin, which is basically used only for the official documents. The real Vatican working language is Italian. In any case, when priests use Latin, they pronounce it according to their national habits - just listen to Pope Benedict XVI. Being myself Italian, I've always found the Italian/ecclesastical pronounciation much natural since my first language directly derives from Latin. It doesn't but prevent people with other linguistic background to use a pronounciation closer to the sounds they are used to. Edited by Dragomanno on 04 August 2011 at 4:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5226 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 28 of 45 04 August 2011 at 5:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Scholars will of course argue about many things to the end of the world, but that doesn't change the fact that there are large areas of agreement. Contentious details do not touch settled consensus. How do we know what we know? Many sources: we can look how words were borrowed into Latin, and how other languages imported words from Latin, and look at how they were spelled. We can look at spelling mistakes, which indicate close sounds ("b" is far closer to "p" than it is to "k"). We have Latin grammarians, who actually wrote about pronunciation. If they say a certain letter had a sound made with the lips, that limits what that sound could have been. Or take St. Augustine, for example, who complained that people had stopped distinguishing long and short vowels--this allows us to pinpoint when that particular distinction started to break down. Are we completely sure what the pronunciation was? Of course not--certainty's not possible. But we can make respectable guesses. Again, I recommend the book I referenced upthread. Now, did the language differ over the (huge) Roman Empire? Undoubtedly, and we even have some grammarians complaining about the Latin spoken by their distant compatriots. We could say much the same thing about English, which has an even wider expanse. Nonetheless, there are commonalities among English speakers' pronunciation and it does make sense to speak of an English pronunciation--albeit with local variations. Moreover, there was likely a prestige dialect during classical times, that of Rome herself, which gives us something more specific to aim for. Edited by ScottScheule on 04 August 2011 at 8:05pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Dragomanno Triglot Groupie Zimbabwe Joined 5001 days ago 80 posts - 98 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2, GermanB2 Studies: Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Latin, Lithuanian, Albanian, Ancient Greek | Message 29 of 45 04 August 2011 at 10:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I will, and thank you for the reference. I think you hit the point while making a comparison between English and Latin: two really widespread languages, both of them largely spoken and used by people who have another mother tongue. And exactly because of that, I think that the different pronounciations of Latin can peacefully survive together, in the same way the different varieties of English in the world (but even in the same UK, if we only consider the pronouciation) do. It is a kind of richness, isn't it? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5226 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 30 of 45 05 August 2011 at 3:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Certainly, I never said anything about how people should pronounce things. Y'all are welcome to whatever pronunciation you want. I was simply objecting to the notion that we don't know how Cicero's Latin sounded, when, to a high degree, we do.
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| Remster Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4803 days ago 120 posts - 134 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: German, French | Message 31 of 45 03 October 2011 at 10:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well, they didn't have audio tapes back then, so it's difficult to find out how it was correctly pronounced.
I think an Italian or atleast Romance language type of pronounciation is the best way, definitely not a Germanic or Scandinavian accent. :P 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 32 of 45 03 October 2011 at 11:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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As Scottscheule and others have written we actually do know fairly well how to pronounce Classical Latin - and we even know some of the dialectal variations because they are mentioned (read criticized!) by the ancient grammarians. In books like "The Roman Pronunciation of Latin" by Frances Lord you can find such quotes in the original Latin, and even though it is tough reading you can see how detailed they are. You can also see comments on developments - in one place no less than Cicero himself admits to having changed his opinion on the pronunciation of aspiration (or 'h'): "Aliquando, idque sero, convicio aurium cum extotta mihi veritas, usum loquandi populi concessi, scientam mihi reservavi". Even the master orator had to acknowledge that his surroundings had other speaking habits than he did - though only on one minor point - and that he'd better shut up with all his corrections. In this case vox populi won.
So given that the old description are just as precise as anything printed on paper from later times, what is lacking? Well, the usual thing - intonation. Even modern phonologic and phonetic descriptions tend to focus on single sounds rather than intonation patterns. And when I think about the difference between listening to good learners and native speakers the clue to separating them is often small quirks of intonation - maybe not even in the sense that all native speakers behave alike, but they treat their intonation with a nonchalance that many otherwise excellent learners are afraid to copy. And this is exactly the reason for warning learners to be so fuzzy about single sounds (including vowel lengths) that they forget to make their speech natural and freeflowing. Maybe they don't sound exactly like Cicero or Quintillius, but they should sound as someone who could be a native speaker. Edited by Iversen on 03 October 2011 at 11:50pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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