Re: Latin Pronunciation

[Dennis <ixohoxi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jorge Stolfi wrote:
> 
>     > [Dennis:] I have a question of my own. One of the nuisances with
>     > Latin is that vowel length is phonemic, a contrasting
>     > distinction, but vowel length is only marked in textbooks. What
>     > happened in medieval Latin? Were vowel lengths forgotten?
> 
> But, did vowel length play a significant role? I suspect that
> constrasting pairs were rather rare, so the loss of that particular
> bit would not have made much difference.

	The only case I can think of is in the second
declension - "femina" = "(the) woman",  
"femina:" = "by (the) woman".  But that's the only
example I can think of (I'm very far from an expert!). 
If that was the only big difference, they could have
safely ignored vowel length.


   I read somewhere that the Romans sometimes tried
things like an acute accent (á) or doubling the vowels
(aa). But I don't recall where I read that... Also,
poetry would indicate where short and long vowels were,
since the Romans imitated Greek hexameters based on
length.  Marginal notes occasionally might have made an
indication.  

> In any case, I noticed that some old Latin books (eg. Schmidl's Jesuit
> History, 17th c.) use diacritics, which the Romans certainly didn't use:
> 
>   Collegii Pragensis locupletissimum hoc quoque anno Caelum sibi
>   vendicavit, /Jacobum/ inquam /Horcziczky/, Latinis postea dictum
>   /Sinapium/. Hunc Virum Fortuna pedentim per varios gyros ex imis
>   provexit ad sublimia eíque constanti ( quod rarum ) vultum arrisit.
>   Fortunæ verò suæis ipsus ( DEO conatus promovente ) dexterrimus
>   faber existit, unáque ostendit, quid possit humanum ingenium ; si
>   modò, qua in re excellere possit, ipsémet animadvertas , eóque
>   culturam & industriam conferas. Itaque /Jacobus/ obscuro loquo
>   natus, in coquina Collegii Crumloviensis Coco primùm lixarum operam
>   diutinam puer addixit. Quia verò ingeniosor apparebat, quàm
>   ferendum censerem Nostri, ut inter fumos obsolesceret ; è culina
>   extractus, & ad Musas traductus est. Literis mansuetioribus
>   utcunque perceptis, Pharmacopaeo ejusdem Collegii, Fratri nostro
>   /Martino Schaffner/, ab Arte Medica, sed eâ praesertim, quam
>   /Botanicam/, /Chymiquamque/ vocant, longè latéque celebratissimo
>   (1), additus est : cujus dum artem omnem docili ingenio,
>   attentísque & oculis, & auribus, assiduè hauris sedulo tyro ;

	I've no better idea.

> 
>     > Here's a classic book on how Latin in the time of the
>     > Roman empire was pronounced:
>     >
>     > Vox Latina : A Guide to the Pronunciation of
>     > Classical Latin by William Sidney Allen. (June 1989)
>     > Cambridge Univ Pr (Pap Txt); ISBN: 0521379369
> 
> Well, it is great to have some hard reference. However, quoting the
> Fortean Times, "for every expert there is an equal and opposite
> expert".

	I haven't read Vox Latina in a long time.  It played a
big part 
in developing my interest in languages; I read when I
was 13.  
I think Vox Latina used the evidence I noted above.   

> The official story, it seems, is that Romance languages were derived
> from a "vulgar" form of Latin, which had acquired the soft
> pronunciations; while the educated Romans of Caesar's time used a
> polished form of the language, with the hard sounds.

	That's the story I've heard too.

> It is a fact that in virtually all Romance languages, from Portugal to
> Romania, the Latin letters "c" and "g" correspond to "soft" sounds
> when they occur before "e" and "i". While convergent evolution in all
> those languages is a possibility, it seems more likely that the same
> feature was already present in their common ancestor --- namely the
> Latin of the Roman armies and settlers in the 2nd century AD.
> 
> The exceptions to the soft-C pronunciation are some dialects of
> Sardinian, which apparently have split off from Latin at a much
> earlier date than the rest of Romance. 

	I looked at some examples of Sardinian a while back.  
It was almost like Latina sine Flexiones or Eurix.  

Dennis