Your questions about pronunciation of Latin

[klaus]

FILE: Letter, reply to query from a high school student....


Re: Your questions about pronunciation of Latin


From: Doc. Harris, who knows some of the answers

Dear Student


I know you must have wondered why your Latin textbooks has long marks over certain vowels in the words you are studying, and the thought has probably occurred to you that they are there for no better reason than to make the study of Latin even more difficult that it is. You will certainly be surprised if I tell you that this is actually the truth, but truth is not such a simple word, so I feel I should offer you a better explanation in a few words if possible.

When people spoke Latin, they put a stress accent on the third syllable from the end of a word, making is louder (not necessarily longer); but if the second from the end was long (which we will discuss later) they put the accent there. Translated back into Grammaticalese, this can be stated as "Rule of the Antepenult":

Accent goes on the Antepenult, but if Penult is long, put it there.

Note: The Latin words "ultima" or 'last' and "paene" which means 'almost" and furthermore "ante" or 'before' are the atoms out of which these two linguistic molecules are curiously formed. I guess that makes things much clearer, doesn't it?

Why the Romans counted off from the end of the word, which hadn't yet been pronounced, before they decided how to say it, is still not fully understood. It may be something related to the way they did their numerals, for example "nine" is for them "one off from ten" or IX. So counting out years would be MC for Shakespeare's time, and then MCM for this century which is fading fast, then a L for halfway through, add some XX's for decades up to l990, and then our old friend IX for the last niner. Rather than add this all up, I would like to ask a serious Roman that he consider MIM for that last year before MM, but ask as I will, I still get no answer.

The Roman did in fact put an extra dynamic burst onto the third (or sometimes second) vowel from the end of a word, that is something the ancient Roman Grammarians tell us, and we have no reason to doubt their word. And Romans even had a native style of poetry based on accent, like this:

"malum dabunt Metelli Naevio poetae"........which is like:

The King was in the counting house counting out his money
The Queen was in the parlor eating bread an honey.

But this seemed entirely too simple as poetry, so they converted quickly to the fad of writing poetry a la Grecque. Not surprising, and we've done the same with the English language. Would you prefer the above couplet as a model for English, instead of a highly polished and intellectual couplet like:

"This is the way the world ends........
.............. not with a bang but a whimper.:

Each age must find what is suitable and also representative of its inner nature. The Romans reached to the Greek Masters, although we have no idea what they considered poetry as sung in the cafes and bistros of Ostia, perhaps it was something like the poetic genius of Country Western versification today.

But at Rome everyone who was going someday to be anyone had to study Greek, the way we have to study Latin. But the Greeks never heard of the Rule of the Antepenult. They used a system in which vowels could be long or short, and some even over-long. This was foreign to the nature of the Latin languages, but the myth of Procrustes and his Sizing Bed (something the socially conscious Romans really appreciated), was so appealing that they decided to use it on their language in the writing of poetry. But in order to remain intelligible, they left the Rule of the Antepenult alone and in daily life continued to count off from the end until the end.

Now we get back to the marks over vowels in the Latin textbooks, something a Greeks would have called a "macron" if they had used it, but of course they didn't. We still call it a macron because the Romans knew the Greek would have called it a macron if they had a use for it, but of course........ This makes sense in terms of what we call "The Classical Tradition", which means keeping around the house forever stuff which should have gone to the dump in the previous decade. But keeping around, it you get used to it and would now never think of letting it go.

Reading Latin poetry (your teacher tells you) you are going to need to know the long and the shorts, so learn it now for Vergil's sake, even if the 4th year Latin Vergil course hasn't been given since l976. But if you get somehow up the ladder to Vergil, you will be faced with an elaborate process called "Scansion of Latin Verse". In this system you write in the longs over your text, marking out the Fingers (dactyls are Greek for finger, two short bones and one long, e.g. - u u) and Feet with a slash. Why "fingers" with "feet" you ask curiously, an oxymoron for English speakers? Well, the French call toes "doigts de pied" or 'fingers of the feet', so maybe the fact that French comes as a Romanic language from Latin enters somehow into this equation.

Writing out or "scanning" a line of poetry is not only tedious, it marks up your text so completely with erasures and corrections that you will never be able to read it at all. Did the Romans do it this way with their squid-ink pens on parchment manuscripts, or was it easier on wax tablets with a chopstick, so long as you weren't out in the sun on a hot day?

Longs and shorts line up behind another set of rules, which say that a vowel is long by "position" before two consonants, or by it own very nature, which means something like genetically long. You could do it the other way round and define shorts as not standing before two consonants or being long by its own personal nature, but that wouldn't clarify the situation much.

But this is just the beginning, there are "exceptions" galore, so these rules are no more watertight than the Laws of Physics before Einstein. "Scansion" might be the "ether" of l9th c. physics, the linguistic binding glue which keeps things in order. But neither really do exist although if you search hard enough, you can see them floating in the limbo of obsolete notions.

How did we get our knowledge of these macron-capped "longs" in the first place. It was a Dutch doctor in the 16th century who made up a dictionary of Latin, in which each word was followed by a line of impeccable Latin poetry written by a Classical master. From this reading of this line Smets could infer the length of the vowel in the word he was documenting, and it is from this and later studies of this kind that we get our knowledge of the Latin vowel lengths. There are a few statements from the old Roman grammarians about vowel-length, but these are usually in cases where there was doubt even to the native Romans.

Coming to the point:

The Romans spoke one way, using the "three from end" system, wrote their poetry differently with the "long-short" system, rather slavishly following the Greeks. How did they manage in such a fix to makes sense out of their poetry at all?

They used the ancient art of linguistic confectionery: They fudged!

How this was done is still not completely clear, but they read their Vergil with proper respect for the longs and shorts, yet at the same time they knew that the Master had written the lines so they could be (sort of) heard as lightly accented in the manner of daily speech, so as to be understood. Strange to say, this ungainly balance between two dissonant systems of speech has a subtle charm of its own, once you are some dozen or more years into the study of Latin. But for the beginner trying to make sense, it sound more like a weight-lifter doing his act on a tightrope. Yet nothing in this world is completely impossible!

You open the Oxford edition of Vergil, and lo --- where are the long marks now? Well, they are never used in "normal" Latin printed books, only in the school texts where not knowing them can cost you marks in the teacher's black book. This may reinforce your suspicion that they were only there in the first place to make things harder. But that isn't really true, you can safely ignore the macrons since your teacher may not be completely sure about them anyway. Watch your teacher, when THEY(the New English term replacing "he/she") look down at the book when questioned about a vowel length, you know THEY are cribbing HIS/HER answer.

In India they still do it the old way according to Panini, the great grammarian of the 4th A.D. The students memorize hundreds of rules first, then when they read something in Sanskrit (the parallel to Latin here) they can cite the rule for each function of every word. This seems unthinkable to Americans, where memorizing the dates of our mere two centuries of history is virtually forbidden as harming the mind, damping the imagination. The fact is that Indians learning almost everything by rote, the Chinese memorizing thousands of characters just be able to read a newspaper.......are surviving and even becoming mathematicians, scientists and businessmen in our country if they can get in. This does offer up some questions beside our rising figures for functional American illiteracy. Ah well, who wants to read when you can get everything on TV?

Say you are really serious about Latin, and have a good mind for detail, you might think it worthwhile to go to the basic authority on Latin Grammar, Allen And Greenough's LATIN GRAMMAR edited by d'Ooge in l906, still regarded by professionals as the best exposition of the subject. Problem is this book has been out of print for decades, and most copies are on the upper shelf of a college professor who doesn't have time to read it much anyway. I was talking to my lawyer last week, and asked about the shelves and shelves of law books in his office, asking if he had read a lot of them in the course of the years. "Of course not, they are there for reference........ I use them as little as possible, takes too much time, and only when I get in trouble." Same for Allen and Greenough, I suspect.

