Latin Pronunciation (Appellatio Linguae Latinae) There are notes after this - please read them if you have

questions. I have assumed Mancunian pronunciation of the English but speak English with a southern English accent, so these could be wrong. I havent used my own accent because its anomalous. Ive chosen it because it seems to be the closest to a consensus English accent. Vowels (Vocales) All vowels are always given their full form. There is none of the murmuring which occurs in English, French or the Germanic languages - they are always clearly pronounced, regardless of stress, no matter where they are in a word. Each native Latin vowel may be long or short. This does not apply to the borrowed Greek vowel Y. In todays texts, a long vowel is indicated by a macron - a horizontal line over the letter. In the past, this was either unmarked or an acute accent was used. Letter A Short Man Example Ad - at, to, towards. Long Palm Example A - from, after, since, by (usually ab with a short A. Lenis - soft, smooth, mild. Mirandus wonderful. Opus - piece of work. Mus - mouse.

E I O U

Exit Id Omnibus Omnibus

Exit - it marches Cafe out. Id - it. Machine Omnibus - by means of the Universe. Omnibus Opus Moose

The letter Y is only used in words borrowed from Greek, and is pronounced as U is in French (or the long oo in many Scots English accents). However, this would have been quite an unnatural pronunciation. Diphthongs (diphthongi) These are pairs of vowels run together to make one sound. English pronunciation is distinctive in that except for short vowels, most vowel sounds are diphthongs. particularly in Commonwealth and southern English English. Latin, like almost every other language, is not like that and therefore all the single vowels shown above are pure, like those in its descendant Italian. However, Latin also has diphthongs. There had been a shift from their original pronunciation during the classical period and therefore one of them, OE, is no longer a diphthong. They also tended to be run together when written or carved, and later when printed.

Diphthong AE AU EI EU OE

Digraph (if any) Has an AV ligature not found in most fonts

Pronunciation Eye Mouse Clay Europe Oi in avoid changing to the pronunciation in Phoebe. Close to the word ruin; closer to uy in Castillian muy (very).

Example Tenebrae - darkness Auris - ear Ei - oh! Eheu - alas Poena - pain, punishment, penalty. cuius - whose. This is rare - usually UI is pronounced as two vowels or like the English we.

UI

Consonants (Consonantes) Silent letters are rare. B - as in English. C - always like K but no suggestion of h - not aspirated. D - like French D, id est with the tongue pressed against the teeth. F - in off; never as in of. G - as in gall, never like the English j. GN is pronounced ngn" - with an ng" without any suggestion of a G before an ordinary N sound. One example is in dignitas" - dignity or worthiness. GU - simultaneously pronounced G and W" sound like a voiced version of QU". H - always as in home, never as in humour. The Latin word humus - soil, ground - is thus pronounced hoomor. The combinations CH - chelys" (tortoise), PH - philosophia" (philosophy), and TH - theologus" (theologian) - are all pronounced as the letters concerned followed by an h" sound, as they were in Greek at the time, and never like the Scots CH or the ch in church". J - like y" in you" - not like the English J. See notes on I, J, U and V below. L - always clear, as in Latin, never dark as in fall. M - as in English except at the end of a word. An example is minimum. The -um is pronounced as if its -ung but cutting off just before the -ng. This was extended in French and Portuguese to other nasal sounds. N - as in English. P - like French P, without an h sound. Q - only occurs in QU. This is subtly different to our QU in that it is like K with rounded lips, not like a K followed by a W. The same principle applies to GU. R - rolled like Scots English and Scots R but never devoiced. Also like the Italian R and the Castilian RR. S - always as in ass, never as. SC - sh.

