As this is my first post here, an introduction: I learned some Latin in high school Way Back When, and am now beginning to study it again to start teaching it to my homeschooled sons next year. (We’ll be going slowly at first, so I’m sure to stay waaay ahead of them! This first year will be as much for English grammar and word roots as for the Latin language per se, anyway.)
I would very much like to get a fluid, useful pronunciation into their ear from the first, though; which means that first it must get into my ear! We were a tad sloppy in high school, I’m afraid: we basically used a passable “classical” pronunciation, but the vowels all tended to be long in practice. I believe this to be a problem for two reasons: (1) it is harder to learn the proper lengths of the vowels if one doesn’t hear it in ones head, e.g., 1st Declension sing. nominative -a vs. sing ablative -a; (2) scanning classical poetry will be difficult, I presume–I never really got that far, myself! And, having learned languages since then, I like to hear the language flow and not just dissect it on the page. Yes, I know Latin’s supposed to be dead and all that, but I’m optimistic!
There’s more than one pronunciation still being taught, I’ve found: Henle’s school grammar describes three different systems. Some homeschool texts actually prefer the Church pronunciation (or, rather, “one of the Church pronunciations”: generally not distinguishing vowel lengths). It’s close to Italian (which may be useful someday: I’m trying to learn some Italian to help me sing arias), and may flow better, but I’m wary of anything that doesn’t preserve the lengths of the vowels. Am I being paranoid about that?
Anyway, I wondered if there exists good sound samples / CD’s / whatever demonstrating classical Latin pronunciation. I have a couple of CD’s that came with Teach Yourself Beginner’s Latin, but I suspect the pronunciations may occasionally be more dramatic than precise (but I could be wrong).
Any advice is appreciated!
