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Latin Being Read Aloud | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Zwlth Super Polyglot Senior Member United States Joined 5226 days ago 154 posts - 320 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written), Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, French, Persian, Greek | Message 17 of 45 13 September 2011 at 5:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Apart from the ugliness of it all, introducing nasalization also introduces a non-phonetic element into an almost perfectly phonetic system - why would anyone want to do that sheerly upon the supposition that Cicero may have done so?
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| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6659 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 18 of 45 13 September 2011 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Wheelock’s is an introductionary course for (college?) students not an academic source of language knowledge. Also, most people in academia pays no attention at all to how their latin is pronounced but rather like to write and talk about it, i.e. it’s commonly accepted that the vowel length were phonemic but ‹it’s so hard to do, so we’ll skip that› is still the way to deal with it. The only arguments against the reconstructed pronunciation I’ve encountered are from either overly patriotic Italians or catholics defending their Italianize version of Latin in absurdum. Vox Latina by Allen is an amazing book where he have sources for every claim he makes about the pronunciation either from old grammarians, Greek transcription, graffiti spelling mistakes, or all of them. Nasality, for example, have been coming and going in latin. The word consul originally had a short o, the n disappeared rendering the word /cõ:sul/ with a lengthening of the o to compensate the loss of the n. However, spelling dictated an n, so later on it was reinstated but the vowel length was still kept, thus giving rise to /co:nsul/. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6659 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 19 of 45 13 September 2011 at 2:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Why do you talk about a perfectly phonetic system as something good? No languages older than say 100 years have those because people either did not care neither understood (a part from Sanskrti…) all parts of speech. Latin marks geminated consonant, but do not mark long vowels. Latin has sonus medius that is sometimes written with i, sometimes with u. Latin use oe and ae for oi and ai. Intervocalic i/j are geminated, but only written out once. Latin has some h’s where they’re not suppose to be (humor was with most certaincy pronounced umor). The latin x is sometimes gs and sometimes cs. There’s no consensus whether you write assimilations or not (conlocare or collocare?) If one, although educated romans did certainly not, pronounce the ph in elephants as /f/ then you can spell /f/ in two ways. The e in set is omitted after words ending in a vowel or m (which is seen in Plautus quite frequently). If you want to learn classical latin, you want to learn classical latin the way it was pronounced. Thanks to comparative language science and early grammarians we have sources on the way the sounds were pronounced. If you chose to ignore that because you think it’s ugly: by all mean do. I may learn to read a language and totally skip learning how to pronounce it because I have no interest in doing so. But, don’t look down upon the ones who want to do latin as close to as it was spoken, and who want to read Virigil an Ovid the way they were once preformed. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5228 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 20 of 45 13 September 2011 at 4:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, I do want to speak as Cicero did, so if it were fairly clear he nasalized his vowels I'd do the same. Moreover, as Hampie points out, the system is not perfectly phonetic in one rather large respect: vowel length. And I don't see how nasalization would compromise that almost perfect phoneticism. I imagine there are rather easy grasped rules about nasality that its proponents use to tell us which vowels are nasal and which are not. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5228 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 21 of 45 13 September 2011 at 4:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
But that directly undercuts your point. Wheelock's and the rest of my texts do detail vowel length at length, and they do so with many other difficult parts of Latin pronunciation, e.g., the Greek y, gemination of consonants, non-aspiration of most stops, the "eu" diphthong. So you can't say they're just skipping the stuff that's hard to do and that's why they skip nasality, because they aren't skipping the hard stuff.
We should distinguish two sets of arguments. There are those who attack the reconstructed pronunciation--these I find completely unconvincing and have little sympathy for. Then there are those that accept the reconstructed pronunciation by and large, but simply reject that nasal vowels were a part thereof. It is the latter argument I made.
I've heard of Allen's book, and it may well be right. So far as I can tell though, when it comes to nasality, it represents the minority view--a significant minority, but a minority. But perhaps other Latin afficionados can persuade me otherwise. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Haukilahti Triglot Groupie Finland Joined 4964 days ago 94 posts - 126 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Polish | Message 22 of 45 13 September 2011 at 5:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Nice to see Hampie back on this topic, we used to have some discussion on it a few years ago. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 23 of 45 13 September 2011 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I faintly remember that Quintillian also mentioned nasality, but even without his testimony it is likely that some Romans have spoken with nasal vowels. Actually the old Norse vikings did too, but that's quite another history. Nevertheless I personally I stick to non-nasalized vocals, which may be a consequence of the way I was taught to read it many years ago, but as long as the subject is under debate I don't feel like changing my habits.
I also stick to a pronunciation with ae, oe as diphtongs, hard c and g and a certain amount of difference betwen long and short vowels. However I have listened to a fair amount of Latin readings through the internet, and I think that many of them sounded heavy and unnatural because the differences in length were taken too seriously. After all my goal when I try to think or (at rare occasions) speak in Latin isn't the way poets would read their poems aloud or the way Cicero did his famous speeches, - it is the way these persons would have spoken to me if I had met them in a Roman villa during the late republican or early imperial periods - i.e. casual speech by cultivated Romans. Unfortunately they didn't have tape recorders back then, but I'm fairly convinced that the reconstructed pronunciation isn't too far from the real thing - and the alternatives (the ecclesiastical pronunciation or regional variants) don't appeal to me as much as the best examples of 'reconstructed' speech (people like Miraglia). The big issue for me is not whether all details are correct, but more that Latin can and should be spoken with a natural free-flowing prosody as any other language. And if there are people who begin to use nasal vowels then I suppose I will be able to understand them - in much the same way as I understand dialects of modern languages. But so far I don't feel like following in their footsteps. Edited by Iversen on 20 September 2011 at 11:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5228 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 24 of 45 13 September 2011 at 7:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I believe I'll send some emails to Latin professors to see what their opinions are on nasality, when time permits.
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