D’Ooge states in his nota bene at bottom that learning to pronounce Latin requires hearing it pronounced. I can google “Latin sound clips” just fine, but what audiovisual aids would the experienced members of this forum recommend?
Also, how important is it to learn Latin pronunciation when your chief goal is to lear to write quality Latin? (My thought is that the flexibility of word order would make Latin close to ideal for considering which arrangement of words has the best sound.)
I agree with bedwere, especially on 0) not sweating.
I often think when I read these discussions of pronunciation about how quickly positions become polarised around imaginary ideals, which carry many social assumptions. It may be too obvious to say but remember that Latin must have been pronounced with a variety of accents. Its more important to pick one you like, rather than worry about whether it is “accurate”.
“It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.” (George Bernard Shaw). But I would hope that nowadays we were a little more forgiving of each others’ accents.
Oh, I wasn’t aiming for authenticity, because I don’t know whether the way spoken Latin sounded in ancient times can be pinned down. I just wasn’t aware of the many different ways of speaking Latin that appear to be available, just on YouTube, let alone elsewhere.
It is of course true that spoken Latin had dialects (though nowhere near what Greek had [I’m not speaking of the Modern Latin dialects ]), and that we cannot indisputably reconstruct all the traits of its pronunciation, the cadence particularly being quite beyond our reach (as far as I understand at least). But I find it baffling that we shouldn’t aim for the best possible approximation, which is actually very good (cf. Sumerian, of which we have a few glimpses that mostly we’re at sea, e.g. DUMU ‘son’ [tomu] and É ‘house’, actually [hai], cf. Arabic حیکل and Hebrew). And the variety would of course be that of Rome in ca. 50 BCE, and the code not too colloquial. W. Sidney Allen delineated most of what one will need in his Vox Latina.
Vox Latina is available free of charge as a pdf. I like how it starts with a chapter on phonology and explains things instead of prescribing its own preferred approach. Thanks for the reference.
]), and that we cannot indisputably reconstruct all the traits of its pronunciation, the cadence particularly being quite beyond our reach (as far as I understand at least). But I find it baffling that we shouldn’t aim for the best possible approximation, which is actually very good (cf. Sumerian, of which we have a few glimpses that mostly we’re at sea, e.g. DUMU ‘son’ [tomu] and É ‘house’, actually [hai], cf. Arabic حیکل and Hebrew). And the variety would of course be that of Rome in ca. 50 BCE, and the code not too colloquial. W. Sidney Allen delineated most of what one will need in his Vox Latina.