Salvete! You probably get questions like this frequently but here it goes. This question relates slightly to D’Ooge but I decided not to put it in that forum since it is not specific to it. I have searched the forum for past posts on pronunciation and links to other sites etc. I am sort of torn between two classical pronunciations, those being the pronunciations described in D’Ooges book on learning Latin and the pronunciations that Adler and the Latinum pod casts use. It seems to me that the D’Ooge’s pronunciations are a little more rigid and invariable such as always pronouncing C hard as in K rather than the S which in Adler depends on the letters following the C. I also gather from this that it is easier to learn and implement than Adler, is that right? As for Adler I think the sound is better personally but am I right in saying it is a fair bit harder to implement and to know how to implement different pronunciations and when e.g. the soft and hard C. What pronunciations do you generally follow? Is there a ‘better’ pronunciation or a more widely accepted form? What other Classical pronunciations are there that are in use or accepted? I would love to hear your views on this, Thanks.
Salve, Iozzic. Notice that the author of the Latinum podcasts you mentioned doesn’t actually use the “s” sound for “c” before “i” or “e”. He says classically “Cicero”= “Kikero”). Instead, he uses a “k” sound, which is more generally accepted as restored classical pronunciation.
Adler (mid-19th century) recommends the “s” sound for “c” (before “e” and “i”) because that conforms generally with English language pronunciation. That’s what English and French speakers of Latin were using from the early-modern period (and before) to the 20th Century.
Note that the modern Italian model (often called ecclesiastical) is different again for the “c” sound (= “ch” in English “cheese” before “e” and “i”) and distinctions in vowel lengths are lost altogether, plus “ae” and “oe” = English “ay”, and therefore easiest to acquire, perhaps.
I really admire the accent used by the Finnish radio presenters of Nuntii Latini. Their model (in my opinion) is a general European restored classical model of the late-15th to early-16th century, but which carries on the late-Latin practice of pronouncing Latin diphthongs “ae” and “oe” as “ay” (in English “hay”). Some call it the Erasmian pronunciation. Nuntii Latini presenters tend to pronounce the “u” in “qu” in Latin as an English “v” rather than as “w”, but otherwise their pronunciation is, I think, to be emulated, most especially because their respect for vowel and syllable lengths and double consonants is marvellous. This is the accent that most liberal reforming latinists (such as Erasmus) aspired to after the 15th century (with a bit of an Italian “swing”, especially for the long “i” sound – early-modern English travellers felt particularly out of step with the rest of Europe when it came to a long “i” in Latin), but every nationality seems to have had its preferred distinctions.
I shouldn’t say there’s a “better” pronunciation in absolute terms because it’s all a matter of convention (taste, even) which always has, and always will, vary with time, place and social group. I think you need to be conversant with the strict classical model (not Adler’s) for classical literature (such as “c” = “k”, “ae” = English “eye”, “oe” = English “oi” in “coil” ) AND the Nuntii Latini model for the literature of most other periods, + sounding double consonants as double (not as single) consonants and trying to be faithful to vowel lengths in all accents. And then being able to switch and use “s” for “c” if you want to be emulate also the later English model. The most important thing, of course, is being able to understand and be understood, and that means accommodating or mimicing several models.
So the Latinum lessons never pronounce C soft as S, it is always hard as in K? I personally like the sound of the Latinum lessons pronunciation, I suppose it is also an advantage being able to listen to it regularly. I may try to get used to this one first and then explore other pronunciations in more detail.
Out of interest Adrianus, where you say:
sounding double consonants as double (not as single) consonants
Does that mean the Latin word occidit for example would be pronounced Ok-kidit with a noticeable double k-k sound with a small gap? Would the word laetissimus be pronounced laetis-simus with a very very short but noticeable gap in between repetitions?
So the Latinum lessons never pronounce C soft as S, it is always hard as in K.
I haven’t listened to all his podcasts, Lozzic, but I do notice that, in the podcast on classical accent, he points out “Kicero” and not “Sisero”. And you do pronounce those words as Ok-kidit and laetis-simus. You can manage laetis-simus as a longer hiss sound (and “rr” as a longer trilled “r” sound, not that it appears here but I forgot about mentioning the trilled “r” sound) but you can’t really draw out a “k” sound and so you do hear people actually leaving a tiny space, but I think it sounds discernably a double consonant if you link the “o” with the first part of the “k” sound and link the second part of the “k” sound with the following vowel or diphthong. Same goes for a “gg” or “pp”. But, as with “ss”, you can just humm or sing your “ll” or “mm” and “nn” without any tiny gap but holding on to the vowels either side. And so on. Talk to an Italian. Life is too short to insist on uniformity of accent and, if you try to, you will always be frustrated by others while driving them nuts by your insistence that you’re right and everyone else is wrong. Listening and making allowances is a great skill.
