“Interesting” is an understatement. Looks like an illuminated medieval manuscript, complete with hebrew, gregorian chant notation, and even a poem composed in Arabic. Amazing find.
The original poster said: “I haven’t found any good audio in ecclesiastical.”
Here is a recording of the entire Vulgate Psalter: “http://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/liber-psalmorum/book-of-psalms-audio-files-in-latin.htm” The reading is not perfect, but it’s pretty good. If you have an iphone or related device “Biblium” has an app with streaming audio of the Novum Testamentum (the same recordings are probably available elsewhere too); the pronunciation is “ecclesiastical” with a definite American accent.
Librivox has a pretty large and growing collection of Latin audio, mostly with a “classical” pronunciation but in a pretty wide range of accents. Not too long ago the only substantial amount of Latin audio you could get free was Evan Millner’s; now his isn’t free but there’s a lot of other free stuff. It’s a good time for Latin listening!
As for the topic at hand, in my view a range of pronunciations is fine and even desirable. I certainly pronounce English differently when I’m reading Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Yeats; if I didn’t, as people have pointed out, I couldn’t read metrically at all.
Wow, I haven’t checked in here for a while so I didn’t realize this thread suddenly got much more active. Thanks everyone!
Nesrad, wow, that guy in the video you linked is unbelievable. I don’t know how anyone gets that good at speaking Latin. I caught on to some of it because I’ve read about the first 30 pages of Gallic War.
Scotistic, thanks a lot for that link. I’ve been looking for something like that for a long time. And just out of curiosity, how do you change your English pronunciation when you read Chaucer and Shakespeare? I mean, what accent is normal for you (I’m American) and what do you do differently when you read those authors?
I’m American too, but some of Shakespeare’s and Yeats’ words have to be pronounced differently than I normally would or else many rhymes, and sometimes the meters, won’t work. For Chaucer it’s much more drastic, since the accents are placed in different places in many words, many words have fewer (occasionally more) syllables now, and so forth. So just to scan the lines you have to pronounce them differently than you would pronounce the same words in normal conversation. And of course there are a lot of obsolete and french and frenchy words - how do you pronounce those? I find when reading Chaucer I tend to fall naturally into an “antique” pronunciation, guided largely by the phonetics of the old spelling.
Yes we do change pronunciation for older English verse in school here (the UK). It makes things so much more easier and intuitive.
Re: my Latin not being free - there are over 1,000 free Latin videos of mine on YouTube, including complete books, read in Restored Classical. I am no longer producing mp3s, only videos. If the host for my mp3s had not gone bankrupt, they would still be free.
I am currently working on the following projects:
Pexenfelder’s ‘Apparatus Eruditionis’
Fay’s ‘Carolus et Maria’
Celsus ‘De Medicina’ (Interlinear Hamiltonian text)
and various other things as the fancy takes me…I have a long list of books I want to record, and I produce new material for the YouTube channel I own almost every day.
My index for YouTube can be found at
http://latinum.org.uk
Re Ecclesiastical - Father Reginald Foster holds little hope for the survival of Latin as a spoken language in the Church - he said recently that he thinks there are fewer than 100 fluent Latin speakers left in the entire Catholic Church. There are far, far more Latin speakers who are non-catholic. Most of these speakers use a variant of restored classical pronunciation, American Scholastic, or other non ecclesiastical variant.
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Re Ecclesiastical - Father Reginald Foster holds little hope for the survival of Latin as a spoken language in the Church - he said recently that he thinks there are fewer than 100 fluent Latin speakers left in the entire Catholic Church. There are far, far more Latin speakers who are non-catholic. Most of these speakers use a variant of restored classical pronunciation, American Scholastic, or other non ecclesiastical variant.
That’s an interesting term, “american scholastic.” I’d be surprised if there were more than 100 non-Catholic fluent speakers. And some of the two groups (Catholic and non Catholic) overlap. I assume Mr. Miraglia, who uses the Ecclesiastical pronunciation, is a Catholic at least by birth, but he’s no clergyman.
Metrodorus, thanks for pointing out your youtube videos, which I have not used. Back when your recordings were in podcast form I listened to, I think, all of them; when the podcast went offline I was crestfallen. Not having backed up the files, I happily paid to get a great deal of it back by buying a number of your dvds, so I hope you didn’t take my comment as a complaint. I’ve benefited from your work far in excess of what I paid for it, and I’m very grateful for your efforts.
I do my latin listening while walking the dog or doing chores or driving alone, so mp3s are all I’ve used. Perhaps I should look into whether I can use your videos too. I’m not likely to actually sit down and watch something - I’d just read a book.