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Latin: which pronunciation? | ||
Tags: Latin | Pronunciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| lecavaleur Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4767 days ago 146 posts - 295 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish | Message 1 of 13 17 September 2014 at 6:28am | IP Logged | ||
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Salvēte !
I'd like the opinion of other students of Latin on which pronunciation, classical or ecclesiastical, is best to use when reciting the language? Until now, I have been following the classical pronunciation guide given in Wheelock's, but having noticed how remarkably different it is from pronunciation I had so often heard in the past, I googled it and discovered that such "traditional" pronunciations were in fact ecclesiastical. So now I don't really know what to do. Ecclesiastical sounds nicer and people are more familiar with it, but classical seems more correct and academic. So, what are your comments, insights, opinions and/or suggestions on the matter? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6572 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 2 of 13 17 September 2014 at 7:37am | IP Logged | ||
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The nerdy way would be to learn both and use whatever fits the text you're reading. If you intend to speak it with others, I suspect the classical pronunciation is the more popular, but I'm not sure.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4628 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 3 of 13 17 September 2014 at 7:40am | IP Logged | ||
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Using the hard, violent sound of /v/ when a poet intended the soft, flowing sound of /w/
should be a war crime. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4089 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 4 of 13 17 September 2014 at 8:42am | IP Logged | ||
I take it you read Shakespeare and Chaucer in the original pronunciation as well. After all, it's not just a matter of the author's intention but it's the only way to make the rhymes and puns work. ;) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5589 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 5 of 13 17 September 2014 at 9:09am | IP Logged | ||
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The really hard thing about learning classical pronunciation is to know the vowel quantities, i.e. for every vowel in every word you have to learn, whether it is long or short. This is essential for the cadence of spoken Latin, but means much dictionary work in practice.
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| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5555 days ago 938 posts - 1840 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 6 of 13 17 September 2014 at 9:55am | IP Logged | ||
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I personally prefer the sound of the restored classical pronunciation for classical
material lie Virgil or Cicero to the Catholic version. But as Cabaire says, to get it right takes a good deal of time with books like William Sydney Allen's Vox Latina or listening to and imitating recorded examples such as that of Johan Winge: http://web.comhem.se/alatius/latin/ or having a go with this fun Pimsleur like course: http://50percentlatin.blogspot.com.au/p/conversation-latin.h tml Edited by Elexi on 17 September 2014 at 9:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5046 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 7 of 13 17 September 2014 at 10:18am | IP Logged | ||
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The restored pronunciation started being used to allow people from different countries to understand each other.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6693 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 8 of 13 17 September 2014 at 12:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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When I read or (in extremely rare cases) speak Latin I prefer a mostly classical pronunciation with hard c everywhere and ae/oe as diphtongs, but when I use isolated Latin words in Danish I may succomb to tradition and pronounce them with s in front of e,i and ae/oe as Danish æ/ø. As for the length of vowels I know in broad terms where they are supposed to be long, but it is not a thing I care too much about, and I don't like the exaggerated way the long vowels are presented in some recordings on the internet. That being said, I was more active regarding active use of Latin a few years ago (where I made a couple of Youtube videos in Latin), and in the meantime my knowledge about the precise distribution of short and long vowels may have deteriorated somewhat.
Eyðimörk raises an interesting question: should we pronunce Chaucer and Shakespeare according to the customs at their time or as you would pronounce English now? I would like to be able to use the original pronunciations (which of course weren't the same for the two gentlemen in question), but alas, I lack some precise knowledge, and it is also a skill you would have to train. On the other hand: when I studied French etc. long ago I had courses in Old French and Old Occitan, and therefore I have actually been taught how to pronounce those two languages (with some reservations because they also had dialects back then). So when I read old stuff I do roll my r's, say "roay" for 'roi' and pronounce the endings to a larger extent than in Modern French in my head, and the few times I have read troubadour lyrics I have heard a deep male voice from a specific recording where some of the texts from my old textbook were used. When I read Old Norse I use modern Icelandic pronunciations of the individual sounds, but because Old Norse has a tendency to put verbs first, use impersonal constructions and favor 'stavrim' (alliteration) there is a different prosody. With Latin the question of prosody is moot because many texts have so long and convoluted sentences that you just start and hope that you haven't run out of air before you reach the end. It is not easy to plan a melody under those circumstances. Apart from that the optimal solution would be to use classical pronunciation for the classic authors and some kind of medieval pronunciation for texts from the fall of Western Rome until maybe the 17. or 18. century, but then you would have to have two kinds of Latin in your head. I guess that the tendency is towards using some variant of the classical pronunciation everywhere, but it can't be really worse to use a Medieval (or ecclesiastic) pronunciation for classical authors than it is to use a classical pronunciation for Medieval texts. Personally - and against all logic - I would be loath to speak Neolatin with a Medieval pronunciation or even worse: one of the strongly regional variants of Church Latin. So I stick to my semi-classical pronunciation whether I read Tacitus, Saxo Grammaticus or Ephemeridae. Edited by Iversen on 17 September 2014 at 4:01pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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