Yes, Iozzic, the author of the Latinum Adler podcasts definitely uses a hard “c” (k) before “e” or “i”. The first instance I come across is Lesson 4 “Have you my leathern shoe?” “Num calceum meum scorteum habes?”, when he says “calceum” = “kalkeum”. He does not say “kalseum” as Adler himself would have said and advised in his Lesson 1, “Of the consonants”, – just as we pronounce “calcium” (the element) in English.
By the way, when I say about pronouncing the double consonants “cc” or “kk”, “tt”, or “pp”, “gg”, “dd”, “bb” by thinking of the sound as having two parts --the start and finish of the letter–and tying each part to its neighbouring vowel, you will be giving twice the time to the letter sound. You’re not actually attempting to enunciate two of these letters with a space between – that can sound odd. I think it’s more like a very deliberate single letter, sounded for twice the time. At the beginning of a word, the sound of these single consonants starts from a closed position, but these double consonant sounds seem to close and then open when embedded in a word (that’s what I mean about having two parts), so it can sound like a tiny pause in the middle when you reach the closed position, which is enough to sense the double consonant spelling when coupled with the double time. The “ss”, “ll”, “mm”, “nn”, “ff”, “rr” sounds express sound throughout and you can just hold them for twice the time, and again it just sounds like a very deliberate letter hummed for a double length. I may be explaining it worse now. Oh well!
From the Renaissance onward, people have been trying to standardize the pronunciation of Latin. The problem is, these systems are always affected (contaminated?) by the speaker’s normal language. English academic pronunciations provide some of the wildest and wooliest distortions, but even French and Italian speakers allow their everyday speech patterns to affect the phonological rules they apply to Latin.
As far as the historical development of the language goes, from the Vulgar Latin of the late Empire into various Romance dialects that would become Italian, French, Spanish, etc., my hard and fast rule is: if the "c"s are not pronounced as a hard “k,” it ain’t Latin!
I remember reading somewhere that geminate (doubled) consonants were an Italian feature, that the only purpose of the doubled consonants in Latin was to show the proper syllable length and accent, but i could be wrong about that.
Pretty harsh, Arvid. So much spoken Latin may be gone with the wind but you are condemning many centuries of practice across Europe, and not just Church Latin, that has seeded so much in Romance and other European language pronunciation because the influence went both ways.
Definitely you’re right about the care in speaking geminate consonants in spoken Latin in Italy, but I remember the general point (the importance of distinguishing double consonants) being stressed by early grammarians (I’m too lazy to search for references), and being re-emphasied by Erasmus and other reformers across Europe. You mention the double consonants converting into a single one and the substitution of a lengthened preceding vowel to preserve the syllable lengths (and vice-versa) but the distinctions in pronunciation were significant, otherwise one couldn’t tell one’s annus from one’s ãnus.
In my defense, I wasn’t talking about Church Latin, or the way Medieval and Renaissance and Modern scholars pronounce the no-longer-in-everyday-use language we call Latin. I was talking about general populations throughout the 5th, 6th, 7th Centuries and so on, using their everyday spoken languages. I think once they started palatalizing or sibilantizing the "c"s before front vowels, it’s no longer legitimate to call their language “Latin;” at a minimum, you have to call it “Romance,” if it’s not yet full-blown Italian, Spanish, etc. Notice that the most conservative Romance language, Sardinian, retains the hard “k” in all positions (and now that it’s a written language, occasionally anyway, spells it that way as well.)
As far as the geminate consonants, I just remember reading in some Latin text (I can’t remember which one) that this was a feature of Modern Italian that didn’t exist in (Classical) Latin, but he could have been talking through his annus.
I was talking about general populations throughout the 5th, 6th, 7th Centuries and so on, using their everyday spoken languages. I think once they started palatalizing or sibilantizing the "c"s before front vowels, it’s no longer legitimate to call their language “Latin;” at a minimum, you have to call it “Romance,” if it’s not yet full-blown Italian, Spanish, etc.
What about regional variations of English that pronounce their consonants and vowels unlike the standard pronunciation? They’re the same language. Aren’t grammatical changes the greater issue?
Language names have to cover a certain stretch of time. If there weren’t some cutoff where we stop referring to a language as “Latin,” then they’d still be speaking Latin in France, Italy, Spain, Romania, etc. But why call it Latin? They’d still be speaking Proto-Italic, or Proto-Indo-European. (Or maybe Proto-Nostratic or Proto-World?) Every generation speaks the same language as their parents, but in order for these labels to be of any use they have to denote a certain speech community over a certain period of time. Admittedly, some language designations can be vague and arbitrary, but Latin is easier than most. It was the language of one city, therefore pretty homogeneous, that spread around the whole Mediterranean world very rapidly, and then diversified with almost unequalled suddenness after the breakup of the Roman Empire.
The Hard “k” pronunciation is just one of the standard changes that people use to document the transition, but it’s a big one. As far as grammar goes, the replacement of inflectional mechanisms with syntactical ones had probably been underway long before, but almost all of our documentation is in a somewhat artificial prestige dialect that undoubtedly preserved a lot of archaic features. (That’s the “Latin” that we’re all trying to learn!)