T - dental like the D, without aspiration. V - like the English W, but see notes on I, J, U and V below. X - always KS, never Z. A foreign letter in Latin, used for Greek words. Y - a vowel. See above. Z - either as in English or DZ as in Greek. I, J, U and V These two pairs are not separate letters and remained so until at least Georgian times in all languages written in the Latin alphabet. Samuel Johnsons dictionary for example, published in 1755, looks to us as if the entries for I and J, and the entried for U and V, are mixed up. The rules were that U and I were written as V and J at the start of words and as U elsewhere when minuscule (lower case). I is also written as J at the end of words. This even applies to Roman numerals. Both letters are written as I and V in capitals - MVSEVM rather than MUSEUM, for example. Double consonants - these are pronounced the way ordinary consonants are pronounced between vowels in Welsh English, like double consonants in Italian or like the K/C sound in book case - more emphatically and with a gap before them. Stress More correctly, this should be called accent. During the classical period, as well as being louder, the Latin accent would have involved a change in the pitch of the voice. It is placed on the penultimate (last but one) syllable if the vowel is long, and on the antepenultimate (last but two) if the next vowel is short. Disyllables accent the first syllable unless they have lost a final syllable. Variations in accepted pronunciation This is the contemporary way of pronouncing Latin, based on a reconstruction of how Latin is thought to have been pronounced by the patrician class in Rome around the time of Claudius. The method of reconstructing it this way is described later. Over most of the history of the language, however, Latin was not pronounced like this and it is also pronounced differently today in various contexts. Language changes all the time, and Latin pronunciation blends into the pronunciation of Italian, Romanian, French and other languages during the Dark Ages and developed from an earlier pronunciation before the period mentioned. There were also regional and class variations which can be seen, for example, in imitations, graffiti and traces remaining in modern languages. The modern Romance languages are descended from the language of the plebeians, not the patricians. The Romans themselves held that the best Latin pronunciation was not in Rome or even Italy but Aquitania, which is the area between the Loire and the Pyrenees including modern Bordeaux. The Heptarchy, which was later to become England, had the reputation of particularly good Latin pronunciation during the Dark Ages because here, the language was deader than elsewhere in the Roman Empire. In other parts of the old Imperium, the people still spoke Latin in a degenerate form which was gradually turning into Provencal, Romanian, French and the like, which influenced pronunciation of Latin itself, but since nothing like Latin was

still spoken in Britain during the Heptarchy, English pronunciation of Latin was not influenced by the vernacular languages as much as elsewhere. This situation came to an end with the Norman invasion due to the fact that Norman French was descended from Latin. There are, however, other approaches to pronouncing Latin. One was to say the words as if they were in ones own language. There are good reasons for doing this. It is not now a widely spoken language, so it may not be important to be strictly accurate for the sake of it. Also, there is no break in the use of Latin since Roman times and just as the living languages, written in the Latin alphabet, have changed, it could be said that this shift in pronunciation is also part of the tradition of speaking Latin. There is also the Ecclesiastical approach. This is used to sing, chant or otherwise vocalise Latin in churches, particularly the Roman Catholic church. It is not as scholarly as the approach described here and resembles the pronunciation of Italian and Romanian. An example of its use can be heard in Yusuf Islams (Cat Stevens) O Caritas. There is another big question about all this. How on Earth can anyone know how Latin was pronounced? It might seem that the pronunciation of language which hasnt been spoken as a first language for almost two millenia in the form recorded could not be reconstructed. This is not so for a number of reasons: * Latin in particular was the first language written using this alphabet. Therefore, other languages using this script tend to derive their own pronunciation from it. One example is English, which was written using the Latin script after the arrival of Augustine in 597. The pronunciation of these languages at the time can be reconstructed, or may have changed little, giving clues to the pronunciation of Latin. Texts written in other languages sometimes record Latin words. For instance, the New Testament, which was written in Greek during Roman times, uses the word kenturion - for centurion, indicating that the C was pronounced like K in that context. * Languages descended from Latin also bear traces of its pronunciation, and some of them are very conservative. In the speech of Sardinia, the word for hundred is kentu. Its also possible to determine which sound could be the true ancestor of a particular set of different pronunciations in modern Romance languages. * Spelling mistakes also occur in Latin which suggest a particular pronunciation. In Pompeii, the name Claudius is spelt Clodio, showing that by the year 79, the plebeian pronunciation of the former diphthong AU had become the same as a pronunciation of O. Slowly spoken Latin sometimes shows doubled consonants when it has been dictated in mediaeval manuscripts. * Changes in pronunciation tend to occur in a particular direction. It is less likely that the ny sound of GN in Italian is immediately descended from a real GN sound than from a NGN sound, which also occurs in Greek and Gothic.

* Other languages related to Latin reveal its own ancestry and sound changes. The aspirated stop sounds in English and German exist because they are related to older aspirated sounds whose existence can be traced in ancient Greek and Sanskrit, but the Latin voiceless stops are related to unaspirated stop sounds in other languages, such as Latin maTer = English moTHer, Greek meTer, Sanskrit maTar. * The Romans occasionally described their pronunciation and wrote down imitations of what they regarded as coarse pronunciations by others. * Rhyming poetry suggests how Latin was pronounced. * Changes in pronunciation of words borrowed into other languages sometimes allow reconstruction. For instance, because house mice are not native to England, English originally borrowed the Latin word mus for it (also found in German). This later became mouse. The change to the AU pronunciation indicates that the vowel in mus was originally long, or it would probably have been pronounced muss today instead. Therefore, it is possible to get some kind of idea of how Latin was pronounced. These principles also apply to some degree to other languages.