Alex Foreman, whom I have linked to with some frequency (e.g., 2020, 2021), specializes in reading texts in reconstructed pronunciations (as with the passage of Deuteronomy he did in six stages of Hebrew here), and in a new Facebook post (friends-only, but I’ll quote the whole text) he does it for anglicized Latin, something that has always fascinated me:
This is the first Latin poem I wrote a translation of as a kid. Also the first poem of Horace’s that I was able to actually make it through. I remember feeling so very excited.
I read this one first in a reconstruction of 1st century Roman Latin, then in my translation, then in a reconstruction of “Cromwellian” or mid-17th century English Latin pronunciation, followed by an English translation from the same period.
People are always obsessing over reading Latin in reconstructed Roman pronunciation from the 1st centuries BC and AD. I’m like: dude there are a whole lot of other reconstructible pronunciations for Latin you could use.
This type of Anglo-Latin is basically that attested by Robinson in 1619, only filtered through a form of English that had gone through some sound changes that his English hadn’t, in order to arrive at something more plausible for the 1650s. Robinson’s Latin pronunciation was of the newer mode and had been put through at least some of the reforms initiated by John Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith, and thus distinctions of vowel-length in inflectional endings are respected, chiefly in open syllables.
Thus in this type of Anglo-Latin pronunciation, final etymologically short /ĭ/ takes the KIT vowel (as in “ubi” [ɪʊ̯bɪ]) whereas final etymological /ī/ takes the PRICE diphthong (as in “superī” [sɪʊ̯pɪrǝi]). Final etymological /ĕ/ merges with short /ĭ/ in the KIT vowel (as in “ducere” [dɪʊ̯sɪɾɪ]) whereas long ē like æ is rendered with the MEAT vowel (as in “comae” [koːmeː]). The ablative of the first declension singular -â happens not to occur here, but it would take the MATE vowel. There would be a distinction between the final vowels of “modŏ” which would end on the STRUT vowel, and “modō” which would end in the GOAT vowel. And yes that pronunciation of “Theseus” /ʃ/ is an attested thing. Robinson actually transcribes <þēšius>.
Here’s the Patreon post with the reading; I hope everyone can access it, because it’s fascinating stuff. And “Diffugere nives” is a really nice poem.
People are always obsessing over reading Latin in reconstructed Roman pronunciation from the 1st centuries BC and AD
Is this related to the way some people obsess over playing early music on period instruments? Discuss.
Before I moved away from the DC area, I would listen to classical music on WETA. I’m OK with genuinely early music played on period instruments, but more often than I would like they would play Haydn or even Beethoven on ‘authentic’ instruments.
Plus, why is it that so many period-instrument companies have such silly, twee names? La Petite Bande. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
People are always obsessing over reading Latin in reconstructed Roman pronunciation from the 1st centuries BC and AD
Possibly because the poets in question were themselves very much concerned with how their poems sounded. Varying by poet, admittedly: Virgil much more so than Lucretius, say; but it’s an odd poet who doesn’t care about the actual sound of their verse at all. Orm?
You can read classical Chinese verse in Classical Japanese: indeed it’s an entire art form
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigin
I doubt whether this is a brilliant way of learning to appreciate Classical Chinese poetry as such, however.
Certainly no worse than using modern Mandarin pronunciation, which basically destroys the entire poetic apparatus (apart from the number of syllables per line).
Orm?!! On the contrary, Orm cared so much about the sound of his verses that he devised his own orthography so that his lectores (who spoke Anglonormand) could pronounce it so their auditores (who spoke Early Middle English) could understand it. Admittedly this is not an aesthetic concern with the sound, but rather a practical one. His strict meters likewise ensured that the stress would fall on the correct syllables.
apart from the number of syllables per line
But shigin destroys that too (comprehensively …)
I’m never sure whether my response to existence of shigin as an actual aesthetic discipline should be stunned admiration or blank horror. Or both …
The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment sounds serious and educational to me, like you would get a lecture instead of a concert.
People are always obsessing over reading Latin in reconstructed Roman pronunciation from the 1st centuries BC and AD
Obsessing is, I think, an exaggeration. But as a practical matter, if you’re teaching Latin, you have to settle on one pronunciation or another, if only so that the students will understand what the teacher is saying and vice versa. Since the Latin taught in most Latin classes is literary Latin of the late Republic and early Empire, it makes the most sense to use a reconstructed classical pronunciation that, while not perfect, nevertheless probably comes fairly close to the pronunciation used by the authors whose language and literature we are studying. This, at any rate, is how I explain it to my students, and they all accept the logic, even if it takes a while for some of them to adjust (especially those who are used to singing Latin texts with a modern Italianate pronunciation).