The point? Reading Vergil you learn to get a feel for the sound of a line of his verse, by listening to someone who seems to read it with feeling, and then experiment on your own. When you feel comfortable reading it and it sounds "genuine", you are home free without a thought about scansion or marks over the vowels or even longs vs. shorts, which can now be relegated to the matter of summer clothing.

But there is always that nagging question behind any discussion like this: Why am I taking Latin, what in the world is it going to be good for? If I really do well and get a high AP grade for college credit, is that enough reason for four years intensive training in a dead tongue which points to a dead end?

Now at last I can give you a clear answer in a very few words. You will probably never get a true reading knowledge of Latin, an achievement many teachers haven't reached after long years. You may not be interested in poetry at all, in fact there are many readers who conscientiously avoid poetry as airy and un-factual. But you have mastered a complex and meaningless system in all its myriad detail, you have done your years of Latin with serious study, never asking what it is good for or why you are doing it at all.

What is this good for? Why it is the best training in the world for another system which has all the same characteristics of meaningless oddities, a high degree of complexity, lack of overall organization, and a shifting ground on which it is based which nobody can exactly define.

What am I speaking of? Why, of course, it is The Law ! Latin is the preview for Law School, and most of our successful lawyers have at an earlier stage been Latinists, probably recalcitrant or unwilling at best. But the path less often taken is in this case the highway to financial and social success, and Latin is a good anticipation for the rigors of mastering and practicing the Law.

Sorry to have lost my thread, I was just going to say a few words about Latin at the beginning, wasn't I?

Well, it seems I wasn't paying attention and the fire went out while I was at the computer with this letter, so I think I'll just go out and split some kindling for the wood stove. Like Latin, we do one thing for the sake of another, and a little work with the maul will be good for the circulation, and the kindling will be good for lighting the logs, and the logs will be right for the fire in the stove, and soon the room will be getting warm, and it will be time for lunch, and then I'll think about taking a nap for a while and forget about all this letter, which by that time will be on the Internet reaching its tentacles out to the world with my important message of the morning........... Now what was it I was going to say?.

William Harris
Prof. Em. Middlebury College
www.middlebury.edu/~harris

[klaus]

LATIN PRONUNCIATION
Phonematic Length of the Latin Vowels



In all printed texts, other than high-school textbooks, the Latin vowels (-a-,-e-,-i-,-o-,-u-) are written without a differentiating mark or diacritic to indicate length. Sometimes length does make a difference in meaning, this is what Linguists call a "phonematic difference", but in many cases length does not make a distinction of meaning, which is to say that it is not phonematic. Linguistics define the phoneme as: "The minimum distinctive sound", or "the smallest sound unit which can effect a distinction of meaning." For an example, when you do a search in the Dictionary, you will see (and hear) the difference between the two verbs "incido", which are distinguished by the vowel length of the -i-.

In the computerized dictionary, you will find longs noted only when phonematic differences are involved. As in most languages, many things must be learned by context and experience, and are not included in printed texts.. In studying Russian and Chinese you must learn the pitch accents which are an essential part of the phonology, and will affect meanings, but they are never marked in printed texts. Writing them all in would be considered a sheer barbarism, and so it is with Latin. In the Review Grammar section longs are marked in as an aid to learning and identifying forms.

When you search for a word in the dictionary, you hear the spoken word, pronounced in an authentic manner, which shows by the lengths of the vowels as pronounced, which are long and which are short. Not only will this serve as a mnemonic aid to learning, it will fix in your mind the sound of the word you are looking at, and prepare you for a correct metrical interpretation when you read Latin poetry. This auditory exposure will also steer you away from the evil practice of using stress on vowels which are long, which is historically unauthentic and completely against the nature of Latin poetic usage.

Actually, the only way we know which vowels are long and which are short, is by carefully examining the occurrences of each word in lines of poetry which come from the best authors of the Augustan period. A medical doctor named Smets constructed a dictionary on this principle in the l6th century, and revision of Smets' approach by modern scholars provides our present knowledge of the longs. There is no God-given information on the length of the Latin vowels, just the established practice of the Roman poets..

As you read poetry, the lines when read correctly will to a certain extent show you which are long, but before you get to the poets, it will be important to listen to the pattern of accentuation (actually a different but related matter) which your teacher employs, since this will teach you lengths as an indirect concomitant of accent (stress), which is used in Latin prose and in daily speech.

A full discussion of long vowels as used in Latin poetry is given in the next section on this index: Poetry and Latin Verse.

Return to Latin Background index

William Harris
Prof. Em. Middlebury College
www.middlebury.edu/~harris

[klaus]

Long or Short?

At some time near the end of the Republic, Romans began to indicate long vowels with a symbol similar to the French circumflex or by doubling the vowel. Eventually a mark (such as the French acute) was added to words. But the long mark was never included in the spelling of a word in the way that accent marks in modern languages appear. In fact, the macron or long mark used in most Latin texts today did not appear until the invention of the printing press. So how do we know which vowels are long? Our understanding of the length of vowels is an inexact science. Scholars used lines of poetry to determine sounds of Latin words. In the 16th century a physician named Smets organized a dictionary based on their findings, and his work has been revised over the centuries. (Source: W. Sydney Allen, Vox Latina, pp 64-65.)

[klaus]

http://bible.crosswalk.com/Information/LatinPronunciationGuide.html

[klaus]

INTRODUCTION TO THE ART OF VERGIL
In dealing with major work from a major poet, we want to be as sure as we can be that we are dealing with the text in an authentic and accurate way. To be sure, there are many fine points of ancient Roman pronunciation which are lost forever. Exactly what intonation and what slurring occurred in spoken speech can only be guessed at, but the detailed work of five generations of accurate linguistic scholars gives us reasonable assurance that the more important features of the ancient Latin language are known, and can be reproduced. There have always been quibbling arguments about "the true Latin pronunciation", but at this date, the level of the entrenchment of the quibbles is more a block to proper use of Latin than the level of our knowledge. Taking the state of knowledge achieved by the Yale scholar Edgar Sturtevant's work on Latin pronunciation as a base, we can vocalize Latin letters with cautious confidence. But the written text itself has gone through various transmutations.

First, in manuscript texts dating from the Roman period, all letters are in capitals, there is no capital -u-, (it is always -V-), and of course no small -v- in the event of your reading a minuscule text. Letters were printed large, almost an inch high, especially in important books like Vergil, as a concession to chronic eye infections which plagued the populace, and of course it was impossible to correct defective vision by ground lenses. With such large print the reading rate was slow, and this was in turn further retarded by the Roman's inability to read silently. This may seem strange to our culture, in which children learn not to phonate by the age of eight or nine, but we know from primary evidence that Romans always read aloud, and so heard their readings with a remarkable acuity. Furthermore they liked reading aloud, and this made poets responsible for producing euphonic, acoustically enjoyable texts. Ancient books are full of music, but until we get completely used to reading them in a strong and unembarrassed voice, we cannot get their full effect. In the case of Vergil, whose writing is musical above all others,, we must practice reading aloud until the process becomes natural to us. Reading the Aeneid silently is like inspecting Bach's score to the B minor Mass... it is true, you can perceive absolutely everything, except the sound.

The text is is printed in CAPITAL letters, and intended to be read aloud, slowly and thoughfully at the rate of less than ten pages an hour. The Romans used only capital letters in their manuscript texts, with "uncial" letters a little under and inch high, about like this:

AT REGINA GRAVI IAMDVDVM SAVCIA CVRA

This has great advantage for an age without eyeglasses, reading handwritten and heavily used copies, on a very wide page of parchment in a codex or book-form. It suits our sense of readable text even less when written without spacing as below, the normal Latin usage except for very elementary students, who might have small red interpunct marks.

