vowel, vowels, syllable, short, pronounced, before, Classical, alphabet, people, classical, Vulgar, heavy, first

The Roman alphabet or Latin alphabet was adapted from an Etruscan alphabet, to represent the phonemes of the Latin language. The Etruscans, in turn, had taken their alphabet from the Greeks, who adapted it from the Phoenicians. This article deals with modern scholarship's best guess at Classical Latin pronunciation (that is, how Latin was spoken among educated people in the late Republic), and then touches upon other variants.

Letters and phonemes

In classical times, each letter of the alphabet corresponded very closely with a phoneme, in the tables below letters and (and digraphs) are paired with the phonemes they represent in IPA.

Consonants

* Each vowel letter (with the possible exception of Y) represents at least two phonemes. A can represent either short or long , E is either or , etc.

Y was used in Greek loanwords with Ypsilon ( ). Latin had no close front rounded vowel and so tended to be pronounced identically with I or U.

AE, OE, AV, EI, EV were diphthongs: AE was , OE was , AV , EI and EV . AE and OE were generally pronounced in as after the period of the Roman Republic.

Latin orthography did not distinguish between long and short vowels, nor between the vocalic and consonantal uses of I and V. This article adopts the convention used in many modern editions of classical texts (and for instance in the Oxford Latin Dictionary) of using Ii for both vowel and consonant, and V (upper case) and u (lower case) for both vowel and consonant. Other conventions used Ii and Uu for the vowels and Jj and Vv for the consonants — see below. Most modern editions use Vv for consonantal V, Uu fur vowel V, and Ii for both consonantal I and vowel I.

For the modern use of macrons (āēīōū) to mark long vowels, see below. Consonants written double were pronounced long (BB , CC etc.). For example anus (old woman) or ānus (ring, anus) vs. annus (year).

(1) appears in the beginning of the words before a vowel or in the middle of the words between two vowels; in the latter case the sound is doubled: iūs , cūius . The compound words preserve the sound of the element that begins with it: adiectīuum .

(2) Metrical features of Latin poetry would suggest that, by the Classical period, the letter M at the end of a word was pronounced weakly, devoiced, or indeed by simply nasalising the preceding vowel. For simplicity, and because this is not known for certain, M is just treated as the consonant here and in other references.

Length of vowels

Length of vowels was more significant and more clearly defined in Latin than in modern English. In Vulgar Latin, there was a difference in quality between long and short vowels (except a) in that short vowels were more open than long vowels ( vs. ), but this was less important than the differences in quantity (English also has phonemic length distinction, but quality has become more significant over time).

Distinctions of length became less important in later Latin, and have ceased to be phonemic in the modern Romance languages, where the previous long and short versions of the vowels are represented by differences in quality alone, except for a where the distinction has disappeared.

Syllables and stress

In Latin the distinction between heavy and light syllables is important as it determines where the main stress of a word falls, and is the key element in classical Latin versification. A heavy syllable (sometimes called a long syllable, but this risks confusion with long vowels) is a syllable that either contains a long vowel or a diphthong, or ends in a consonant. If a single consonant occurs between two syllables within a word, it is considered to belong to the following syllable, so the syllable before the consonant is light if it contains a short vowel. If two or more consonants (or a geminated consonant) occur between syllables within a word, the first of the consonants goes with the first syllable, making it heavy. Certain combinations of consonants, e.g tr, are exceptions: both consonants go with the second syllable.

In Latin words of two syllables, the stress is on the first syllable. In words of three or more syllables, the stress is on the penultimate syllable if this is heavy, otherwise on the antepenultimate syllable.

Other orthographic notes

* C and K both represent . However, K is used in only a very small number of words from Greek. Q clarified minimal pairs between and , making it possible to distinguish between disyllabic cui and monosyllabic qui .

* The semi-consonant is regularly geminated between two vowels, but this is not indicated in the spelling. Before a vocalic I the semi-consonant is often omitted altogether, for instance 'he/she threw back' is spelt reicit rather than reiicit.

Modern spelling conventions

Modern usage, even when printing classical Latin texts, varies in respect of I and V. Many publishers continue the convention of using I for both and and V for both and . However u is by convention used as the lower-case equivalent of V as both vowel and semi-consonant (the ancient Romans did not have lower-case as we know it).

An alternative approach, less common today, is to use I,i and U,u for the vowels, and J,j and V,v for the semi-consonants.

Many books adopt an intermediate position, distinguishing between U and V but not between I and J. Usually the semi-consonant V after Q or S is still printed as u rather than v, probably because in this position it did not change from to in post-classical times. This approach is also recommended in the help page for the Latin Wikipedia.

Possibly the most fitting way is to not distinguish between V and U but to use V as the capital version and u as the lowercase version. As V was originally used by the Romans and the lowercase version of that letter originally would have been u.

Textbooks and dictionaries indicate the quantity of vowels by putting a macron or horizontal bar above the long vowel, but this is not generally done in printed texts. Occasionally in inscriptions one may see a circumflex used to indicate a long vowel where this makes a difference to the sense, for instance Româ 'from Rome' (ablative) compared to Roma 'Rome' (nominative). Sometimes, for instance in Roman Catholic service books, an acute accent over a vowel is used to indicate the stressed syllable. This would be redundant for one who knew the classical rules of accentuation, and also made the correct distinction between long and short vowels, but most Latin speakers between the IIIrd and XXIst centuries did not make any distinction between long and short vowels, while they kept the accents in the same places, so the use of accent marks allows you to read aloud correctly even words that you have never heard spoken aloud.

