Talk:Traditional English pronunciation of Latin

[Untitled]
Your treatment of vowels before "r" in RP in the sample text seems to me peculiar. (Is it even necessary to show the three different accents? this seems beyond the scope of your purpose.) In particular, I think we should have:

vɛərɪ̩ʼæbɪlɪs 'kjʊəræt and ɒb'djʊəræt

Also, I think lots of the schwas in RP should be /ɪ/

--Gheuf 07:05, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I appreciate your comment that the diphthongization before "r" is not a distinction which needs to be shown in the transcription, but it is for that very reason that I think having 3 separate transcriptions is unnecessary in the first place. For your purposes, you should be able to construct fairly easily a "pan-English" transcription that will relate to traditional accent-specific transcriptions by simple rule.
 * If you are going to present 3 separate transcriptions, though, I think you should use the transcriptions considerd "standard" for those accents. In the case of "curat", it's not that I personally hear a schwa there; but the presence of the centering diphthong (as opposed to a monophthong) is considered to be one of the clues that differentiate RP from other English accents (see J. C. Well's "Accents of English").
 * In my transcription of "variabilis", the vowel "i" was supposed to be a small capital "i". The little subscript dot was put in by accident. But yes this is the vowel of "KIT" and not of "FLEECE": RP differs (I believe) from English in its treatment of prevocalic "i". I am an American and pronounce "ee", but standard RP transcriptions (like the OED) generally have "ih" in this position.
 * For the quality of unstressed vowels I was again going off J. C. Well's book; he develops some time to explaining how, in RP, "abbot" and "rabbit" don't rhyme, because unstressed "ih" and schwa haven't merged.--Gheuf 21:32, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
 * This is the case of a historical sound change that has left centering diphthongs before "r"; not a low-level phonetic detail.--Gheuf 22:34, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
 * My remarks on "abbot" v. "rabbit" were meant to apply to your transcription of "variabilis": the last and penultimate "i"s of this word should, I think be transcribed as "ih" not as schwa. The last one is also "final" so that whatever remarks apply to final vowels in general, or to "rabbit" in particular, should also apply to "variabilis".--Gheuf 00:41, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
 * The difference between episolon-r and epsilon-schwa-r is precisely the same as the differene between "Merry" and "Mary." Your transcription of RP "variabilis" is more appropriate to "verriabilis". That is all I meant by my initial complaint.--Gheuf 00:47, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Hi, RandomCritic, I saw your message on my talk page, and have had a (very) quick look through your essay - it's quite some work. It does fall somewhat out of my area of expertise, so I won't be able to give an informed critique of your analysis, I'm afraid. Neither will I have time to look at it in depth over the coming long weekend (it's Queen's Birthday here), but hope to be able to do so after that some time (it should be rather educational, I imagine, even though my preferred method of pronouncing Latin leans more toward the classical rather than the fully anglicised version - as an example, having "Ave" pronounced as [] rather than [] strikes my ears as very odd). Just one thing in the Australian transcription that struck me right away is that the vowel corresponding to AmE and BrE  is more front in AusE - it is conventionally shown as, but  would also be acceptable. Also, I know it would be time-consuming, but could you perhaps put in more IPA templates - there are a great many places where I see just boxes, and while I can probably reliably pick the intended symbol, I'd prefer not to have to guess. Cheers, Thylacoleo 04:48, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Original Research
This article, interesting though it may be, is not written appropriately for Wikipedia. It needs to be cited, and I fear there is original research in it: In particular, I have seen a number of texts that discuss the traditional English pronunciation of Latin, but never have I seen any assertions that it has a particular (separate) phonology; instead, it is discussed as fitting onto the English phonology. So I will delete the relevant phonology section as OR, but keep it here for other people to consider and add citations.

Also, the IPA transcriptions need to be replaced with the standard Wikipedia ones at Help:IPA for English. That way, the incorrect or controversial statements which riddle this article can be removed.

—Felix the Cassowary 12:21, 13 May 2010 (UTC)


 * I added the WP diaphonemic IPA. I left the others, but they can be deleted if you like. — kwami (talk) 20:32, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Phonology
Since A-L developed for many centuries within English, yet without having a full complement of English sounds, its phonology taken in isolation is somewhat unlike that of most natural languages.

For the most part, establishing the identity of A-L phonemes presents little difficulty. The r-colored vowels,  ,  are clearly conditioned by a following , and are allophones of ; ,  or ; and , respectively. The reduced vowel is likewise an allophone of the same five vowels in unstressed syllables, and the reduced r-colored vowel  in American English is likewise an allophone occurring in unstressed syllables preceding.

The exact status of the "long vowels" is more difficult to ascertain. They certainly exist as conditioned alternants to the short vowels and  ; the limits on their distribution demonstrate that they cannot be the underlying forms. Their exact identity, given dialectal variants, is debatable, but they will here be considered to be, , , , and , the last being a form of which palatalizes a preceding consonant.