ATREGINAGRAVIIAMDVDVMSAVCIA CVRA

Reading a continuous row of letters like this, one would read carefully, phonating each character and listening to the sound of one's voice for the "text", which is the way Romans actually read. But since we have been schooled since third grade to read words as "characters" without phonating out the sound, we gain far greater reading speed, while losing the directness of the writer's voice arising from re-sounding the words. The Commentary hopes to bring us back in some measure to an auditory approach to Vergil's poetry, without which we miss half of the effect of his language. When you download the Latin text (from the main menu) you can choose between the minuscule (normal) or capital letter continuous text for your reading,

Since poetry often has an element of visual display in the individual lines, the format makes the line visually and artistically clear as a study in design. Many lines of Vergil are studies in design, and the ancient format makes this easier to grasp. We are fortunate in being able to imitate an early style of lettering such as the Romans used with our modern typefaces, you cannot do this with Greek, which in older MSS is unreadable, as are the papyri. Perhaps at this point a word about "long marks" is in order. The Romans knew the longs by knowing how the language sounded, but never wrote them in, nor do modern texts of any author include them with the one exception of high school textbooks. Since students seriously studying Latin will never see a long-marked text after high school, the use of such crutches may well be questioned. It would seem better to learn to deal with regular printed texts, than learn everything in "marked" text, and later wonder where the cribbed marks went. A Dutch doctor named Smets published in l599 a dictionary of regularly used poetic words illustrated with one verse from a good poet of the Augustan period,which establishes the natural length of the vowels. But even so there are questions about length in some words, which the OLD lists at the beginning of each entry. Note that modern Russians must speak with precise pitch accents, but would never think of writing them in their books. If students learn the longs and shorts by hearing Latin spoken by the teacher and speaking it themselves, there will be no problems later on, that is the long and the short of it.

Two letters in the Latin alphabet and how they are to be pronounced have always generated more heat than light, the letters -u/v- and -c-. If we use the capitals alone, we will see only -V-, which must be pronounced -w-. There is no question about this linguistically, although those favoring "church pronunciation" will fight on for -v-. The same is true of -c-, which was always -k-, but the palatalized pronunciation -ch-, which did appear in very late Latin, is preferred by those whose Latin started in church schools. It would seem better to alter one's pronunciation in view of linguistic correctness, and in hopes of getting nearer to the author's sounds, but if the teacher can't learn new tricks, using the accustomed pronunciation will be necessary. But at least sound the Latin words out loud and clear, there is no earthly virtue to whispering and mealy mouthing. The worst sin against the nature of poetry would be -v- and -c- engrained in the mind as ghostly letters , forever deprived of sound..
William Harris
Prof. Em. Middlebury College
www.middlebury.edu/~harris

[klaus]

When Bonaventura Vulcanius of Bruges (1538-1614) was appointed professor of Greek at Leyden University, he had a chequered career behind him, like so many humanists of his generation. After studying medicine at Louvain University he went to Spain in 1559, where he was secretary to the Archbishop of Burgos (until 1566) and his brother in Toledo (until 1570). In the years 1573-74 he lived in Cologne as a private teacher; a drunken brawl and its consequences prohibited his appointment as a professor of Greek there. After living for some time in Geneva and Basle he returned to his native Flanders and became rector of the Latin school at Antwerp and secretary to the leading Calvinist nobleman Marnix van Sint-Aldegonde. In 1581 he arrived in Leyden; there he became one of the key figures of the young university. For almost thirty years he taught the future elite of the Dutch Republic, among them scholars and poets such as Daniel Heinsius and Hugo Grotius.

          Vulcanius was a versatile scholar: he edited both Latin and Greek texts (nearly always with his own Latin translation), with an emphasis on Hellenistic and Byzantine works. He also had a keen interest in more recent work, as his editions of the Dutch historiographer Cornelius Aurelius and of the poets Janus Secundus and his two brothers evince. In addition to his work as a scholar, translator and teacher Vulcanius was also a poet in his own right: some of his occasional poetry is found in the scholarly works published by his contemporaries. Much more of his poetry is still unpublished, dating both from his 'Spanish' period  and from his later life. From his poetry –and from poetry addressed to him, in manuscript and print– Vulcanius emerges as a leading personality in Dutch humanism of the 16th and 17th century.

[klaus]

BONAVENTURA VULCANIUS.

NAtus est hic Brugis Flandrorum anno Christi trigesimo octavo, supra mille quingentos, die trigesimo mensis Iunii.
page 526, image: s542

Patrem habuit Petrum Vulcanium, qui ob insignem eruditionem, pari cum eloquentia coniunctam, magno illi Erasmo carus inprimis atque acceptus fuit, ut Epistolae eius testantur. Ab hoc optimis praeceptoribus traditus, annos circiter sedecim natus, tantos in utraque lingua et humanioribus litteris progressus fecerat; ut aequalium suorum nulli cederet.

Mox Lovanium eum ablegavit; ubi cum per biennium egisset, dubitante patre, Iurisne an Medicinae studio filium addiceret, opportune admodum accidit; ut eo ipso tempore quaereretur iuvenis aliquis Graece et Latine doctus, qui illustrissimo Francisco a Mendoza, Cardinali et Episcopo Burgensi, a studiis esset. Cuius rei is negotium dederat Ioanni Paccio, Historico Regio, qui tum temporis Lovanii agebat. Ac patet commodam hanc occasionem visendae Hispaniae, et simul linguae addiscendae, non negligendam esse ratus, non gravate eum Paccii eiusdem fidei commisit, qui in Hispaniam duceret, et Cardinali sisteret, commendaretque. Is ergo anno millesimo quingentesimo quinquagesimo nono per Galliam in Hispaniam abductum, Burgis Cardinali tradidit; qui peramanter exceptum in familiam suam ascivit, et stipendium honorificum assignavit.

Cum autem is tum temporis totus esset in scribendo libro: De naturali nostra per dignam Eucharistiae sumptionem cum Christo unione, eius opera statim in transcribendis, et Latine vertendis, multis Patrum Graecorum, Cyrilli maxime Alexandrini, et Isidori Pelusiotae, qui coaetaneus illi fuit, aliorumque auctoritatibus antea non editis, fuit magnopere adiutus. Eiusdem auspiciis Cyrilli libros septendecim, De adoratione in spiritu et veritate; primus Latinos fecit.

Praeterea Nicolai Cabasilae Methonensis Episcopi Orationes septem, De vita in Christo; antea neque Graece, neque Latine a quoquam editas, Latine vertit; qui liber postea inspiciendus Theologo cuidam datus, una cum versione intercidit. Usus est etiam Cardinalis eius opera ad Epistolas Latine primum, deinde etiam Hispanice scribendas. Bibliothecae etiam suae, quam Codicibus Graecis manuscriptis instructissimam habebat, eum praefecit.

Cum vero post obitum Cardinalis, frater eius, Ferdinandus a Mendoza Archidiaconus Toletanus, eum in familiam suam recepisset; mortuo etiam illo, a patre graviter aegrotante, per litteras ad Ioachimum Hopperum scriptas, domum revocatus, cum post undecim annorum absentiam, periculosissimo tempore, per Galliam rediisset, quanta potuisset festinatione, et patrem iam vita functum reperisset: ac miserum patriae statum aequis oculis aspicere non posset; compositis ibi rebus suis, in
page 527, image: s543

Germaniam abiit: ubi primum Coloniae commoratus, Cyrilli librum adversus Anthropomorphitas, antea non editum, vertit, et Latine edidit; cui adiecit primum eiusdem Auctoris librum De adorationem spiritu et veritate, abs se versum: qui antea solus et perperam versus in operibus Cyrilli legebatur.

Inde Basileam profectus, et ope Ioannis Baptista Heintzelii, duumviri Augustani, vetustissimum exemplar in membrana exaratum nactus, in quo erant Cyrilli Dialogi ad Hermiam, et alia; antea perperam admodum ab interprete habiti; eos de integro vertit. Ibidem etiam Isidori libros Originum una cum Martiano Capella ab innumeris mendis ope M.S. Codicum, et ex coniectura emendavit.

