L. Amadeus salutem dicit omnibus!
Part II of my dramatic reading of Petronius’s Cena Trimalchionis has been posted at ScorpioMartianus.com:
I look forward to more comments and critiques. Gaudeatis!
All right. I have already mentioned my admiration for your reading style, so here comes some pedantic nitpicking instead:
You sometimes aspirate a bit more than I would like, especially the letter C, and stops before R; e.g.: acchipiet plagas chentum, inthrantibus, chave chanem, didichisset, thribunal, chonditam, athriensem etc.
It might be only me, but I think you sometimes pronounce -tus with a long u, mostly so in: succinctus, vinctus, pictus, capillatus. It might be that I am fooled by vowel quality, or a general slowing down at the end of the words; I hear something similar in the word “Trimalchionis” right at the beginning, “salutabat”, “dispensator”, etc.
Other quantities:
cerasinus, sounds like cerassinus
sinistram, both i are a bit longer than I would say it.
magistro; I think the i is too long
vix, you pronounce with long i, any reason for that? I think it should be short.
idem, with short i
stupentibus, long u
I think you pronounce noster, nostrae, etc, with long o, but I believe it actually is short in that word.
Oh, and you read Trimalchio’s name as Gnaeus. Surely it is Gaius?
Finally, the text on your site has some errors:
Mineraque > Minervaque
natili > natali
<?xml version="1.0"?>
Thank you for your explanation of the aspiration; you have certainly given me something to think about. I was aware of the possible inate aspiration of Latin consonants (as indicated by Burrum), but I have generally tried to minimize it in my own pronunciation, so as to not over-do it. In your aspirations (which certainly are weaker than in English), I then heard a symptom of what I myself have had problems with. What I mean is that your reasoning was more sophisticated than I expected.
As for aspiration in words like triumphus etc., if, as you say, these spellings just “happened to catch on”, would you then describe it as misguided pedantry to keep a clear distinction between such aspirations and non-aspirated consonants, as I have hitherto tried to do?
Hm, I don’t think it’s (only) the case that I’m hearing the syllable lenghts. There are several other heavy syllables in your recording which is distinctively long, but in which I don’t hear the same lengthening of the vowel.
sinistram, both i are a bit longer than I would say it.
I’m not sure what you are hearing here. The quality is necessarily IPA > in every case of the Latin vowel ‘i’, never IPA > , as Wheelock falsely teaches. […] It must be the proper > quality that’s throwing you off.
Quite possibly I’m affected by the quality, but I don’t think it’s the only reason. To illustrate, I made a (very broad, i.e. orthographic) transcription of a short passage: http://web.comhem.se/alatius/latin/adsinistram.png\
The first i in sinistram is short, I grant that, but what happens in the heavy syllable -is- is that the i is rather longish, while the s is very short compared to other s:s, and I suspect that it was mainly that which I reacted to. Keeping the time allocated to -is- constant, I would have expected an s that would be possibly nearly twice as long, and thus the length of the i decreased by the same amount. And at the end, if we look at the -us, we see exactly was I was talking about above: the u is in fact longer than the o of the following non, which strikes me as peculiar, and begs the question how you would differently pronounce an actual -Å«s in the same position.
As for the vowel quality, note that I don’t object to using a closed pronunciation for short i, but I wonder if the matter of versus [ɪ] is not more controversial than you make it sound like. Wheelock aside, authorities like Allen also favour a quality distinction between long and short i, in that the short i would have been more open (not necessarily exactly as much or as centered as the English [ɪ] of course.) If you have any references arguing against this, you may want to contribute to this Wikipedia article (see also the corresponding Talk page, where the issue of Latin vowel quantities has been discussed rather extensively.)
You actually missed most of my actual mistakes! I’ll admitt to one of them: “peccatum” I read as “pecatum.” Whoops!
Haha, well then, another one is “spissisissima”, which you clearly said as “spisisissima”. But general trends are more interesting to discuss than individual mistakes.
Not misguided at all! I commend perfectionism. My approach is stylistic and, I thought, appropriate to the text I chose to read. I may not employ it again, or it might become a part of my vernacular. Aiming for perfectionism first (as I have done in the past) is essential to mastering a variety of pronunciations.
Hm, I don’t think it’s (only) the case that I’m hearing the syllable lenghts. There are several other heavy syllables in your recording which is distinctively long, but in which I don’t hear the same lengthening of the vowel.
sinistram, both i are a bit longer than I would say it.
