Great! At least you can train the vowel lengths/stresses this way maybe somewhat more easily...A.A.I wrote:Godmy, I've seen your thread and I have all of the books in the series (that I'm aware of). My learning of Latin only started recently but the desire to do so, and collection of resources in perparation for it, have not.
Well, any attempt to sound more as a "Roman from the street" will inevitably deviate from what we know and we imagine to know... I don't say there are not certain things one can do in his pronunciation to sound even more "Latin" and which I do not do (I know), but there is also something you can call a "safe border line". Anyway, I will see how I will progress with these recordings into the future.Your pronunciation seems very polished to me, however, as you're likely aware of yourself, it still has that pedagogical feel.
I may be trying partially to encompass both... but let's discuss the particular things in details (well, as you do yourself in the rest of your post )That's probably what you're going for but I've progressed to a stage where the overal phonology and not the individual phonetics are the issue (apart from some work needed on long consonants ).
Indeed, but we can do a great deal just knowing with a kind of certainty (which we have) the few facts about prosody we know: that the stress (or the one we most agree on) should be dynamic (= so we may look at Italian/Spanish for some inspiration...well in Italian one has to be aware of the stress lengthening that is absent in Latin, true), that we know where the main word stress is (though we do know how strong can an initial stress be in the short words (e.g.) , and that we know with some kind of certainty the vowel phonemes... <- all these things make a big portion of what you call 'a native accent', but of course we still know only the basic outlines (for some fictious Roman educated speaker) and do not know well all the potential allophones or diphones... or are very uncertain about.Elison, stress patterns, prosody, etc: It's difficult stuff because we have fewer ways for reconstructing that side of things.
About the elisions, nasalizations: I'm still considering it, but ... maybe a two types of recordings would be good to have. One with nearly none nasalization (and fully pronounced "m/n"s) and "kw" and one recording with an attempt to nasalize where it is possible and labialize my 'q' velars... elide what I can elide. Etc.
Anyway what I perform is an example of an "emphatic" speech. I think that lot of those things you observe in Plautus/Terence and in poetry wouldn't be heard in emphatic or careful speech (also probably the speeches in senate) and it wouldn't be **that** much different than what we imitate.
Just working out the individual phonemes must have been a huge task, even with the information we have.
Indeed. If you look, you see that I've been content so far with the vowel inventory of my mother tongue (not because I would think it is better, but because the individual long and short vowel phonemes in my language differ really only in subtle details). But you are right of course... (and I will see what I'm about to do in the future)
Still, it has to come together in some form, in my own head. It's also about not simply allowing English phonetics and orthographic conventions (and my own diaglossic relationship with them) to heavily influence my own Latin.
Indeed. Try to read aloud a lot, it compensates partially for a listening you would have in a real living language (I can say from my own experience)... and well, these recordings can be ultimately also of some help At least I think that I'm quite more strict in certain points than H. Oerberg in his original recordings (Like: I don't pronounce 'imperium' with stressed long vowel... the vowel must stay short in all circumstances.. and he's a bit 'lax' about this, breaking the rule )
I also don't bother with the 'qu' as a labiovelar stop. Although Vox Latina describes it, it doesn't seem to recommend it.
I may disagree: it seems from V.L. that there is 'almost' no controversy and quite an agreement between the scholars that it should be a labiovelar stop and also all the phonetic transcriptions (on Wiktionary let's say) write it like that. What bothers me however that next to these transcriptions there is always a a kind of audio recording where the speaker always pronounces a sequence of two sounds, like ignoring it. In fact, all the Latin world I know seems to ignore it in the pronunciation.... so I do it too, and it is weird.
But it is true that it is hard to say how would such "k" sound, whether the following vowel would be also affected by the velarization (=rounding) or not... It's just: controversial and right now I don't think I would imitate it sufficiently well.
Also, I don't bother with the different types of L. On the other hand, I do include the final nasal and like to assimilate and elide where I have seen evidence that it occured. I'm still learning more about these processes.
I forgot to mention "L"'s. You are right that one should be more strict about it. I think I'm not (and I should write it therefore to my descriptions), but I also don't think that I always pronounce a clear "L" and that I have some allophones of my own which **might** even be close to what they recommend. But thank you for telling me that I should note this in the description.
You can at least listen to proper long vowels in it (And I do them natively)... of course with the tiny deviation in my vowel inventory, but compare it yourself that it is tiny