Inde Genevam progressus, Arriani Historiam de rebus gestis Alexandri, turpissime ab interprete versam, ope M.S. exemplaris infinitis locis correxit, et nova interpretarione donavit. Unde Basileam reversus, cum etiam de matris obitu nuntium accepisset, et iam res Belgicas in meliore paulo statu esse cognosceret; peregrinandi satur domum rediit: Et cum in Frisiam cum Legatis Ordinum Belgicorum proficisceretur, ac iter faceret, a Curatoribus Academiae Professor linguae Graecae designatus, anno millesimo quingentesimo septuagesimo octavo; triennio demum post Leidam venit, et Professionem suscepit. Ab eo tempore assidue tam publice docendo, quam scribendo, per annos triginta duos, de re litteraria optime meritus est

Inde rude donatus est, cumque variis aetatis ingravescentis incommodis conflictatus: id quod ipse hoc epigrammate testatur:

Ter denos docui Leidis binosque per annos
      Cattigenum [Reg: Chattigenum] pubem Graiiugenum [Reg: Graiugenum] ore loqui.
Nunc manibus, pedibusque, oculisque, atque auribus aeger,
      Et senio languens lampada trado aliis.

Tandem anno CHRISTI millesimo sexcentesimo decimo quarto die ... mensis ..... annum aetatis ingressus septuagesinum septimum, in vivis esse desiit. Edita sunt ab ipso haec:

Cyrilli Alexandrini Patriarchae liber adversus Anthropomorphitas, Graece et Latine: cui adiunctus est eiusdem Cyrilli liber, quod Christus sit unus.

Eiusdem Cyrilli de Adoratione in spiritu et veritate libri septendecim, quos ille primus vertit.

Arrianus de rebus gestis Alexandri Magni Graece et Latine.

Callimachi Hymni et Epigrammata, cum Moschi, ac Bionis Idylliis, totidem versibus Latine ab eo reddita, et scholiis illustrata.
page 528, image: s544


Constantinus Porphyrogeneta de Thematibus Orientalib. Graece ac Latine, cum Notis.

Agathias Graece ac Latine cum Notis.

Nilus Archiepiscopus Thessalonicensis, de primatu Pontificis Romani, et de purgatorio Graece ac Latine.

Iornandes de rebus Geticis, cum Notis.

De lingua Getica sive Gothica Commentarius, cum characteribus ei linguae propriis.

Glossaria Latino Graeea, et Graeco Latina, cum Notis.

Apuleii opera omnia, post Colvianam editionem innumeris locis correcta.

Aristoteles de Mundo, Graece ac Latine, cum Apuleii et aliorum versionibus, accurate collatus, et innumeris locis castigatus. Cui adiecit Gregorii Cypris Archiepiscopi Constantinopolitani Encomium maris.

Nondum edita autem adservantur haec:

Tatiani Harmonia quatuor Euangeliorum, cum interpretatione verbali, lingua Getica.

Poemata Graeca et Latina, ac versa e Graecis Latine, et e Latinis Graece.

Proverbia Gnomica ex Hispanica lingua Latinis trimetris et dimetris ad imitationem Mimi Publiani versa.

Odae tres Anacreonticae Graecae in Natalem Domini.

Emanuelis Chrysolorae tractatus de comparatione veteris et novae Romae, Graece et Latine.

Ex Academia Lugdunensi.

FINIS.
http://www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/camenaref/adam/adam1/s541.html

[klaus]

Bonaventura Vulcanius (de Smet) [1538 - 1614].

[sknente]

Note that modern Russians must speak with precise pitch accents

[klaus]

Wheelock's Latin
By Frederic M. Wheelock , Richard A. LaFleur
6th Edition Revised [2005]
The classic, single–volume introductory Latin textbook, introduced in 1956 and still the bestselling and most highly regarded textbook of its kind.

Vowels in Latin had only two possible pronunciations, long and short. Long vowels were generally held about twice as long as short vowels... and are marked in this book, as in most beginning texts (though not in the actual classical texts), with a "macron" or "long mark" (eg ā): vowels without a macron are short.
(In Latin, vowels are either long or short, i.e. they are sounded for a shorter or longer amount of time. In normal written Latin, the length of a vowel is not indicated; you just have to know. In textbooks, long vowels are indicated with a caret or macron over the vowel ... except for when they're not.)

[klaus]

he Latin of The Passion

I commented a little while ago on the fact that the use of Latin in Mel Gibson's forthcoming film The Passion is not authentic because Latin was not widely used in Israel. It turns out that isn't the only inauthenticity. According to correspondants who have seen previews of The Passion, in the film Latin is spoken in the Italianate pronounciation, that is, in the pronounciation generally used in the Roman Catholic Church in Italy and the United States. That is not how Latin was pronounced 2,000 years ago.

Now, you might wonder how we know. After all, the Romans didn't bequeath to us any recordings of their speech. And indeed, sometimes, when a language is known only from written records, we may not have a very good idea of what it sounded like. But there are ways of learning what languages sounded like in the past, and when we are lucky it is possible to learn quite a bit. Sometimes we have descriptions by contemporary authors. Sometimes we have indirect evidence, such as the way in which the words of the language in question were written by speakers of other languages, or the way in which loans from foreign languages were written. Some information can be gleaned from variation in spelling. Sometimes we can make inferences from developments in the daughter languages, or from the application of phonological rules.

In the case of Latin, we know quite a lot. The best summary of our knowledge of the pronounciation of Latin is a slim book entitled Vox Latina: A Guide to the Pronounciation of Classical Latin by W. Sidney Allen. It has a companion entitled Vox Graeca that summarizes our knowledge of the pronounciation of ancient Greek. The most obvious difference between the Italianate pronounciation and the classical pronounciation is the use before [e] and of the palatal affricates [tɕ] (as in cheese) and [ʤ] (as in judge) in place of the velar stops [k] (usually written <c>) and [g] respectively. According to Allen, that pronounciation didn't arise until at least the fifth century C.E.

By the way, although it has pride of place due to the role of the Italian clergy in the church, the Italianate pronounciation is not the only one used in the Catholic church. There are various "national" pronounciations, which at times have been defended vociferously against reform. According to Allen (p. 104):

The reforms were, however, opposed by the Chancellor of the University [Cambridge - WJP], Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, who in 1542 published an edict specifically forbidding the new pronounciation of either language. As penalties for infringement, M.A. s were to be expelled from the Senate, candidates were to be excluded from degrees, scholars to forfeit all privilges, and ordinary undergraduates to be chastised.

Gardiner's edict was only repealed in 1558 on the accession of Elizabeth I.
Posted by Bill Poser at February 21, 2004 02:46 PM

[klaus]

HOW TO READ LATIN POETRY

A treatise on the complicated matter of Latin Versification is beyond the scope of this article. But a few basics on this complex area, as aid for beginning and intermediatestudents, can be simply put:

It should be noted that these rules, although correct and useful, will never help a person read the dactylic lines of Vergil as they should be read. Listening to someone with a good sense of musicality and interpretation reading Vergil, is the best, and perhaps the only way to learn to read Latin poetry. Marking out the "long and shorts" as is common in schools, is NOT the way to read poetry, and may well prevent you from ever reading Latin verse in a musically satisfactory manner.

If as a student, you are inclined to doubt my warnings, just ask your Latin teacher (HS or college) to read a page aloud so you can get the gist of it. If the teacher reads well, listen carefully, but if the teacher fudges, it means he or she does not understand the verse as poetry endowed with sound and rhythm. Then you have to go it on your own, learning it (as with all important things) by your own effort.

1) Vowels in Latin are either LONG or SHORT, this refers to the length of time they take to be pronounced. A long is about twice as long as a short. [However there is no evidence that Romans counted out their "one-and.. two-and.. " 's in the exact manner of a modern elementary music teacher.]

2) Vowels can be LONG BY NATURE, which means they are "genetically" long in the tradition of Latin and its Indo-European parentage.

