{"id":102,"date":"2010-04-19T02:33:48","date_gmt":"2010-04-19T09:33:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/?p=102"},"modified":"2010-04-19T02:33:48","modified_gmt":"2010-04-19T09:33:48","slug":"latin-pronunciation-for-the-continuing-student","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/?p=102","title":{"rendered":"Latin pronunciation for the continuing student"},"content":{"rendered":"

On bulletin boards and in magazines dealing with classical homeschooling, one question that arises over and over again is, \u201cWhat sort of pronunciation should we use in teaching Latin?\u201d The options usually boil down to two: the reconstructed classical pronunciation, and the Italianate ecclesiastical pronunciation. Both have their champions, and the discussions that follow in their defense usually generate more heat than light. A lot of the discussion is usually centered on which one is right<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Asking \u201cWhich pronunciation is the right one?\u201d is an exercise in historical reductionism doomed to fail. One cannot define an entire spectrum from a single point, and the history of Latin as a living language extends for somewhat over two thousand years. Either<\/i> is right. Neither<\/i> of them is satisfactory for all occasions. <\/p>\n

Typically, the most attention is given this question by parents just starting out in Latin instruction. At this point, the question is more or less moot, and any real anxiety is out of proportion with its pedagogical significance. While learning forms \u2014 declensions and conjugations \u2014 it doesn\u2019t matter<\/i> much how you pronounce them, as long as you learn those forms, what they mean, and what they\u2019re for. For practical purposes, therefore, my own suggestion is to pick one — whether purposefully or arbitrarily — and use it consistently for the first year or two. You\u2019re probably better off choosing a pronunciation matching the kinds of texts used in the introductory text. With something like Wheelock\u2019s Latin Grammar, which draws most of its examples from classical authors, you probably want to go with a classical pronunciation. If you\u2019re using a course like Henle\u2019s, which is based on ecclesiastical texts and ecclesiastical authors, then it only makes sense to go with that as your pronunciation standard. If your chief reason for learning Latin at first is to be able to sing church music, that\u2019s a good reason to start with an ecclesiastical pronunciation as well. <\/p>\n

Later on, though, pronunciation will<\/i> become significant, especially when one begins to deal with literary products. Poetry in particular is at least largely about the sounds<\/i> of a language. I\u2019ll discuss that a little bit later. First, however, it\u2019s probably worth dispelling some of the widespread misinformation that gets circulated. <\/p>\n

The one I\u2019ve heard most frequently is, \u201cThere are no recordings of classical Latin speakers. It\u2019s clearly impossible to know how the language was pronounced.\u201d This is generally used as a way of dismissing the classical pronunciation, though a parallel argument could be used as easily to dismiss any other system. Unfortunately, those who make this argument are merely asserting that they<\/i> don\u2019t know how to figure something of this sort out. But there are those who do. <\/p>\n

At the subtlest level, yes \u2014 there are things we don\u2019t know. We\u2019d give a lot to be able to plant even one microphone in the Forum to pick up just one of Cicero\u2019s orations. But we actually do<\/i> know, with fair accuracy, how the major inventory of language sounds were produced. Historical linguistics is a slow and painstaking process, but over its long history people really have taken those pains, and so there is now a substantial body of data available for analysis. <\/p>\n

Detailing all those sources of information is beyond the scope of this discussion, but a few examples may suffice. We do have a few grammatical and literary discussions about mispronunciations, of course. These are at least somewhat interesting. But they usually document the egregiously odd — such as Catullus\u2019 harangue against a certain Arrius, who added initial \u201ch\u201d sounds to a lot of words that should have begun with a vowel. Those are colorful, but provide less information than we might wish, and almost no information about what was normal. There are, moreover, relatively few of them.<\/p>\n

Just as one might read novels and the publications of the popular press today without learning a great deal about how we pronounce English, one could stare at a page of Cicero for the next ten years and learn little or nothing about how Cicero pronounced it. It would help you very little in distinguishing classical from ecclesiastical pronunciations. <\/p>\n

But those are literary texts, and literary texts are not the only tools of the discipline. The real treasures for the historical linguist are errors. Some of the papers I get from my students, for example, could provide more information about how we speak than a ten-year run of National Geographic<\/i> or New Yorker<\/i>: those who write \u201cI might of known\u201d instead of \u201cI might have known\u201d are providing virtually irrefutable evidence that, in its auxiliary usage, \u201chave\u201d is normally pronounced much the same way as \u201cof\u201d. That will tell us something about the loss of the initial h; it will also tell us that in \u201cof\u201d the final f<\/i> is like a v<\/i>. The fact that one sees, with increasing frequency, comparative phrases formed with \u201cthen\u201d rather than \u201cthan\u201d illustrates the fact that in an unemphatic position (as these connective words almost always are), the vowel itself tends to settle down to about the same middle schwa sound (\u01dd).<\/p>\n

Our surviving evidence from the ancient world is (unsurprisingly) short on student papers, but they are not short of inscriptions scratched into stone of one sort or another. Some of these are quite elegant; others are primitive \u2014 the desperate efforts, for example, of a grieving parent who wants to memorialize his dead son or daughter as best he can. Often that best is riddled with misspellings. The inscriptions themselves are often rather moving, reaching across centuries with an uncommon universality, but in addition, almost every one of them tells us something about the language.<\/p>\n

Anyone interested in the detailed conclusions about classical Latin, and the fastidious work that has gone into reconstructing it, would be well advised to take a look at W. Sidney Allen, Vox Latina<\/i>. It\u2019s fairly dry going, unless you have the philological bent, but it\u2019s worth reading if you do. It argues every point with very solid evidence.<\/p>\n

Of course the “we can’t know” argument is not the only one out there. Others are more belligerent and random. One of the more bizarre ones I\u2019ve encountered over the last few years includes the reflection that \u201cif it\u2019s good enough for Dante, it\u2019s good enough for me.\u201d This sounds full of conviction, but substitutes triumphal ignorance for reason. Anyone even glancingly familiar with rhetorical fallacies will identify it as an appeal to inappropriate authority. Dante, writing a little more than 1300 years after Vergil (whom he regarded as his master), had no better direct access to recordings of Classical Latin than we do, but certainly lacked all the comparative evidence that has been marshalled over the last two centuries. To read Vergil as Dante did is probably a useful exercise, if you are interested in learning what Dante was hearing. It tells us virtually nothing about what Vergil was writing, however.<\/p>\n

So does it matter what kind of pronunciation you use, and if so, why? To start with, no. It will obviously not affect your conversation with native Romans. It will probably not vastly affect your understanding of Latin texts. Some of the best classicists I have known have had very peculiar pronunciation. They seemed to get along. The English have had a long tradition of some of the finest classical scholarship in the world, coupled with with some of the worst pronunciation imaginable.<\/p>\n

But if you want to deal with authors on their own terms, you probably need ultimately to learn and use two (or perhaps more) different ways to pronounce Latin. Sure, you should start with one method while you\u2019re learning the ropes. But if you really want to appreciate the Latin that was written over a space of a thousand years, you have to be ready to adapt. It\u2019s not really that hard, and the fruits of the exercise are considerable.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s wrong with reading classical Latin as if it were Mediaeval Latin? It\u2019s not merely that it\u2019s wrong. It\u2019s not, I would argue, morally<\/i> wrong, and if you can read and appreciate Cicero\u2019s orations while reading them with a thick Italian or English accent, fine. But you will lose the music of the language, and especially with poetry, that\u2019s important. Just as a brief illustrative case, let\u2019s look at two consonants and a diphthong that are treated differently in Classical and Mediaeval pronunciations. <\/p>\n