Ok, I didn't know that, I simply went after the sound vs. orthography resemblance...
do Americans have the worse accents when speaking Latin?
- Thread starter kylefoley202
- Start date
As a French what immediately strikes me are the dark Ls everywhere. I don't know if this is the American influence or an intentional feature of the reconstructed pronunciation.
This is perhaps disputed, but at least according to W. S. Allen in Vox Latina, the Latin L was likely dark in final and pre-consonantal position, and light elsewhere—pretty much like in English. Here's the evidence he cites:
So, whether the people on that radio do this intentionally or merely by chance because it comes naturally to them as English speakers, maybe they're doing it right!
By the way, I'm currently working on a huge project that includes Latin recordings, and I've adopted the dark L in the positions prescribed by Allen (rightly or wrongly, who can really tell?).
I rather like the sound of a word like nihil when pronounced that way. It does sound oddly, but also somehow delightfully, Anglophonic...
I rather like the sound of a word like nihil when pronounced that way. It does sound oddly, but also somehow delightfully, Anglophonic...
Thank you Pacifica, I had found similar information on Wikipedia but not with that much detail, it's all the more interesting to understand how this came to be established because dark Ls seem rather exceptional in modern Romance languages as far as I can tell (I speak zero Portuguese but I often seem to hear the name Brasil in Portuguese with such a dark L that it almost sounds like a W, not sure if this qualifies tough).
Interesting, I had no idea. Funny how this same sound has now become a major difficulty for Many French speakers of English.
I suppose that beau might be a back formation from beaux to its redesigned singular (albeit it might also result from how it was pronounced when preceding a word starting with a consonant), but the French elles preceded by a vowel and followed by a consonant indeed tended to voice the sonorant, which resulted to the apparition of an u.
And it seems that it happened both within a word:
autre < aultre < altre < alterũ < alterum
beaux < beaulx < bels < bellos (but belles < bellas, belle < bellã < bellam and bel < bellũ < bellum)
outre < oultre < ultra
And at the junction of two words:
bel‿enfant: vowel-sonorant-vowel; while beau garçon (< bel garçon): vowel-sonorant-consonant.
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Fun fact: the word "faith", which of course comes from Old French, was pronounced pretty much the same way in that language as it now is in English. Wiktionary gives the "archaic" Old French pronunciation as /ˈfei̯θ/ (it changed in later stages, and the /θ/ was lost). That looks only marginally different from Modern English /feɪθ/.