3) Or they can be stated as LONG BY POSITION, which means that a vowel which is followed by two consonants is generally "considered" or made long, but the following stipulations must be noted:

a) A vowel before another vowel or -h- is short: e.g. via, nihil

b) A diphthong, representing two fused vowels, is long, and also vowels contracted from diphthongs (inclúdo from claudo)

c) Any result of contraction is quite naturally long: e.g. nil from nihil

d) A vowel before -ns, -nf, and sometimes -gn is long: infans

e) A vowel before -nd, -nt is short: e.g. amant

f) A vowel followed by a stop consonant (-p-,-b-, -ph-, -d-, -t-,-th-, -k-, -g-, -gh-) followed by a liquid (-l- or -r-) may be considered long OR short in Classical poetry, although it is always short in early verse. [Rather than wrestle with this complicated piece of legislation, assume that the highly sonorous -l- and -r- are felt to be so vowel-like as to invalidate the "two consonant rule".]

g) If a consonantal -i- (=-j-) is preceded by -a-, -e-, -o-, -u-, the vowel is considered long, because of the consonantal function of the vowel: e.g. aio, maior, peius..

h) Final -s after a short vowel is often suppressed, thus removing one of the causes for length. In Post-Augustan authors final long -o is regularly shorted, e.g. in cases like ego, amo etc., but not in the dat. and abl. of 2 decl.. nouns. Generally a vowel before another vowel is considered short if not part of a diphthong; but not in cases like cuius, and forms of fio.

i) By a well established process, called The Law of Iambic Shortening (or in the grammarian's jargon Brevis Brevians), a long vowel is shortened if it is preceded in the word by a short vowel, and if it is preceded OR followed by a syllable which has the (prose system's) word-accent. The detailed operation of this rule is too complex to discuss here; the interesting thing is the operation of word-accent to convert an "iambic" word to two-shorts, apparently as a concession to the rhythm of conversational parlance. In Plautus this process is universal, rarer in later poetry.

j) The vowel before an elided -m (which had disappeared from spoken Latin early) simply disappears if the next word starts with a vowel, as well as an initial vowel when backward elided, e.g. est,, giving 'st. We thus actually have a three-valued logic for the Latin vowels: Long, Short, and "gone".

h) "Long by position" means long for verse, hence in verse the vowel must be of double length. But this does not mean that in prose the vowel is long, or that it must affect the STRESS accent. This curious double-standard is one of the things Romans lived with, with some unease. On the other hand a master like Vergil can make the verse-rhythm and the prose-rhythm work with and even against each other, creating a subtly moiré effect in verse.

(Actually the word "position" is a mis-translating of the Greek grammatical term "thesis" which means "convention, agreement"; ignorant Roman schoolmasters thought it came from the verb "ti-THE-mi" which can mean "place, put in position", hence the error.)

Footnote: LONG means "long", not stressed or made loud. Hence a long "-a-" is actually pronounced "-a-a", not as two separate sounds, but one long one which occupies twice the space of a single "-a-", as if legato. It is like a half-note in music counted out as double, in a sequence where quarter notes are normal, although we should not count it out exactly, since we know so little about the exactness of Roman music. The first line of Vergil's Aeneid, with a little latitude, is to be pronounced thus:

A-arma viru-umque cano-o Troiae-ae qui-i pri-imus ab o-ori-is

Unfortunately many teachers substitute stress for length in reading Latin poetry, probably because English is a stress-oriented language and long vowels are not normally used. But if you are going to read Latin, you should read it as the Romans spoke it, and there is no questions about the fact that when they specified a vowel as LONG grammatically, they meant "L-O-N-G" acoustically. To read Latin with stress substituting for length is wrongheaded, it makes Vergil sound like something conjured up on a rocking-horse, and misses the real sound of Latin verse, which can be quite lovely. (For a full discussion of this problem, see Section 13):. Stress.)

The verse form most commonly used in Latin is the "dactylic hexameter".

This is the standard line for all epic poetry in Latin, following the example of Homer closely. The dactylic line is also the first line of the two-line "Elegaic Couplet", which embraces the whole output of Ovid, Propertius Tibullus and others. It can be said without hesitation that the dactyl has its foot firmly in the body of Latin literature.

Dactylic hexameters use only two basic rhythmic structures, or "feet":

1) The dactyl: A long followed by two shorts, e.g." long-short-short", and

2) The spondee: A long followed by a long, e.g." long-long"

[Note: Dactyl comes from Gr. dactylos "a finger",. which has one long bone and two shorts, while Spondee in Greek means "libations, sacral processioning at a service", with the measured rhythm of our traditional wedding processional music. From such humble origins the grand terms of the grammarians often come!]

Now for some purely practical rules drawn from observation::

1) Every dactylic hexameter line, and every foot within a line, must begin with a long.

2) This long CAN be followed by a long, in which case we are into the next foot, which must of course start with another long.

3) Or it CAN be followed by two shorts, in which case are we again in a new foot, which must start with a long.

4) MOST lines end with the tried-and-true "heroic" cadence of a dactyl followed by a spondee (the last syllable of which can be either long or short, by a kind of Latin poetic license). Only one out of fifty or so verses will end with two spondees, usually introduced for a somber effect.

5) Anticipating a next-to-final dactyl will help you get the line in order; if it doesn't come out with a dactyl, you have made an error. (But then again, you may be right, since there are occasional spondaic closings.)

6) Often we are so busy searching for LONGS that we forget the other side of the equation: Also look for SHORTS. Since a short must be followed by another short, and that always precedes a long, "searching for shorts" is just as good, and in some ways better, than "looking for longs". Latin, as against Greek, is heavy in the frequency of its long syllables. Since there are many fewer shorts in a typical dactylic line, why not find them, and assume as a rough rule that the rest are long? [One incidental way of finding some of the shorts is by appeal to the Prose Accentuation system; if the accent is third-from-end, the second from end must be a short, or it would have had the accent!]

And now for some notes drawn from observation of the stylistics of the Roman poets:

1) Even a skilled poet like Vergil can occasionally stage a line which is completely dactylic (see Aeneid 8, 596 for the sound of trampling hooves of horses), or wholly spondaic (as in 8, 452 demonstrating great bodily effort). Or a line can be made to mumble and murmur (3, 658) by means of piled up elisions. But these are the special effects of a master, and relatively rare.

2) The exact positioning of the two types of feet in the line is a technique which Vergil works with sensitively. Lines are shaped by the rhythms, and the artistic shaping of a line is among the things which make Latin poetry work.

3) Caesura, the separation of two words in the median portion of a dactylic line by "cutting" (caedo) the foot, is an accepted artistic practice derived from Greek epic poetry. A word-break after the first syllable of the third foot is the most common place, and is called the strong caesura,

the most common type. Variants of the location of caesura are noted in manuals on versification, but the most important thing is to read each line carefully and determine if the word-break (wherever it occurs) works with or against the metrical rhythm artistically. In many cases the effect which the writer is seeking is easier to comprehend than the discussion in manuals on Latin Versification. Put the other way around, the technical description is liable to be meaningless except as a statistic, unless it can be coupled with artistic meaning in a given line if poetry.

It may occur at this point, since one can spot the vowels which are LONG BY POSITION, and the DIPHTHONGS by eye, that it might be useful to know which vowels were LONG BY NATURE. If you have to ask this question, the simple answer is "Learn them from your high-school textbook where longs are marked" or "Look them up in the dictionary", which not going to be very helpful if you have to ask the question at this point. But how does the dictionary know which vowels are long?

In the late 16th c. a Dutch M.D. named Smetius published a dictionary of all commonly used Latin words, following each entry with a line of poetry taken from an author whose classical taste was beyond question. This book and its successors give the information which we now use: Long vowels are documented from the library of Augustan Latin poetry, which is the best source of authenticity, so we are dealing with a veritable circular argument. In a very few cases, Roman grammarians like Aulus Gellius (whose book neatly titled "Attic Nights" has disappointed generations of students expecting something racy) give additional information about lengths which the Romans were not sure about. [A full account of such grammatical cabalism is to be found in W.M. Lindsay"s remarkable book The Latin Language, Oxford l894, a short perusal of which will make it clear that even the Romans had a great many questions about the longs and shorts of their native language.]

