I’ve just started learning Latin and have found NT audio files on the net – but I’m confused about the pronunciation used. The little I have read tells me that “V” is W, “C” is always K, etc., yet the MP3 file reader appears to be making a “V” sound like V and “C” is often soft as in English “celery”, or “ceiling”. Vas gibes? [www.greeklatinaudio.com]
I hadn’t seen this site before, but he talks about the pronunciation in the “Additional Information” section. He doesn’t explain his Latin pronunciation, except for listing a hard “c” and a soft “c”, and “v: as in victor”, “w: if you find one, wing it”.
I don’t know anything about Latin, but for the Greek reading he uses a Modern Greek pronunciation, so I wouldn’t be surprised if his Latin was questionable as well.
I didn’t listen to it but from your description I’m guessing he’s using the ecclesiastical pronunciation. It’s what you’d hear in churches today and in past centuries.
Basically, in Ecc. pronunciation, Latin is pronounced following Italian orthography, as well as neutralizing many of the diphthongs, and most times, ignoring vowel quality.
However, in the “Additional Information” page, there is the following:
PRONUNCIATION CONVENTION USED IN LATIN READINGS
Based upon current American-hemisphere Spanish phonetic values
defined as follows …
With this, they use a pronunciation model which I had never encountered before for Ecc. pronunciation. I can tell you that they read Latin with an American-Spanish pronunciation:
c as in “cigarette” (soft)
g as in German “Loch” (soft)
j as in German “Loch” (above)
In the usual Ecc. pronunciation, like I said, based on Italian, “C” before /i/ or /e/ is pronounced like CH in English “cheese”; here, they give the sound the letter would have in American Spanish in that position: [s]; they do same with “ti”, pronounced [si], instead of the expected Ecc. [tsi]. The sounds they give for G and J don’t even exist in standard Italian; they however, exist in Spanish. What I find odd, though, is that J be pronounced too like G, having a velar sound. So that you have: ejus sounding something like “ehus”, and Jesus like “hesus” (IPA [xesus], the way it’s said in Spanish); in the general Ecc. pron. I’m familiar with, this would be like English “eyus” and “yesus”.
So, they read it as if it were Spanish, though adding [v]. Once in this forum, I talked about the Nuntii Latini pronunciation being rather “Germanic”, and based on that, it seems that each country adopts a pronunciation best suited for them, using their own phonetic inventory.
Anyway, the pronunciation on that site is not one used by the Vatican people, as theirs is, again, based on Italian.
How accurate is the Greek pronounciation? I listened to the first chapter of Matthew 1, and the main things I notice are that eta is pronounced almost like an iota, the theta almost like a tau, and zeta like sigma.
As far as I can say, they are using the modern pronunciation for Greek. There are a few people however, here in textkit, of Greek heritage and they could give you the exact info.
In Modern Greek quite a large variety of vowels are simplified and tend towards ‘i/ee/’, and some of the values of the consonants are different from the reconstructed ancient pronunciations. But the tiny bit of documents I’d read says the change of pronunciation already began in the Hellenistic era, maybe due to the large ‘barbaric’ population who learned Greek as their second language.