I know what you’re saying about accent change, Arvid, but you’re assuming those populations far from Rome, who spoke Latin before the Romance languages developed, actually used a hard “c” and then lost it. I think that’s an unlikely hypothesis. They spoke quite happily before Latin came along, and it is more likely that they spoke Latin under the influence of their existing linguistic habits and accents. I come from Ireland and people who have only English as a first language still speak with an Irish accent that is shaped by language habits developed long before English was imposed on and adopted by the native population. The same will be true of Latin imposed on, or adopted by, other populations.
Those people (I’m not sure who they are, mind you) who use hard “c” pronunciation to document transition from Latin to Romance are wrong, I think, if this is taken to mean more than a performance indicator regarding power relations and is taken as a causal factor. Historically, the dominant culture perpetuates itself in the documentary and artifactual evidence, while simultaneously seeking to eradicate the culture and language of a dominated group. The evidence always tends to favour the conqueror, not surprisingly. The documentary evidence, in being biased towards the dominant group, just reflects the rise and wane of the power of Rome. What later becomes evident in accent was always there, I think, but without the channels to leave sufficient evidence. It’s not always a conspiracy, of course, because we’re dealing sometimes also with subordinate groups of lesser literacy (which is not to disparage those cultures).
Adrianus, you and I don’t disagree at all on how language develops and changes, our only disagreement is terminological. There has to be some point at which the language a given population speaks is no longer “Latin.” Otherwise they’d still be speaking Latin.
By the time of the Oaths of Strasbourg (about 800) we get our first real sample of the popular language (“Romance,” linguists call it) of at least a part of what is now France, and scholars have agreed to call that “Old French.” In other words, it’s no longer Latin. You’re right: it’s widely believed that the Celtic substrate explains many of the…peculiarities (to say no more) of the French language.
The language that the first Roman administrators and soldiers brought with them undoubtedly was Latin, maybe not Ciceronian, but Latin. By the time the majority of the population of Gaul were using some version of this language in their everyday lives, I don’t know if a linguist would ever have called what they spoke “Latin” instead of “Gallo-Latin” or “Gallo-Romance.” The only thing I know is, if we agree to call the modern language “French” and the language of Caesar’s legions “Latin,” the transition had to have taken place sometime. There are various shibboleths you could use, but the evidence of loan words in German, for example, seems to indicate that the hard “k” was universal in the 4th or 5th centuries, and the meager evidence we have can only show that by the 9th, it wasn’t.
Remember Sardinian, though. Since it still has “k” in every environment, by my criterion, is it still Latin? Of course not. There are many other changes that are relevant to that distinction. But I think we can say that they were speaking “Latin” later in Sardinia than in France.
Please, Arvid, can you recommend a good source that discusses the evidence? I’d be interested. Thanks. I do find the Latin to Romance transition very difficult to get my head around.
A: Adrianus–I thought I was going to get downtown to the main library today, but now it looks like tomorrow at best. I’m working on it, though; the card catalog in my head is unfortunately on the fritz again! And…
2: I wanted to see what happened when my postings went to 100!
I can see that pronunciation and the evolution of language is a very animated and still rather complicated topic The information in these posts is very informative.
On Google Books. An Introduction to Vulgar Latin by Charles Hall Gradgent from 1907. I have no idea if it’ll support me or not, but I figure it’s worth looking at; you can’t beat the price!
(I was away for a few days.) Salvete, omnes. I followed your recommendation to get Herman’s Vulgar Latin several months ago, Cantator, and I’m glad I did because it’s a very good book. If is brief, though. This is what it says on [k] becoming a sibilant before [e] and : “Comparing the Romance developments leads us to believe, despite a shortage of clear textual or epigraphical evidence, that this assibilation process had also begun before the end of the Empire.” That’s all (and a bit on [k] before [j] + [e] or becoming [tj] in some quarters, as with nacione and natione).
It’s not that I’m imagining asibilation did not take place in a broad sense, but it’s just interesting to imagine how this could happen in particular contexts, where it’s possible a group just has a lot of difficulty with a [k] + [e] or sound, and finds a [s] + [e] or sound easier or more ‘natural’ for them to say. In the course of time, then, it’s possible assibiliation just becomes “respectabilized” and the documentary evidence for it appears. I don’t know that this was the case, but I’m wondering could it have been so.
Grandgent’s An Introduction to Vulgar Latin (1907) is one of those books that cannot be downloaded outside the US, due to Google’s blanket position on copyright. It’s not a bad thing but it’s inconvenient, and Google may or may not eventually get round to letting others download the work. Google will automatically let servers within the US download books published before 1923 because they are certainly out of copyright. For servers outside the US, it won’t make that assumption. I’m outside the US, so if I want the out-of-copyright Grandgent, I must fool Google Books into thinking I’m within the US by using a proxy server ( http://mozmonkey.com/switchproxy/ ). A nuisance, but there you go. To echo Cantator, thanks, Arvid, for the pointer to Grandgent.
The information in these posts is very informative.