One might note that the severe practice of making high-school students memorize all long vowels accurately, and then encourage them to pronounce these longs as LOUD or stressed, is not only unnecessary, but also unhistorical, unesthetic and unrewarding.
Conclusions

1) Be aware of the rules and observations above, but do not expect them to teach you everything you need to know about reading Latin verse.

2) Try to find a professor who reads Latin with dramatic (but not stagy) gusto and feeling. If he reads as if he were in an accelerated rocking-chair, go get someone else to read to you. Get the feeling of the line BY EAR. As in music, it is the ear which gets the measure and the up-beat, not the memorization of rules. Poetry is "language-with-rhythm", and if you can't get the ear into the process, you can't hear the poetry.

3) Read many lines OUT LOUD, taking a chance about correctness, and persevere until you hear lines coming out "right". If dactylic hexameters come out with that final resounding, epic dactyl cadence, you are probably on the right track. Continue, get the feel of the process, and later if you have a question about a vowel, ask someone or consult a dictionary for lengths. Recall that those who read Latin verse fluently, page after page with delight and feeling, got their technique for reading from the lines on the page and from their ear. There probably isn't enough time in life for most of us to look up each word for the LONGS, life is just too short. You can do it yourself by learning basic rules and jumping into reading with both feet, and taking a chance. Your ear will eventually correct you if something is terribly wrong.

Although standard Latin instruction teaches students how to puzzle out lines, charting them on paper with longs and shorts scribbled in over the text is clearly not the highroad to poetic appreciation. What you want is the ability to read page after page with an easy voice, so you can grasp the rhythms while you are imbibing the meaning of the Latin words. That is what reading Latin poetry is all about. It may take time, but it's worth it!

But all Latin poetry is not written in dactylic hexameters. The first variant to compare is an Ovidian elegaic couplet. The first line is a standard dactylic hexameter, the second line, called a "pentameter" for no especially cogent reason, starts off the same way but comes to an unexpected pause in the middle, often coinciding with some point of surprise or pathos. After this interruption or hiatus the line starts off again and resumes what feels like a normal dactylic line with a typical cadence of conclusion. If you have become familiar with the basic dactylic line, and when reading the second line of an elegaic couplet (which is conveniently indented in all printed texts) you expect a break or hiatus toward the middle of the line, you can probably make the verse form out for yourself by ear.

After the central stylically observed "break" or 'caesura' in the "pentameter", the line takes up again with a dactyl, followed by another dactyl, and then a spondee. This is a regular pattern, it concludes the line with a certain finality, and establishes the couplet as a self-contained unit, rarely reaching into the next couplet for its meaning. This is indeed a rudimentary description of the elegaic couplet, but it should be sufficient to work with initially; for a detailed account of the couplet in various authors and periods, complete with detailed statistics, consult any modern manual on Latin versification.

But dactyls are not all that there is to say about metre in Latin. The "Lyric poets" Catullus and Horace use a variety of metres drawn from the common practice of the Greek poets from the time of Sappho to the Alexandrians. Catullus and Horace reach into the library of Hellenistic metrification, and produce lovely little poems in very un-Roman metres, as Horace was quick to admit in print. The sharp and biting hendecasyllabic line with its uneven eleven syllables, the graceful stanzas of the Sapphic and Alcaic metres, even (if only once) the two longs pursued interminably by two shorts in the Sapphic ionic a minore.... these add spice and dimension to Latin poetry, but at the cost of having to study metre carefully before you can be at home in Lyric Poetry. Any one of the many monographs on ancient metrics will bail you out with the lyric metres if you have perseverance, but it is your ear which must eventually supply the musicality to make real the printed schematics of these complicated, Greek-based systems of versification.

Return to Latin Background index

William Harris
Prof. Em. Middlebury College
www.middlebury.edu/~harris

[klaus]

Scripsit Accius WATANABEUS
www.uky.edu/AS/Classics/retiarius/haicua.html

[klaus]

The History of Latin Pronunciation
Allen, W. Sidney. Vox Latina: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Brittain, Frederick. Latin in Church: Episodes in the History of its Pronunciation, Particularly in England. Cambridge University Press, 1934.

Brittain, Frederick. Latin in Church: The History of its Pronunciation. New ed., rev. and enlarged. Alcuin Club Tracts 28. London: A.R. Mowbray, 1955.

Collins, John F. A Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1985.

Copeman, Harold. Singing in Latin, or, Pronunciation explor'd. Oxford: by the author, 1990; available from the author at 22 Tawney Street, Oxford OX4 1NJ.
Reviews: Douglas Leedy in Performance Practice Review 5 (1992), 103-8. Lawrence Rosenwald Historical Performance: The Journal of Early Music America 5/1 (1992), 47-50. Gunilla Iversen in The Early Drama, Art, and Music Review 15 (1992-3), 19-22.

Daitz, Stephen G. The Pronunciation and Reading of Classical Latin: A Practical Guide. The Living Voice of Greek and Latin Literature. Guilford, CT: Jeffrey Norton, 1984. [a tape cassette with a booklet]

Duffin, Ross W. "National Pronunciations of Latin ca. 1490-1600." The Journal of Musicology 4 (1985-6) 217-26.

Kelly, H. A. "Pronouncing Latin Words in English." Classical World 80 (1986) 33-7.

Ranum, Patricia M. Me'thode de la prononciation latine dite 'Vulgaire' ou 'a la franc,aise': Petite me'thode a` l'usage des chanteurs et des re'citants d'apre`s le manuscrit de dom Jacques Le Clerc (vers 1665). Se'rie "Musique" ed. Alain Artaud. Arles: Actes Sud, Hubert Nyssen Editeur, 1991.

Scherr, Vera U. G. Auffu"hrungspraxis Vokalmusik: Handbuch der lateinischen Aussprache, Klassisch -- Italienisch -- Deutsch, mit ausfu"hrlicher Phonetik des Italienischen. Kassel: Ba"renreiter, 1991.

Sonkowsky, Robert P. Selections from Vergil, Read in Classical Latin. The Living Voice of Greek and Latin Literature. Guilford, CT: Jeffrey Norton, 1985. [cassette tapes with a booklet]

Trusler, Ivan. The Choral Director's Latin. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America 1987.

Wray, Alison. "Authentic Pronunciation for Early Music." Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought. Ed. John Paynter, Tim Howell, Richard Orton, Peter Seymour. London & New York: Routledge, 1992: vol. 2: 1051-64

One can also learn much about the pronunciation of medieval Latin from studying the historical development of the Romance languages. Some examples:

Joseph Louis Barbarino, The Evolution of the Latin /b/-// Merger: A Quantitative and Comparative Analysis of the B-V Alternation in Latin Inscriptions. North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures 203. Chapel Hill: U.N.C. Department of Romance Languages, 1978.

Joseph Louis Barbarino. Latin and Romance Intervocalic Stops: A Quantitative and Comparative Study. Studia Humanitatis. Madrid: Jose' Porru'a Turanzas S.A.; Potomac, Maryland: Studia Humanitatis, 1981.

Klausenburger, Ju"rgen. Morphologization: Studies in Latin and Romance Morphophonology. Tu"bingen: Niemeyer, 1979.

Wright, Roger. Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France. Liverpool: F. Cairns, 1982.

Wright, Roger, ed. Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

Serial bibliographies for the study of Latin and other languages include: Anne'e philologique, Bibliographie linguistique/Linguistic Bibliography, MLA International Bibliography, Medioevo Latino.

[Darkstar]

Так а кого это смущает? Только англоязычных. Возьмите любого итальянца или может даже сардинца. Вот вам и латынь.

[Darkstar]

Предлагаю переименовать латынь в древнеитальянский, чтобы больше не возникало таких вопросов...

