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| 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 41 of 45 14 September 2011 at 5:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, not all the time. Only when followed by a vowel. And Spanish, for example, just uses que as a replacement for quem, quam, quae, and qui--and they seem to deal with the ambiguity of that without too much trouble. If you elide by forming a semivowel, does that apply to all types of preceding vowels? I mean, I'm used to turning "u" into the "w" semivowel, and "i" into the "y" semivowel, but making semivowels out of ae, e, and o seems a tad weird. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 42 of 45 18 September 2011 at 1:33am | IP Logged | |||||
It is emphatically a leap of faith to think that you can have any real idea how people sounded in the past, and the farther back you go, the greater the leap. To imagine that you can take a fixed point in time 2000 years ago and believe that you have any real possibility of being correct in your assumption is positively theological if not downright talmudic in terms of scholarship.
Because classical pronunciation has been established for a long time now, with nasalization a mere footnote in terms of poetic reading, but in the past few decades only so many people have jumped on the reconstructed bandwagon and begun making wholesale recordings of it. I don't look down on people who do it, but I just find it very odd to want to sound only like Cicero (instead of anyone who came in the centuries before him or the millenia after him), to imagine that that is "correct," and to essentially push that pronunciation on others, which is what is done when wholesale recordings are made using it. 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 43 of 45 18 September 2011 at 1:53am | IP Logged | |||||
That is just nonsense. We have grammarians who specifically wrote about the sounds that were made and how they were made in the mouth. We have comparative linguistics. We have theories of sound change. We have misspellings and glosses. To say this is theological is ridiculous. It's like saying the most confident guesses about Roman history are complete guesswork as well--but no one is rightly that skeptical. There are very few video recordings of it, but nonetheless we know that Julius Caesar was assassinated. We know Tiberius succeeded Augustus,. And we know that "c" represented a velar stop. Linguists are incredibly careful with these reconstructions and you do them a huge disservice. So yes, we can confidently go back 2000 years. We can actually go back much farther than that. See the proto- Indo-European reconstructions. Edited by ScottScheule on 18 September 2011 at 2:36am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 44 of 45 20 September 2011 at 1:24am | IP Logged | |||||
I get the feeling that attempting to discuss this with you is akin to attempting to discuss the reliability of scripture with a fundamentalist. Of course we have a more than fairly general idea of the principles of Latin pronunciation back when it was a living language (for those who can't access a hard copy of the above referrenced Sideny Allen's Vox Latina or who just want another distillation of what the grammarians wrote, this digitized copy of Francis Lord's Roman Pronunciation of Latin may be of interest). However, in saying you want to sound like Cicero or Ovid, you are saying you want to sound like specific individuals sounded in 43 BC. To think that you can do that is patently absurd. As for the final M, the fact that it is written in the first place underscores that it was lost, so why object to putting it back where it belongs when we are piecing the puzzle back together? If you want to be sloppy about it, that's fine with me. I've never gone up to anyone who does it and told them that he should not. However, people who do it have come up to me and commented that I should do it, and that is what I object to. When people like Evan make massive scale recordings of it employed wholesale they are in effect making it normative, and that is what I object to. In the majority of guides to Latin pronunciation that I can recall reading (and believe me I have looked at more than my fair share), the nasalization issue is always quite nuanced, along the lines of "...there is some evidence that, at least under some circumstances, M in final position may have sometimes been elided..." Let's leave it like that. Do it if you want, but don't think that you are more correct than those who don't, or that by doing it you are showing that you care more about pronunciation than those who don't do it. 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 45 of 45 20 September 2011 at 1:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As mentioned by Zwlth one of the better sources on the internet is "The Roman Pronunciation of Latin" by Frances E. Lord, which has the advantage of containing a lot of authentic quotes from Roman grammarians. The letter 'm' is discussed shortly before the middle og the page (from the sentence "_M_ is pronounced as in English, except before _q_, where it has a nasal sound, and when final."). One peculiar detail is that the Romans apparently found that 'm' sounded like mooing, and the nasalization should then one way of changing the sound to something else. Most of the examples discusses final -m before a word that begins with a vowel, where the habit of letting the following word take over the m is criticized (underscores changed into double quotes):
That the M was really sounded we may infer from Pompeius (on Donatus) where, treating of "myotacism", he calls it the careless pronunciation of M between two vowels (at the end of one word and the beginning of another), the running of the words together in such a way that M seems to begin the second, rather than to end the first: [Keil. v. V. p. 287.] Ut si dices _hominem amicum, "oratorem optimum". Non enim videris dicere "hominem amicum", sed "homine mamicum", quod est incongruum et inconsonans. Similiter oratorem optimum videris "oratore moptimum". He also warns against the vice of dropping the M altogether. One must neither say "homine mamicum", nor "homine amicum": Plerumque enim aut suspensione pronuntiatur aut exclusione.... Nos quid sequi debemus? Quid? per suspensionem tantum modo. Qua ratione? Quia si dixeris per suspensionem "homimem amicum", et haec vitium vitabis, "myotacismum", et non cades in aliud vitium, id est in hiatum. From such passages it would seem that the final syllable ending in M is to be lightly and rapidly pronounced, the M not to be run over upon the following word. These remarks don't indicate clearly whether the weakening of 'm' - which is attested - is combined with a nasalized pronunciation of the preceding vowel. I'm not quite sure which words the Romans would use to describe fullblown nasal vowels like those of French or Portuguese, but if fullblown nasalisation was used as a substitute for 'm' they would certainly have written about it in clear terms. My guess is that it was a phenomenon that might or might not be a sideproduct of weakening an 'm'. Lord's remarks about 'n' are less unequivocal, and nasalization may have been less important here than before final moo (or what remained of it). --- Actually I'm more worried about the following passage from the same homepage: In pronouncing diphthongs sound both vowels, but glide so rapidly from the first to the second as to offer to the ear but a single sound. In the publication of the Cambridge (Eng.) Philological Society on "Pronunciation of Latin in the Augustan Period," the following directions are given: "The pronunciation of these diphthongs, of which the last three are extremely rare, is best learnt by first sounding each vowel separately and then running them together, AE as ah-eh, AU as ah-oo, OE as o-eh, EI as eh-ee, EU as eh-oo, and UI as oo-ee." Thus: AE (ah-eh) as in German "naher"; or as EA in pear; or AY in aye (ever); (not like a* in fate nor like AI in aisle). AI (ah-ee) as in aye (yes). AU (ah-oo) as in German "Haus", with more of the U sound than OU in house. EI (eh-ee) nearly as in veil. (In "dein", "deinde", the EI is not a diphthong, but the E, when not forming a distinct syllable, is elided.) EU (eh-oo) as in Italian "Europa". (In _neuter_ and _neutiquam_ elide the E.) OE (o-eh) nearly like German o in "Goethe". (...) These claims run squarely against information from other sources, and politely expressed, I have a hard time to believe that they really describe the pronunciation during the Augustan Period. See for instance these four ways of pronuncing Julius Ceasar according to Michael A. Covington: YOO-lee-us KYE-sahr (reconstructed ancient Roman) YOO-lee-us (T)SAY-sahr (northern Continental Europe) YOO-lee-us CHAY-sahr (“Church Latin” in Italy) JOO-lee-us SEE-zer (“English method”) Edited by Iversen on 20 September 2011 at 1:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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