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SONÍ English | Español Whereas any student can understand that we accurately know the writing usages of the Romans, as well as those of the users of Latin of any other later periods, it is a cause of greater confusion and even scepticism to affirm that we also know with great accuracy the pronunciation of Latin in the different stages of its long history, and in particular in classical times. It would be too long to explain here how we have come to know the pronunciation of Latin in times for which we have no sound record; but this is a question on which many specialists have worked, and the beginner has to exercise a certain degree of trust in the teacher. We will mention here nevertheless the main instruments that allow us to know how a language like Latin was pronounced in the past. 1. In the first place we’ve got historical and comparative philology. If a Latin word like máter, for instance, has evolved into Italian and Spanish madre, Catalan mare, French mère, Portuguese mãe and in all of those languages without exception the letter m is pronounced the same way, maybe we can hesitate about the pronunciation of the other letters in the word; but we have in principle no reason to think that the m was pronounced any differently in Latin than it is pronounced in all those languages that derive from it. If we then compare Latin not with the daughter languages that evolved from it in later times, but with the sister languages that are related to it because they share an even older common origin, the so called Indo-European languages, and we observe that the letter m has kept exactly the same pronunciation, independently from Latin, into modern Greek μητερα [mi.'tɛ.ra], German Mutter ['mʊ.tʰɐ] and Hindi माता ['mɑ:.tɑ:], which all correspond to Latin máter, then once more we find support to be pretty sure of the way Latin m was pronounced. Similar analogies can be established for all the other letters. Historical and comparative philology can also explain the cases where we observe differences in the related languages, as the presence of an è in French or a u in German where we have á in Latin, and we can thus have an idea of the way in which Latin was and was not pronounced. 2. We have also the written testimony of Latin grammarians, who described how the sounds were articulated, or Latin writers in general who commented on many points of pronunciation. 3. Spelling mistakes we find on inscriptions also illuminate us regarding contemporary pronunciation. If during a certain century everybody writes æquus when they mean ‘just’, and equus when they mean ‘horse’, and we don’t find, even in the writing of the less educated, anyone that confuses the two words, but in the following century many people, even the better educated, start to hesitate and sometimes write equus to mean ‘just’ and æquus for ‘horse’, we can gather two things: first, that in the latter century the pronunciation of æ and e was similar enough to make even educated people make mistakes when they wrote those otherwise unrelated words; and second, that in the former century, on the other hand, the pronunciation of æ and e was still so different that not even uneducated people confused the two words when writing. 4. Finally, poetry gives us a lot of clues about pronunciation, as a poem has to abide by certain rules of sonority that tell us how the words in it should be pronounced to create the adequate rhythm. With all of these tools and the number of documents that have arrived to us from antiquity, we can be sure that we know quite accurately —there are always some minor obscure areas, of course— how Latin was pronounced during the classical period. The interested student should refer to W. Sidney Allen, Vox Latina, The Pronunciation of Classical Latin, Cambridge University Press 1992 [1965], where a much more detailed treatment of all these topics will be found. But before we proceed with the classical pronunciation of Latin, we need to try and clarify the tremendous confusion that reigns regarding the so called 'ecclesiastical' pronunciation. As it was only natural, after the fall of the Roman empire, Latin, which survived as a learned language, came to be pronounced in every country according to the conventions of the respective vernacular; thus the Latin word lætitia [laɛ̯.'tɪ.tɪ.ʲa] received in Italy the pronunciation [le.'ti.tsja] like the Italian name Letizia, in Spain [le.'ti.θja] like the name Leticia, in England [lə.'tʰɪʃ.ə], etc. (cf. Op. cit., "Appendix B: The pronunciation of Latin in England", pp. 102-110). These traditional pronunciations, varying from one nation to another, were in use in each country in all areas of Latin, both in scholarly contexts and in ecclesiastical ones, of course indistinctively as there was never a conscience that there should be any division between the two. It is wrong to think therefore, as not a few people in modern times have mistakenly been led to believe, that there existed in history a specifically ecclesiastical pronunciation of Latin or that the Italian proununciation would ever have been used by non Italians. Against these varying traditional pronunciations, it’s true, there had been throughout history different erudite initiatives to promote a unified pronunciation of Latin; yet these were not based on the Italian vernacular, but rather on the testimony of the ancient sources, usually understood to support the principle of "one letter one sound" independently of the spelling context, as seemed to be suggested by phonetic descriptions of the letters of the alphabet like the one provided for instance by Martianus Capella in his Dé nuptiís. These erudite unifying tendencies, of course, affected the Latin used both inside and outside the church indistinctly, as for centuries scholars and ecclesiastics were the same people. As a matter of fact, this type of pronunciation was still in use in the court of pope Leo XIII, as anyone who listens to the 1902 recordings of the Italian castrato Professor Alessandro Moreschi can easily perceive (he says [pon.'ti.fi.kem], ['e.ti.am], etc.). Yet these erudite attempts failed for centuries to displace the various national pronunciations that traditionally prevailed in the different countries, both inside and outside the church. As erudition became increasingly sophisticated, the simple principle of "one letter one sound" was refined by further inspection of the ancient sources, notably by Erasmus and his successors, and the tendency to bring the pronunciation of Latin ever more closely to the one it had in classical times became the main aim of the better educated, who were also ever more disconnected from ecclesiastical milieus. After the fascinating advancement that the science of philology experienced in the last hundred years —scientific comparative philology didn’t really start before the 19th century, with the development of interest in Sanskrit that came along with the European colonization