Гораздо интереснее как они произносили Q и С.
Поскольку в новоромансих оно дало все что угодно от /ch/ до /k/,  то и Q произносилось каким-то особым образом. И это не /kv/
Мне кажется, что изначально это было что-то более полугласное типа /hw/, где h могло быть сильно палатизировано, отсюда итальянское /сh/, но произносилось легко, поэтому в руманском и сардинском исчезло оставив /w/ > /p/, /b/

[Драгана]

I think the Latin pronounsation is not very difficult-if to compare with other languages (english,french etc).It's resemble italian and spain pronouncation.

[Драгана]

Que"куэ"->ке->к'е->че.Что же тут не так?Сначала выпало у неслоговое,потом к смягчилось и перешло в ч.

[Драгана]

Скажите кь помягче и порезче-будет почти как ч!
Кстати,а корень был еще в доИЕ наверняка gui-, +суф.-v-дало vive,viva;vita; и жить,живой-от гив-?А guiva,gviva где-н.слово есть?

[Darkstar]

Ага, а румынский и сардинский? А особенности северо-итальянских диалектов? Суть в том, что там нужно постулировать целую кучу процессов, чтобы из жесткого KV получить такую гамму разных фонем...

[klaus]

SMETIUS, HENRICUS, Prosodia quae syllabarum positione & diphtongis carentium quantitates, sola veterum Poetarum auctoritate, adductis exemplis demonstrat. Frankfurt, 1599.

[klaus]

Michael A. Covington
Latin Pronunciation Demystified
2 Four rivals
The pronunciation of Latin becomes much less puzzling once you realize that there are at least
four rival ways of doing it. The pronunciations you hear in biology or astronomy class don't
match the ones you learned from your Latin teacher, and guess what? That doesn't mean they're
wrong. They just reflect different periods in history.
Table 1 displays the four main methods. The ancient Roman pronunciation wasn't accurately
reconstructed until about 1900. Before that, scholars in every European country pronounced
Latin as if it were their own language. With English this gave particularly comical results because
English pronunciation had undergone drastic changes at the end of the Middle Ages. Here's an
example:
Julius Caesar
= 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")
Today, we still use the English Method to pronounce historical and mythological names in En-
glish context. The constellation Orion is called O'Ryan, not o-REE-on, and Caesar is called
SEE-zer.
Italian "Church Latin" is widely though not universally used in the Catholic Church and in
singing.
I recommend the northern Continental pronunciation for unfamiliar scientific terms, since it
resembles many modern languages and is, in fact, the pronunciation used by Copernicus, Kepler,
Linnaeus, and other scientific pioneers.
1
________________________________________
The ancient Roman pronunciation is of course what we use when teaching or seriously speaking
Latin. Its biggest peculiarities are that v is pronounced like English w, and ae like English ai in
aisle. These two sounds were already changing at the end of the classical period.
3 Do we know how the Romans pronounced Latin?
Surprisingly, yes. The details of the reconstruction are given in W. Sidney Allen, Vox Latina
(written in English), Cambridge, 1965. There are several main sources of knowledge:
• The Latin alphabet was meant to be entirely phonetic. Unlike us, the ancient Romans did
not inherit their spellings from any earlier language. What you see is what you get.
• Language teaching was big business in Roman times, and ancient Roman grammarians give
us surprisingly detailed information about the sounds of the language.
• Languages derived from Latin give us a lot of evidence. In fact, many of the letters of the
alphabet are pronounced the same way in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. It
stands to reason that the original Latin pronunciation has survived.
• Spelling errors made by the ancient Romans are very informative. If two letters are often
mixed up, they must sound fairly similar. Likewise, if two letters are never mixed up, we
know they sounded different.
Here's an example. In classical times, the natives had no trouble keeping ae distinct from
e; if they ever misspelled ae it came out ai. Later on, they started changing ae to e. That
enables us to pinpoint when the sound of ae changed.
• Finally, transcriptions into other writing systems, such as Greek and Sanskrit, often pin
down the ancient pronunciation of Latin very precisely.

5 About the alphabet
In classical Latin, the vowels i and u can be pronounced non-syllabically as consonants. For
example, uia was not "oo-ee-ah" but rather "wee-ah" and is nowadays written via.
Except for a few purists, all Latinists today write v for consonantal u. This would have puzzled a
Roman, who considered U and V to be the same letter.
After classical times, Latin v came to be pronounced like English v, losing its phonetic resem-
blance to u.
Latin dictionaries and textbooks often write consonantal i as j, but editions of the classics usually
do not. Thus you will find Julius in the dictionary but Iulius in a classical text.
The letter w did not exist in Latin. In northern Europe, beginning in the Middle Ages, scribes
sometimes wrote w or vv to represent the sound of English w in non-Latin names.
5 About the alphabet
In classical Latin, the vowels i and u can be pronounced non-syllabically as consonants. For
example, uia was not "oo-ee-ah" but rather "wee-ah" and is nowadays written via.
Except for a few purists, all Latinists today write v for consonantal u. This would have puzzled a
Roman, who considered U and V to be the same letter.
After classical times, Latin v came to be pronounced like English v, losing its phonetic resem-
blance to u.
Latin dictionaries and textbooks often write consonantal i as j, but editions of the classics usually
do not. Thus you will find Julius in the dictionary but Iulius in a classical text.
The letter w did not exist in Latin. In northern Europe, beginning in the Middle Ages, scribes
sometimes wrote w or vv to represent the sound of English w in non-Latin names.

[klaus]

From Alan Bowman and David Thomas, Vindolanda: the Latin writing tablets London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1983, pp. 19-24
It is well known that the Romans punctuated their writing under the early Empire by the use of a medial point between words (interpunct); it is also well known that they came to abandon this practice.38 In inscriptions it is still found in use, though rarely, into the third century, but in Latin papyri it ceased to be used early in the second century.39 In first-century papyri, both literary and documentary, it is often found, sometimes used regularly but more often only used here and there.

With respect to the Vindolanda tablets it must be stressed that a great many apparent dots occur on the photographs many of which are certainly not ink. In other cases we cannot be sure which are and which are not ink (and recourse to the originals does not always help). In consequence we are often unsure whether or not an apparent dot after a word is to be treated as interpunct or not. That said, the impression we gain from our tablets is that they fit very well into the known picture. Only a minority of writers use interpunct, and there may well be none at all in the military documents;40 possible exceptions are 135.1 (but this may have a different purpose(Vol. II, Ch. 4) and 160.41 It is rare to find interpunct used consistently; more commonly it occurs only here and there within a text. This confirms the received opinion that interpunct was on the way to dying out altogether by c. AD 100.42 Interpunct occurs in the following texts:43 120, 164, 175, 196, 208, 211, 216, 238, 242, 266, 297, 311, 315, 323, 326, 330, 339, 345 and 351. Of these, however, only 164, 175, 196, 238, 266, 297, 323, 330 and 345 use interpunct frequently. In addition there are some ten or eleven texts in which interpuncts may or may not occur.

The other way to indicate word division is by leaving spaces between words. This is not a normal feature of Latin papyri and it is perhaps surprising that it does occur here and there in the tablets. Good examples are 152, 225, 311, 314, 322 and 335. In medieval manuscripts, after word division became the norm, it was usual to leave no space between a monosyllable and the word following. This practice does not seem to be observed in our tablets, not even when the monosyllable is a preposition.

