Ok, why is it so hard to find latin pronunciation in IPA? The only place I have found it is on the web, but it kind of contradicts some orthodox suggestions. In the book Vox Latina, the suggestions aren’t specific enough, especially if you’re an american that isn’t too familiar with the British Recieved Pronunciation.
Linguists are the only ones who do use IPA. The reason you’re not finding it outside of Vox Latina is because it really doesn’t exist. Vox Latina is the standard book on how to pronounce Latin, although it’s old enough that someone should make a newer standard. If you want to convert that into IPA, that’s great, but as you say takes some knowledge of British.
There is always John Traupman’s Conversational Latin, which, although written in American, isn’t very technical in pronunciation guides. A combination of the two books may get the job done–I think that’s what a lot of us have done.
Ditto with Vox Graeca. I’m not sure what else is out there to compete with it, though.
As always, with both languages, most of the stuff out there is either referring to the ecclesiastical version of the language, or the hollywood one…
1%homeless: A different source of reconstructed classical Latin pronunciation can be found in the image http://www.omniglot.com/images/writing/latin_pronunciation.gif — its view on various vowels frequently differs from that on the orbilat.com page. If you can note here some of the RP suggestions from Vox Latina, then perhaps their IPA equivalents can be provided.
mrcolj: I suspect that IPA usage by non-linguists is less frequent in the States than elsewhere. Has enough new pronunciation information been discovered over the last 25 years or so to justify the creation of an replacement for Vox Latina? (I know nothing about the state of this art, so I’m quite curious.)
I’m really not sure if it has. I’ve seen a lot of theories on pronunciation, but I really don’t know if any of them besides Vox Latina were based on any kind of linguistics… Anyone else want to comment?