On those few occasions when I have been lucky enough to teach a course on mediaeval Latin poetry or drama, we have used a mediaeval (or at least mediaevalizing) central or southern European pronunciation instead. (You have to, otherwise the rhymes don’t rhyme!)
The pronunciation of Latin in England has always been famously incomprehensible to everyone else in the world. I remember one of my own teachers telling the story (perhaps apocryphal) of Erasmus’s visit to England ca. 1500. He knew no English, but he expected that he would be able to communicate with any reasonably learned Englishman in Latin. Instead he found their Latin, spoken in some weird barbaric Hyperborean accent, even more unintelligible than their English.
I just happened to be reading an interesting anecdote about Latin verse in Patrick Fermor’s A Time of Gifts. In the middle of describing (many decades after the fact) walking though Swabia in between Stuttgart and Ulm as a teenager in early 1934, he gets into a digression about what sorts of poetry in what languages he had memorized at various points in his life, which leads to a further digression about the time he was an SOE officer in German-occupied Crete in 1944 and he and his colleagues and some local Cretan guerillas kidnapped the German commander (General Heinrich Kreipe, 1895-1976). They spent some time moving around the mountains with their captive while evading pursuing German forces before they were able to get the captive to a beach where a British boat picked him up and took him to Egypt and thence into POW camps. One morning during this process, as the sun was rising rather spectacularly over Mt. Ida, the captive general murmured to himself a bit of memorized Horace:
Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte …
Fermor, who was 20 years younger then his captive, then picked up from memory where the general had stopped:
…nec jam sustineant onus
Silvae laborantes geluque
Flumina constiterant acuto
(etc etc etc.)
The general looked at his young captor and said “Ach so, Herr Major.” “It was very strange. As if, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk from the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”
What the anecdote alas does not describe was whether the German general and his young English captor used different pronunciation schemes for the Latin!
: dude there are a whole lot of other reconstructible pronunciations for Latin you could use.
But why would you? Horace wrote in the last century BCE, doesn’t that seem like the logical reconstruction to use for his poetry? There are also a lot of reconstructible pronunciations you could use for Shakespeare – a 19th century Russian speaking English, or an early 20th century Nigerian. Yet, people seem obsessed with early 17th century Shakespeare.
Don’t get me wrong – Foreman does a good job with the 17th century Anglo-Latin, it just seems fairly random to choose that period and location among all the reconstructions you might pick.
@JW Brewer
No doubt they would have done.
Pronuntiatio restituta was adopted in England in early 20c. Whereas in Germany, they would still have used had traditional pronunciation when the general was at school learning latin.
The German would have said something like
“Vides ut alta… zoRakte”, rather than “Wides ut alta …sorakte”
I much prefer the traditional pronunciation(s), because arguably more people have learnt it and used over the course of centuries then the Classical pronunciation. But i agree that for reading Classical poetry the pronuntiatio restituta is the one to use.
Would an educated Roman of the first century really have pronounced ‘nymphis’ as /nimfis/? Most of them knew some Greek, and surely would have attempted both the front-round vowel y and the aspirated plosive ph, being aware of the reasons for the spelling.
By the way, the first reading is very similar to the pronunciation now used in Britain, except that we don’t tend to trill the r, and our vowels are a bit anglicised (but not radically different), and we use alveolar t and d. And I would guess that Fermor and Kreipe used roughly similar pronunciations.
But why would you?
Because you want to? Because it’s interesting and different? Foreman isn’t saying everyone should dump restored classical pronunciation and use something else (for god’s sake), he’s saying every once in a while it’s fun to see it from a different angle. You might as well say “Why study a useless language like Kusaal or Sumerian [to take two examples at random] when you could learn Chinese?” Uniformity is the death of intellectual vitality.
Would an educated Roman of the first century really have pronounced ‘nymphis’ as /nimfis/?
You’re misremembering. In the first-century reading at the start, he says /nymphis/ with rounded front vowel and aspirated p (I just double-checked to be sure).
Would an educated Roman of the first century really have pronounced ‘nymphis’ as /nimfis/?
No.
Incidentally, Quintilian reports Cicero as mocking a Greek witness for not being able to pronounce the Latin /f/.
a useless language like Kusaal
Trying saying that in Zebilla!
(You might get away with it in Bawku, at least if you say it in Hausa.)
One thing to think about is that these things are easy for Foreman. He can learn something before breakfast that would take you or me a week (well, unless you’re like him).