A further feature which needs mentioning is the occurrence of a diagonal mark, exactly like an apex mark (see the following section), after salutem. If this occurred only once we should simply dismiss it as having no significance. But the fact that it probably occurs no less than four times must give us pause: see 234, 243, 248 and (the clearest example) 265. In the position where it occurs it cannot be intended as an apex over a vowel and should perhaps be understood as marking the end of a section of a letter (in fact the opening section).44 In this connection we should also draw attention to the medial point after the date in 135.1; this seems unlikely to be interpunct (it is not normal at line ends and is not used elsewhere in the text) and may be intended to mark off the date from the text following. There may well be a similar indication of the end of a section of a text in 146.1, see the note ad loc.45

The use of apices in Latin inscriptions and papyri has been the subject of two recent articles by Kramer and Flobert.50 Kramer discusses the shape the apex mark takes (in papyri it is always straight and looks much like an acute accent), the period of time over which apices are attested (from the 1st century BC to the 2nd century AD in inscriptions, but as late as the third century in papyri), and the reasons for their use: he seems to believe that the use of apices depended more or less on the whim of the individual writer (his word is "fakultativ").51

Kramer, however, does not go into details, in contrast to Flobert, who gives a statistical analysis of a selection of inscriptions, indicating the nature of the syllable on which the apex is placed (open/closed, stressed/unstressed) and its position in the word (initial/medial/final).52

Of the 75 examples of apices in the Vindolanda texts 61 are on vowels in final syllables or on monosyllables, about 80%. Flobert too, in the material he examined, noted a significant proportion of examples on final vowels (up to 49%), but not such a striking proportion as in the Vindolanda material.53 Of the 14 falsely placed apices (i.e. those on short vowels), 9 are on vowels in final syllables, about 65%, a somewhat smaller proportion than in the case of the correctly placed apices. The figures suggest almost a mechanical habit of placing apices (if they were used at all) on final vowels, regardless of whether those vowels were long or short. But apices are not placed willy-nilly on final vowels. It is striking that certain words or word-forms repeatedly have an apex on their final vowel, a fact which further demonstrates the importance of conventions of writing which one can no longer understand: suó 6 times (cf. tuó once, meó once), first-person singular present verb-forms (rogó, exoró, cupió, putó, scribó, rogó), dative and ablative forms of second-declension nouns (Brocchó, Verecundó, Cassió, Flauió, Vettió, Seueró, uiaticó (?)). A high proportion of apices on short vowels are on a final a (8 out of 14). 32 of the 61 correctly placed apices are over final o, and another 12 are over final a. a and o have a similar capacity, it seems, to attract an apex, particularly if they are in final position. It is not simply the length of the vowel which is influential. The letter (regardless of the length of the phoneme which it represents) and its position in the word have to be taken into account.

As for apices which are not on final vowels, we find that in most cases the apex is on the vowel which bears the stress accent. Long vowels: compendiárium, Fláuio, Octóbres, Fláuius, numerátioni, fráter (twice), nómina; 7 examples, i.e. all but one of the apices on long vowels which are not on final syllables. Short vowels: rógo, Córis (?). Flobert too has noted a marked tendency for the apex to be used on stressed vowels. There is evidence that short vowels under the accent tended to be lengthened,54 and that tendency may help to explain a form such as rógo. Does sácrifició offer evidence that there was a secondary stress on the a?

It is also worth noting that it is particularly common to find final o marked with an apex when it is being used in the address in the prescript of a letter or in an address on the back of a letter. This is only what we would expect. The use of an apex in this position continues in papyrus letters into the third century, well after the use of the apex elsewhere had been abandoned.55 As has been indicated, Flobert's analysis naturally takes account of the use of apices over short vowels in inscriptions.56 We know of no such analysis for Latin papyri,57 but have noted two probable examples of its occurrence, both in letters: P.Köln III 160.758 and P.Qasr Ibrîm 30.59 This is clearly a subject which will repay further study and one for which the evidence of the tablets will be of great value.60

P.Flobert (1990), "Le témoignage épigraphique des apices et des I longae sur les quantités vocaliques en latin impérial", in G.Calboli (ed. 1990), 101-10
J.Kramer (1991) "Die Verwendung des Apex und P.Vindob. L 1 c", ZPE 88: 141-50.

[klaus]

John C. Rolfe.
University of Pennsylvania.Use of Devices for Indicating Vowel Length in Latin
...These statements are clear and definite. The second one made by Scaurus is confirmed by the inscriptions; for although there are twenty-two instances of an apex over i in the twelfth volume of the CIL alone, that use is relatively very rare. An apex occasionally appears even over a tall I, as in XII.890 and 3065 add. The other statement, in which Quintilian and Scaurus agree, points to a logical and helpful use of the apex, but unfortunately the statement is not confirmed by the inscriptions. The apex is used in many instances where it does not serve to distinguish words or case-endings of the same spelling except for the quantity of the vowels, and frequently such words or case-ending are left unmarked. This fact, however, does not prevent us from accepting Quintilian's principle as one of those which regulate the use of the apex; for it will be seen that no principle of the kind is observed with uniformity. In fact, one is almost tempted to think at times that uniformity was deliberately avoided.
Of many thousand inscriptions which I have examined I have found only two in which all the long vowels are marked. As both these inscriptions are short,
probably no great significance is to be attached to their consistency, but they are interesting as rare specimens.
It would seem that the best results would be obtained by examining some of the longer official inscriptions of the best period, and we may begin with the Monumentum Ancyranum, the great inscription in which the Emperor Augustus recorded the events of his reign.18  The inscription proper contains approximately 1,884 words and 1,399 long vowel-quantities. Of the latter 487, or about 34 per cent, are indicated by apices or by the tall I. The marks are for the most part limited to one on each word, but forty words have two marks and two have three marks each.19 Although, of course, the apex did not designate the accent, it naturally occurs frequently on accented syllables, since an accented penult often contains a long vowel, which is sometimes the only long vowel of the word. Quintilian's rule is observed in seventy-eight cases, while in forty instances marks are omitted which would differentiate words or forms. These figures, however, are the result of giving the rule the most liberal interpretation possible, including, for example, all cases of īs and not merely those from words which also have forms in ‑ĭs, and adverbs like antea as well as ablatives in ‑a. If we confine the count to forms which could actually be mistaken for others, we have thirty-nine marked vowels and twenty-three unmarked.
In general, the marking of the long vowels seems to be to a certain extent a habit, which once begun is carried on for a time, dropped and resumed, a view which receives confirmation from the usage in other inscriptions.
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, LXI (1922), pp87 ff.

[klaus]

Предлагаю переименовать латынь в древнеитальянский, чтобы больше не возникало таких вопросов...

Гораздо интереснее как они произносили Q и С.
Поскольку в новоромансих оно дало все что угодно от /ch/ до /k/,  то и Q произносилось каким-то особым образом. И это не /kv/
Мне кажется, что изначально это было что-то более полугласное типа /hw/, где h могло быть сильно палатизировано, отсюда итальянское /сh/, но произносилось легко, поэтому в руманском и сардинском исчезло оставив /w/ > /p/, /b/

Q has the sound of English Q in the words _quire_, _quick_. Priscian
says:

[Keil. v. II. p. 12.] K enim et Q, quamvis figura et nomine videantur
aliquam habere differentiam, cum C tamen eandem, tam in sono vocum, quam
in metro, potestatem continent.

And again:

[id. ib. p. 36.] De Q quoque sufficienter supra tractatum est, quae
nisi eandem vim haberet quam C.

Marius Victorinus says:

[Keil. v. VI. p. 5.] Item superfluas quasdam videntur retinere, X et K
et Q... Pro K et Q, C littera facillime haberetur; X autem per C et S.

And again:

[Id. ib. p. 32.] K et Q supervacue numero litterarum inseri doctorum
plerique contendunt, scilicet quod C littera harum officium possit
implere.

The grammarians tell us that K and Q are always found at the beginning
of a syllable:

[Prisc. Keil. v. III. p. 111.] Q et K semper initio syllabarum
ponuntur.

They say also that the use of Q was more free among the earlier Romans,
who placed it as initial wherever U followed, --as they placed K
wherever A* followed,--but that in the later, established, usage, its
presence was conditioned upon a vowel after the U in the same syllable:

[Donat. Keil. v. IV. p. 442.] Namque illi Q praeponebant quotiens U
sequebatur, ut _quum_; nos vero non possumus Q praeponere nisi ut U
sequatur et post ipsam alia vocalis, ut _quoniam_.

Diomedes says:

[Keil. v. I. p. 425.] Q consonans muta, ex C et U litteris composita,
supervacua, qua utimur quando U et altera vocalis in una syllaba
junguntur, ut _Quirinus_.