I’m not sure what you are hearing here. The quality is necessarily IPA > in every case of the Latin vowel ‘i’, never IPA > , as Wheelock falsely teaches. […] It must be the proper > quality that’s throwing you off.
Quite possibly I’m affected by the quality, but I don’t think it’s the only reason. To illustrate, I made a (very broad, i.e. orthographic) transcription of a short passage: > http://web.comhem.se/alatius/latin/adsinistram.png\
The first > i > in > sinistram > is short, I grant that, but what happens in the heavy syllable > -is- > is that the > i > is rather longish, while the > s > is very short compared to other > s> :s, and I suspect that it was mainly that which I reacted to. Keeping the time allocated to > -is- > constant, I would have expected an > s > that would be possibly nearly twice as long, and thus the length of the > i > decreased by the same amount. And at the end, if we look at the > -us> , we see exactly was I was talking about above: the > u > is in fact longer than the > o > of the following > non> , which strikes me as peculiar, and begs the question how you would differently pronounce an actual > -Å«s > in the same position.
Wow! what an impressive exposition in that cool diagramme. I can only take your word on the precision of your lettering of the phonemes, but I do hear some of what you mean. It will then be appropriately called compensatory lengthening, where the vowel grows longer within the long syllable, even though the vowel’s inherent quantity is short.
Also, there is a line that may be crossed where scientific anatomy of the sound at this level loses meaning because the mathematical quantities observed no longer represent what human minds are aware of on a casual basis. Syllable lengths are always relative, and while precision is paramount, absolute precision is not a natural thing. Flexibility after ridigity has been practiced!
I went through another time to listen, look at your graph, and consider. That part of the piece is especially challenging to pick on, because I am rapidly changing speeds for dramatic effect, and moreover, the ‘non’ comes after a comma, and a distinct change in the tempo. I’ll say again: these are relative matters, especially in prose. In poetry, these all might be a lot more clear to us.
As for the vowel quality, note that I don’t object to using a closed pronunciation for short i, but I wonder if the matter of > versus [ɪ] is not more controversial than you make it sound like. Wheelock aside, authorities like Allen also favour a quality distinction between long and short i, in that the short i would have been more open (not necessarily exactly as much or as centered as the English [ɪ] of course.) If you have any references arguing against this, you may want to contribute to > this Wikipedia article > (see also the corresponding Talk page, where the issue of Latin vowel quantities has been discussed rather extensively.)
I’d happy to bring up this thread again. Allen, astonishingly, appears not to be able to read Latin well in the passages he cites, nor take into account other important quotations (one comes to mind: ‘A, I, U vocales similiter sonant sive longae sive breves, dum E, O differunt cum longae aut breves sint’). This sounds insulting, and it’s meant to be: he should know better to take the time to understand the passages he cites before assuming it’s just like English — utterly unique among the world’s languages in this regard. Allen, in all frankness, is wrong, and has all the philological evidence standing bluntly against him (his invocation of Italian examples is richly comical, since he clearly has no idea about the morphology of Italian from Latin). If you want to bring this up again, I suggest you start a new thread where we can get into it properly.
You actually missed most of my actual mistakes! I’ll admitt to one of them: “peccatum” I read as “pecatum.” Whoops!
Haha, well then, another one is “spissisissima”, which you clearly said as “spisisissima”. But general trends are more interesting to discuss than individual mistakes.
Mm, “mistakes” … I’d like to have you think about the way you recite English, say it in regular discourse, record it properly … where might a German, say, having learned English quite proper, find non English seeming incidents not coinciding with his general paradigm? I don’t mean to ask this rhetorical question to divert criticism from myself (for I welcome it), but instead as a philosophical question for us to consider whilst we debate some finer points that may never have occurred to even the most nitpicking of ancient grammarians.
As for “spissisissima” — being a totally made up word, I felt liberties were in order. You’ll find that theme of experimentation and rich colloquialism common in Petronius.
This is what I found in the Wiki article.
Vowels
Front Central Back
long short long short long short
High I /i?/ I /i/ V /u?/ V /u/
Mid E /e?/ E /e/ O /o?/ O /o/
Low A /a?/ A /a/
This is quite fine. Some mention is made of the opening of ‘i’ and ‘u’ as a ‘maybe’.
But there are a lot of things that need correction on that page, but most are so minor I wouldn’t bother for the fatigue that would result.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml version="1.0"?>
(Btw, you missed a [ quote ] tag in your previous message.)