He’s also very interested in Renaissance Latin poetry (a.k.a. “neo-Latin poetry”).
Uniformity is the death of intellectual vitality.,
There is no point in actually debating this because we are discussing a question of taste. Of course new perspectives are interesting. But of all the Latins in the world, he chose that one? Yes, I could pour Lyle’s Golden Syrup on my cacio e pepe to break with conformity but I can guess the result. And I guess that is my real issue – nothing particularly surprising emerges from reconstructing 17th century Anglo-Latin (if you’re familiar with reconstructions of 17th century English). He sounds like a 17th century Englishman speaking Latin. Otoh, we are dealing with a five hundred year old “speech” sample that is probably reasonably correct and well founded, so I grant that bit is cool. It would be far more interesting to hear how a 3rd century Gaul spoke Latin, but that would be pure speculation.
But of all the Latins in the world, he chose that one?
Yes, because he found it interesting.
It would be far more interesting to hear how a 3rd century Gaul spoke Latin, but that would be pure speculation.
Far more interesting to you. Do you not see the problem here?
One of A.P. Herbert’s “Uncommon Law” comical stories features a young man who attempts to pronounce the various Latin phrases embedded in English legal jargon with the pronuntiatio restituta (he is obviously supposed to represent the first generation to have been taught that way in school), with all of the older barristers and judges having no idea what the heck he’s talking about. But Herbert wrote those stories over a series of decades (and then there are lags between initial magazine publication and getting anthologized in a book etc), so it would take some digging to figure out exactly when he wrote that one.
And in fact most of the remaining Latin-origin phrases in 21st century U.S. legal jargon are pronounced traditionally, not least because the percentage of current U.S. lawyers and judges who ever studied Latin as such (with the pronuntiatio restituta, as I did, or otherwise, as may have remained the case in some Catholic schools) is fairly low, so most legal-jargon speakers learned the pronunciation of the phrases in law school or “on the job” from other monolingual Anglophones.
Seems to me he happened to come across the 17th-century book he shows in the video and spontaneously decided to read it aloud.
It’s very noticeable to me: every y is rounded, and every ph, th, ch is a heavily aspirated plosive (or maybe actually a cluster with [h], which might be even more appropriate for a native Latin speaker).
And in fact most of the remaining Latin-origin phrases in 21st century U.S. legal jargon are pronounced traditionally
And a good thing too, say I! I think someone, perhaps you, quoted that Herbert story here a while back, but I don’t know how to find it…. Oh, wait, I found it (by searching on “my lord”); it was Geraint Jennings (January 29, 2009 at 2:21 pm).
@JWB
Not just US legal jargon, but also here in Australia, and dare I say everywhere else where English common law has made its way around the world.
Ratio decidendi, for example, is “rayshio dee-sigh-den-die” never “rah-tee-o de-kee-den-dee”.
Also it’s not just legal jargon, but ordinary Anglo-latin as well: eg., a mathematician wouldn’t say anything but “rayshio” (ratio) or “vuh-ty seez” (vertices).
Businesses everywhere have an “adjenda” not an “aghenda”. Etc. Etc.
PS
Love the AP Herbert stories.
You also won’t get very far in botanical or zoological circles if you try to use a classical pronunciation of Latin binomials. I’ve always been interested in 18th- and 19th-century natural history, especially taxonomy, and when I was a grad student at Berkeley I took a course on the flora of California, just for the fun of it, as a break from my regular coursework in classics and archaeology. The lab sections of the botany course were taught by another graduate student, a very amiable young woman in the biology department. We hit it off right away, and spent much of the semester cheerfully mocking one another’s pronunciation of Latin plant names. She of course used the modern anglicized pronunciation standard among North American scientists, while I insisted on pronouncing them as if I were Pliny the Elder. I did this mostly to make her roll her eyes, but it wasn’t entirely an act: it still seems grotesque to me to pronounce a lovely word like abies, which ought to be a rolling anapestic trisyllable, as an ugly disyllable that rhymes with rabies or scabies.
Far more interesting to you. Do you not see the problem here?
Not at all. I said from the start I was being subjective and expressing an opinion. More power to those who find Foreman interesting but I stand by my right to find his selection pointless, Anglocentric and a waste of his talents.
When I was a young sprout I assumed Latin was pronounced just like English, mainly because of Linnaean nomenclature. I even thought that learning Latin would be a good preparation for learning English as an L2. At age 12, my first day of Latin class was an eye-opener. But it simultaneously explained a bunch of other things, once I started thinking about it. And so here I am 62 years later as a language nerd.