However, many of these sounds can be demonstrated to exist as independent phonemes as well. is certainly a phoneme, when it appears as eu, in closed as well as open syllables. is marginally phonemic, as it exists in the closed syllable huic. is possibly phonemic when it appears as the diphthong ai, but due to the limitations of the data this cannot be demonstrated; in a maximally parsimonious system, it could be accounted for, even in these cases, merely as an allophone of. is at least marginally phonemic as it appears in the word post; and more certainly insofar as it provides a distinction between the endings -os and -ōs. The vowel and its allophones might also be considered to be merely allophones of    ; however, their sporadic (if somewhat uncertain) appearance in initial unstressed and final syllables suggests a basis for considering them phonemic. The creation of apparent minimal pairs due to degemination (e.g. penna vs. pœna, collum  vs. colum ) could also be used to make a case for the existence of  and  as independent phonemes.

In addition, the vowel and the diphthongs  and  are unquestionably phonemic in A-L.

The table below reflects an analysis of A-L phonemes in which each of the "long vowels" has phonemic status.

English and Latin

 * (moved to the bottom and heading added by —Felix the Cassowary 14:10, 26 July 2010 (UTC))

English is so unphonetic that it really messed up the pronunciation of Latin. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.191.69.8 (talk) 20:02, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

English was a lot more phonetic when the two languages first met, but still, this sort-of almost-ish sums up the article. :) TooManyFingers (talk) 18:44, 30 November 2019 (UTC)


At the moment, the only mention I can find of the digraph  says that it is pronounced /i:/ uniformly across the American, British and Australian variants. This is not the case: in the British pronounciation of Latin,  is at least sometimes pronounced /ai/ -- including in the example word given, "Pleiades" -- and I believe may be /ai/ universally, though the digraph is uncommon enough that I am not certain of this. 213.249.135.36 (talk) 21:03, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

English vocabulary
The large section at the beginning of examples (academic English vocabulary) seems inappropriate here when there is another page Contemporary Latin for vocabulary matters. Nadiatalent (talk) 12:45, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Long and short vowels in English

 * Generally, a vowel followed by more than one consonant is short in English, as in Hermippe hər- MIP -ee, except that final -es is always long, as in Pales   PAY -leez;

Why "except"? In final -es, the vowel is not followed by more than one consonant. It does not seem to be an exception to this rule, but to another rule specifying that a vowel in the final syllable followed by one consonant is short. Or does the end of the word count as a pseudo-consonant $ for this purpose? Then this needs to be mentioned, since it is not at all intuitive.


 * while a vowel with no following consonant is long.

Then final -a is the single exception, isn't it? (Is long -ā as in the ablative ending or in the numerals trīgintā, quadrāgintā etc. treated identically, then?) --Florian Blaschke (talk) 01:22, 22 November 2013 (UTC)


 * You're right, badly worded, but still a single rule. "More than one consonant" is just a more accessible way of saying "closed orthographic syllable".  At the end of a word, a final consonant will make the vowel short, with that one exception.  (This is the orthographic rule you also find in German.)  — kwami (talk) 09:38, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Are initial open unstressed vowels long or reduced?
I'm confused about open unstressed vowels in word-initial syllables. From the section "Long and short syllables in English", it would appear that Hypatia and Elara would start with a reduced vowel. Hypatia, however, informs me that the initial vowel is long (and in fact, Hypatia (disambiguation) informs me that this is so even in Ypattiana), and the section itself informs me that the initial vowel in Elara is also long. Clearly, a rule is missing here (unless I've overlooked it).

The section "Initial unstressed syllables" informs me that "y" and "i" are treated differently from the rest and (at least in older usage) long in this environment, which explains Hypatia and Ypattiana. However, even according to this section, Elara should start with a reduced vowel! In fact, one of the examples listed is Elysium, which should parallel Elara exactly. So, why is the initial vowel of Elara given as long?

By the way, shouldn't Ypattiana and Diana be pronounced /aɪˌpætiˈeɪnə/ (rather than /aɪˌpætiːˈɑːnə/) and /daɪˈeɪnə/ (rather than /daɪˈænə/), since penultimate open stressed vowels are long? I find the rules for vowel length incredibly confusing ...

I find it quite difficult to predict the pronunciation /haɪˈpeɪʃə/ with long vowel and palatalisation of ti to /ʃ/ from the present rules, too. Which are the relevant rules in this case? I'm lost here.