Yep, it’s neat. Apart from the spectrogram funcionality, there are tools for pitch analysis, and much more. Another simmilar programme is PRAAT.
What?! Phonologists say that Swedish short ‘i’ is [ i ]? That’s ridiculous! Of course you can’t tell a difference — they’re almost exactly the same! They’re almost the same as Italian [ i ], a sound which goes both for long and short. Well! then if by Latin [ I ] we mean the same quality as Swedish [ I ], then by God it’s near a perfect match. I hope you can appreciate the difference between your own short ‘i’ and that of English! which Allen asserted was proper for Latin (and was wrong).
[I read [ i ] as [ ɪ ] in your first sentence.] Yep, I believe that phoneme is usually described as being pronounced [ ɪ ], even though the difference in those examples is very small. The quality might be more open though in less articulated speech, as well as in unstressed syllables, I guess. But, anyway, yes, indeed I hear a clear difference between it and the English [ ɪ ], which sounds almost schwa-like in comparision.
Anyway, I take it then, that you are not opposed to Allen’s arguments for a general “laxed” pronunciation of short vowels per se, only to the degree of laxness he envisions? I’d readily agree that Allen’s general method of describing the Latin sounds as far as possible (or, as it were, possibly to a larger extent than possible) is unfortunate, not to say annoying, especially for non-native readers. Granted, his expressed mission is to give pronunciation advice to English speakers, but rather than advocating i as in “pit”, a better advise in this case might have been “to strive to pronounce the short i with the same closed quality as the long counterpart: you will probably pronounce it a bit more open anyway, in a way which is in accord with the arguments I have put forth.” (I have no idea whether he would agree with that of course, but to me it seems reasonable.)
I wasn’t able to open the Wiki .ogg files, but I found other sites for my comparison:
http://www2.hhs.se/isa/swedish/chap9.htm#pronunciation
http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels/chapter14/swedish25.aiff
Going by these, where the quality of short ‘i’ is clearly > (> almost> ) I think you could go right ahead and use your own ‘i’ vowels and feel just fine. (But not the other vowels. >
> )
Great, that’s reassuring! (As for the other vowels, I guess my pronunciations of the Latin long and short /u/ are more or less calqued from the corresponding Swedish phonemes as well, so the same question goes for those. They are exemplified in the words “stol” and “ost” on the first of the sites you linked too; the reason for the use of for this sound in the Swedish orthography is due to a historic vowel shift.)
…the quality of the vowels in > my pronunciation > of the short > i > and > u> ? Would you say it is acceptable? Notably imperfect? Disturbing? An atrocity?
Lovely. Your reading is good and clear. I’m going to watch this YouTube recording now.
Delightful! Well performed. I think that’s all excellent beginning instruction, and very clearly presented. Macte!
You are flattering me. 
Thank you very much! 
The next step is to make it more natural. For the same initial demonstration, you aptly raised the pitch consistently on every stressed syllable, to show a clear distinction between length and stress, well done. Now, knowing that, you can choose where to emphasize words and where not to, more like telling a story. [Edit: I see you’ve mostly done this for your lovely recordings of the Metamorphoses. Macte! I’d like te hear more theatre and drama in your voice in future recordings.] Vojin Nedeljkovic, as I think you know, has done this brilliantly, and his recordings stand out in my mind as some of the best ever produced. His natural flow and virtually perfect pronunciation have long been my model.
Ah, yes, drama… That’s of course an art in itself, and certainly something I have to practice on, and not only in Latin. But I believe the hobby of recording Latin texts has been very good for me, not only for the pronunciation of Latin per se, but also for the fortitude and my general control of my voice. If I listen to older (not published) recordings, I think my voice was much weaker and short-breathed back then; not to say that I’m really pleased with the current quality of my voice… But on the other hand, I guess that goes for most people listening to recordings of their own voices.
Oh, and I can only agree with you that Vojin Nedeljkovic made some very good recordings. A real pity his site seems to have vanished.
As for your vowels, about which you showed concern, they are precise and very good. I think they differ from me and my models’, and also some from some of the Italian pronunciations I know, but Italian, for example, is a language with many different pronunciations, and no one speaks the “standard” proper Italian that is taught.
That might be, but if you have any online resources that illustrate what you would particularly describe as a good Italian pronunciation, I would very much be interesting in hearing it.