Latin pronunciation today

Pronouncing a dead language

When Latin words are spoken in a living language today, there is ordinarily little or no attempt to pronounce them as the Romans did. Myriad systems have arisen for pronouncing the language — at least one for each language in the modern world whose speakers learn Latin. In most cases, Latin pronunciation is adapted to the phonology of the person's own language, although obviously this means that people are not pronouncing Latin the way it was pronounced by Romans.

Latin words in common use in English are fully assimilated into the English sound system, with little to mark them as foreign (indeed, people do not generally even think of Latin words as being foreign), for example, cranium, saliva. Other words have a stronger Latin feel to them, usually because of spelling features such as the diphthongs ae and oe (occasionally written æ and œ) which are both pronounced in English. In the Oxford style, ae is pronounced //, in "formulae" for example. Ae in some words tends to be given an // pronunciation, for example, curriculum vitae.

French, Spanish, German and other languages all have their own versions of the Latin phonological system, often even taught at school during Latin classes, sometimes without pointing out that these are not the original pronunciation.

Ecclesiastical pronunciation

Over time the pronunciation of Latin, as with any language, evolved into what most people recognize as Latin today. This pronunciation, commonly referred to as "Ecclesiastical" or "Church" Latin was from medieval times the standard pronunciation of Latin, especially as preserved in the Catholic Church and the liturgical rites of the Latin Church. The preference for local phonetic usage is especially true of Italians, who learn Latin as it was pronounced during the low Middle Ages in Italy by the intellectual classes and which was similar to modern Italian. Below are the main points that distinguish Roman Pronunciation from Classical Latin pronunciation:

* Vowel length is lost: vowels are long when stressed and in an open syllable, otherwise short.
* C is pronounced (as in English "ch") before AE, OE, E, I or Y.
* The digraphs AE and OE are pronounced .
* G is pronounced (as in English "j") before AE, OE, E, I or Y
* H is silent.
* S may become between vowels.
* TI, if followed by a vowel and not preceded by s, t, x, becomes .
* V remains as the vowel , but the semi-consonant becomes , except after Q or S.
* TH becomes .
* PH becomes .
* CH becomes .
* Y becomes .

The Ecclesiastical Pronunciation greatly influenced English pronunciation of Latin. In the 19th century, it was also given notable standardization north of the Alps from its use by the monks of Solesmes Abbey for their reform of Gregorian chant. It is the most commonly recognized pronunciation, and the method which is still most alive today as a living language. A recent example of its use occurred in the motion picture The Passion of the Christ, recorded in Aramaic and very ecclesiastical Latin. However, some contemporary musicians try to produce authentic regional pronunciation as far as possible.

Daughters of Latin

Because it gave rise to many modern languages, Latin never actually died: it was merely changed through centuries of use and from this was born the great diversity of the Romance languages. The end of the political unity of the western Roman Empire accelerated the process, sending western Europe into an economic depression and curtailing the mobility of the population, making it less likely for a proto-Romance speaker to need to speak to someone from a distant locality, and encouraging the divergence of local dialects. Moreover, written Latin, like written English, was always to some degree an artificial literary language, somewhat different in grammar, syntax, and lexicon from the vernacular. Today's differences can be quite striking.
Even in Classical times, we know that the people in the street did not speak the formal, Classical tongue. They spoke what is known as Vulgar Latin, which was already very different from its sibling, mainly because of simplifications in its grammar and phonology. It is this Vulgar Latin that became modern French, Italian, etc.

Key features of Vulgar Latin and Romance include:

* Total loss of and final .
* Pronunciation of and as .
* Conversion of the distinction of vowel length into a distinction of timbre, and subsequent merger of some of these phonemes. Most Romance languages merged short with long and short with long .
* Total loss of Greek sounds (which were never really part of the language anyway).
* Palatalization of before and , probably first into , then , then before finally developing into in loanwords into languages like German, // in Florentine, in Spanish and in French, Portuguese, and Catalan. French has a second palatalisation of to (French ch) before Latin .
* Palatalization of before and , and of , into //. French has a second palatalisation of before Latin .
* Palatalization of followed by vowel (if not preceded by s, t, x) into .
* The change of (except after ) and sometimes into , then /v/ (in Spanish, has reduced to an allophone of ).
and many other aspects of pronunciation, not to mention grammar and vocabulary.

For further details, please refer to the relevant articles below:

:Latin language
:Vulgar Latin
:Romance languages

References

*Allen, W. Sidney. Vox Latina — a Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin. Cambridge University Press, 1978. ISBN 0-5221-22049-1 (Second edition)
*Pekkanen, Tuomo. Ars grammatica - Latinan kielioppi. Helsinki University Press, 1999. ISBN 951-570-022-1 (3rd-6th edition)

External links

* Ecclesiastical Latin in the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia.
* The Roman Pronunciation of Latin , by Frances Ellen Lord, in the Gutenberg Project.
* The Ecclesiastical and Classical Pronunciation of Latin , by Ray Cui.

Category:Latin language
Category:Language phonologies
Category:Language orthographies