of India—, it was finally possible to recover the classical pronunciation of Latin to remarkable detail. The brilliance of this intellectual achievement of philological science made that in a very short time the unified erudite pronunciation of Latin finally displaced the diverse vernacular traditional pronunciations from all areas of scholarship all over the world (except, partially, in Italy); but as erudition and church now went along completely diverging ways, the different traditional pronunciations prevailed in the ecclesiastical context. This century saw therefore for the first time in history a division between the pronunciation of Latin inside and outside the church, and the birth of the label of 'ecclesiastical' for what was nothing other than the traditional vernacular pronunciations of Latin. As had traditionally been the case, these vernacular pronunciations were still different in the different countries, and in response to the successful internationalisation of the erudite pronunciation, the ecclesiastical authorities started a battle to unify ecclesiastical Latin too; but instead of doing so through the finally thriving unified pronunciation of the erudites, which was in origin no less ecclesiastical than the vernacular ones, they decided to try and spread the traditional pronunciation of one country, Italy, to the rest of the world. Pope Pius X expressed this wish in a letter to the archbishop of Bourges in 1912 (cf. Op. cit., p. 108) and the anhistorical identification of ecclesiastical Latin with the vernacular pronunciation of modern Italian has been spreading since then. Yet even in the 1980s the last Spanish priests I heard using Latin were still firmly sticking to the Spanish pronunciation, and I know well that the vernacular German pronunciation of Latin is still the norm in that country. In any case, the demise of the use of Latin in the church seems to be making both the traditional local pronunciations in general, and the Italian one in particular, equally irrelevant. Leaving therefore the ecclesiastical Babel behind, we will now proceed to describe the classical pronunciation of Latin —which is sometimes given the name of prónúntiátió restitúta—, as the only authentic standard across borders, and indeed the only thriving one. As said before, the philologist has books available in which they can find lengthier explanations; but the majority of students should have enough with the following. For comparative purposes, British English so-called Received Pronunciation (RP) has been chosen as the standard. Vowels Latin has six vowel letters, the last one of which only appears in words of Greek origin: a e i o u y Latin has twelve main vowel sounds, since each one of the vowel letters can represent either of two sounds, one we call short and another we call long. The long sound can be indicated in writing by means of the apex, although, unfortunately, in the majority of texts this extremely beneficial mark is not used (in others it is substituted by the metrical macron, with the subsequent confusion between vocalic quantity and syllabic quantity): Short: a e i o u y Long: á é í ó ú ý Generally speaking we can say that the long sound is achieved by slightly lengthening in pronunciation the short sound; although this lengthening comes hand in hand with a greater effort of the articulatory organs, which slightly modifies not only the duration (quantity), but also the timbre (quality) of the sound of the vowel. English has very accurate equivalents for the Latin short vowels e (as English bed), i (bit), o (British RP pronunciation of pot) and u (put), and for the Latin long vowels á (British RP pronounciation of father, similar to General American pronunciation of odd), í (machine), ú (goose). Not so much for the rest of vowels: Latin short a is somewhat between the vowels in British RP cut and cat, Latin long ó is similar to British RP pronounciation of thought and even closer to certain less common American pronunciations of force, and Latin long é is unlike anything an English speaker is accustomed to articulate. The sound of vowels y and ý, originally Greek, is also foreign to English; they sound like French u, that is by rounding the lips as for the oo in goose, but saying an ee as in geese. The main difficulty native English speakers are likely to experience with Latin vowels derives from the fact that long vowels in English usually appear only in accented syllables, so it will prove challenging to put them in non accented ones, where they appear in Latin just as frequently as they do in accented ones; in fact, in non accented syllables, all vowels have a tendency in English to become a mere schwa [ə], which is a neuter vowel (the first a in about) that sounds like something in between Latin a, e, i, o, u and y, while at the same time being none of them in particular. This diminished pronunciation of the vowels hinders comprehensibility enormously and must be avoided at all costs in Latin. A secondary problem is that some of the Latin vowel sounds (e and o) never appear in an open syllable in English, so there will be a tendency to change them into diphthongs in words like 'mare', whose final e will tend to be pronounced as in English café, or 'homó', which will be made to rhyme with English homo. This should also be carefully avoided. We now indicate the pronunciation of each vowel by means of the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and we provide some examples that can be listened to by clicking on each one of them: a [a] ad, casa á [ɑ:] á, lána e [ɛ] et, senex é [e:] é, hérés i [ɪ] id, sitis í [i:] vís, fínis o [ɔ] ob, honor ó [o:] mós, nótor u [ʊ] ut, nurus ú [u:] tú, lúdus y [ʏ] typus ý [y:] gýrus Besides the twelve above, Latin has four short nasal vowel sounds, which appear only at the end of words and are indicated in writing by an –m which is called m cadúca and is pronounced as a consonant only when it’s followed by a word that doesn’t begin by a vowel or an h1. English, unlike French or Portuguese, has no nasalised vowels, so these may prove challenging for native English speakers. To nasalise a vowel, the air has to be sent up through the nose. In Latin, they are as follows: –am [ã] tam –em [ɛ̃] ídem –im [ɪ̃] sim –im [ʊ̃] tum ------- 1 If there follows a word that begins with a consonant other than h, the m cadúca changes in pronunciation according to the point of articulation of the following consonant, thus becoming labial before a labial (tam pulcher [tam.'pʊɫ.kɛɾ]), dental before a dental (tam turpis [tan.'tʊr.pɪs]), and velar before a velar (tam castus [taŋ.'kas.tʊs]).
Whereas any student can understand that we accurately know the writing usages of the Romans, as well as those of the users of Latin of any other later periods, it is a cause of greater confusion and even scepticism to affirm that we also know with great accuracy the pronunciation of Latin in the different stages of its long history, and in particular in classical times.