Also, is the pronunciation I've given at Talk:Xenophyophore correct? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:12, 18 January 2014 (UTC)


 * if you're still interested in this almost 8 yrs after you asked, any spelling or pronunciation rules for English are going to be problematic. This guide only gives you the expected form if the pronunciation is regular, but as often as not it will be irregular, and some details are going to differ across speech registers even when a word is regular. Fagles' translations of the Iliad and Odyssey have pronunciation guides in the back. Incredibly confusing, even for native speakers. For a lot of us, when we come across an unknown word we often don't even bother to try to sound it out. I tend to just hear gibberish in my head, and my sister once told me she would say "horse" in her head. So yeah, if native speakers find it hopeless much of the time, I imagine as an L2 speaker you're kinda screwed. That's just the joy of English.
 * As for your specific questions, a lot of pronunciations are based on other words that look similar, much the way gender is assigned to loanwords in German. (I'm not sure which is worse, English spelling or German gender.) So anything ending in -ana is often pronounced with an PALM vowel, as in 'Americana'. That's consistent enough that we might want to add it as yet another exception, though the expected FACE vowel does occur in some words, especially obscure ones. Diana is sometimes spelled Dianna. I don't know if the 'short' vowel there is related to the disyllabic laxing in Saturn, or as you find in 'patent' in the US or in 'zebra' in the UK. For Hypatia, there's going to be dialectical and register differences in whether -tia is palatalized and whether the 'i' is dropped. Upper-crust RP might still pronounce it /haɪ'peɪtiə/. You might want to use the local pronunciation of "Asia" as a guide (I'm not sure if anyone still pronounces that /'eɪziə/ as shown in the OED), but there's tends to be less reduction and assimilation with obscure words, as there's a frequency effect. So for xenophyophore, I would expect that someone who only reads the word, or who says it only occasionally, would probably pronounce both unstressed o's as /oʊ/, and likely also pronounce the xe as /ziː/, but someone who does research on them would probably reduce both o's to /ə/ and would be more likely to say /zɛ/.
 * Yes, I think initial 'y' may be an exception to the reduction rule, but there are register differences in vowel reduction as well, as well as whether the vowel is 'long' or 'short' (i.e. /aɪ/ or /ɪ/) if not reduced. — kwami (talk) 20:35, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Constellations
Not all of them have the "old" Latin pronunciation. Never heard anyone say /laibrə/, only /li:brə/. Also, the genitive forms are used in astronomy frequently, to designate stars. Those in -i are usually pronounced /i:/ as well, even when the constellation has the "old" pronunciation. So you get /ælfə tɔːri:/ ("Alpha Tauri"). Those in -ae are often /ai/. Most star names are Greek or Arabic and may have several different pronunciations (e.g. Betelgeuse), in fact I think only one bright star visible in England has a Latin name (Regulus).Walshie79 (talk) 08:18, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Added 'Libra' as a counter example. I've never heard the expected pronunciation either, though it is in dictionaries. — kwami (talk) 20:06, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

deletion of sample text
I've deleted the "Sample text" section, for two reasons. First, the chosen text is totally inappropriate since it has been taken from Carmina Burana, where the authentic pronunciation would be German. Second, this also demonstrates that the transcription is WP:OR, since it iwould never have been published, being in itself of no practical value. The four-way versions of the English are also excessive and pointless. SamuelTheGhost (talk) 16:18, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

"Arsinoë /ɑːrˈsɪnoʊiː/ ar-SIN-oh-ee"
This goes against the syllabication rules of Latin: it was ar-SI-no-e (a single consonant between two vowels always belongs to the next syllable). If these rules are not followed in English (which is evidently the case) this should be mentioned. 80.101.66.65 (talk) 08:35, 13 October 2021 (UTC)


 * It's explained in the key. — kwami (talk) 20:00, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Palatalization of ti
Chandler (1889) says that ci, si, and ti follow what this article calls “Palatalization 3” (the consonant becoming /ʃ/) after a stressed syllable and preceding a vowel. This is different from what the article currently says, that it happens when the syllable is not initial. Should this be changed? Conveniently, all examples listed for this palatalization follow Chandler’s rule. But I’m not sure what a word like “aestivationis” should be pronounced like, where the semivocalic i comes after a non-stressed syllable (es-ti-vuh-SHOW-nis versus es-ti-vuh-TYO-nis).

https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/218054#page/371/mode/1up

Konomu (talk) 10:47, 4 June 2022 (UTC)


 * You appear to be correct. For nomen actionis and ma​ter lec​ti​o​nis, Lexico has /ˌnəʊmɛn aktɪˈəʊnɪs/ and /ˌmeɪtə lɛktɪˈəʊnɪs/. MW is similar. Personally, I'm used to /ˌæksiˈoʊnᵻs/ and /ˌlɛksiˈoʊnᵻs/ here, though I don't know where I picked that up. But then I stress the preceding vowels in these cases. Does Chandler count "secondary" stress as a stressed syllable? — kwami (talk) 23:38, 5 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately he never explicity says anything about secondary stress in that section. So words like “sufficienti” have unclear english pronunciation. Konomu (talk) 12:26, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Typo?
Near the end of the subsection on secondary stress, I see this:

ac.cù.mu.lá.tor

... but to me that pronunciation seems odd; I would expect

ac.cú.mu.là.tor

instead.

Am I right? Or do I just talk funny? TooManyFingers (talk) 06:09, 2 May 2024 (UTC)