Whenever I hear people object to the reconstructed pronunciation, the biggest issue is usually that they can't stomach the idea of v being pronounced as /w/. Is that sound somehow objectionable? It exists in a lot of languages. Why do people find the idea of the Romans pronouncing it this was as somehow ridiculous?
Reaction to the pronunciation of v/u.
- Thread starter Clemens
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I wasn't aware it was controversial, but one possible reason that I can think of is that /w/ is relatively rare in Romance languages, and when it does occur it almost never comes from a Latin /w/, except in the combination /kw/ I think. Whereas in the other cases where the classical pronunciation differs from how a Romance speaker would spontaneously read a given word, it's usually because of an exception to a well established rule (e.g. in French <c> is usually pronounced /k/ *except* before <e i y>), so it's a comparatively smaller leap.
Is it rare? I'm thinking of all the French words with oi or Spanish words with hu. What I've heard from people is more things like they think it's ridiculous that Caesar might have said /we:ni:/ rather than /ve:ni:/, for example.
Maybe that's all it is.
Come to think of it, as far as that particular word is concerned, maybe they find its classical pronunciation ridiculous because it sounds somewhat like "Wiki(pedia)", bar the vowel lengths...
I vaguely remember someone mentioning a joke about civis/kiwis at some point...
I vaguely remember someone mentioning a joke about civis/kiwis at some point...
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Not that rare, but like I said it doesn't come from a Latin /w/, but rather from later phonological changes as in boire (which was at some point actually pronounced something like /bojr/, then /bwer/). Similar thing happened with Spanish <hu>, /we/ often comes from a tonic /o/.
But yeah maybe it has nothing to do with all that!
It still sounds a bit like that in Walloon, though more exactly /bwe:r/, I think.
Doesn't surprise me, Northern Oil varieties tend to preserve that /e/ or /e:/.
There are some Central Italian dialects where the outcome of Latin v is indeed /w/. They, of course, also have /w/ as the outcome of Latin /b/ between vowels. Most likely we have here Proto-Romance */β/ > Centr.It. /w/. A circular development in cases where Latin originally had /w/, true, but one has to account for the data from all the other Romance languages, including those spoken north and south of Central Italian (or, indeed, other dialects of the latter which have /v/).
That may have added to one side's argument, but I'm pretty sure the debate predates the 'Wiki' term (or am I wrong to think that term isn't quite as old as the Internet?).
Regina Coeli is another example I have heard against classical pronunciation. It seems to be what the hearer is used to is what it "should be."
I'm not well versed in language by any means, but some things I heard in my time were:
1. The classical pronunciation, since its differences from ecclesiastical all tend to favor Germanic phonics, was a Protestant tactic against the Catholic church.
2. The romance languages should be our guide in pronouncing Latin, with Italian being weightiest due to its proximity, but the other four (I think? -French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian) also having influence. - Not sure how that would work, really - it wasn't laid out for me, just posited.
I don't really have a dog in this fight, but do either of those have any merit?
Interesting! Circular developments are fun, the other day I read about a case in some Indic language where a given phoneme had gone through a pretty long series of changes, only to come back to its original pronunciation a few centuries later. There's also something I've noticed recently in the French of France: much like <oi>, <o(u)e oê> is pronounced /wa/ in some words, at least in Parisian French (poêle /pwal/, moelle /mwal/, couenne /kwan/), but in the past, I don't know, 10 years or so I've been hearing a lot more the pronunciation /wɛ/. It's probably due to the influence of spelling, but indeed it also reflects an earlier stage of French phonology. But I'm digressing!
Those are what we sometimes call the "big 5" Romance languages, because they're the ones with the greatest number of speakers and are official national languages in one or more countries, but there are many more Romance languages (how many is up for debate). But Pacifica mentioned Walloon in Belgium, Imperfacundus the Central Italian languages, other notable ones include Gallician, Catalan or Occitan.
As for the arguments you bring up, I don't know enough about the debate/controversies surrounding this topic, but what you said about Germanic languages did cross my mind. I do feel like /w/ (and even more so the letter <w>) is treated/used to be treated partly as a foreign sound in French at least, for instance even Germanic names such as Walter were rendered with a /v/ instead. And so I wouldn't be surprised if that Romance-centered point of view had had an influence on how people thought Latin ought to sound like.
Really? I would never have thought it would be pronounced with /a/. (I do pronounce poêle and moelle with /a/, though.)
We in Belgium say words like wagon and WC with /w/ where I think you guys say /v/.
Yup, I don't know if that is/was standard for my dialect (Parisian) but that's how people pronounced it where I grew up. Actually I still have that silly memory of hearing a girl say /kwɛn/ and being shocked, back when I was like 8 years old, I still remember it to this day :')
Oh right now that you say it I do remember it being a difference between Belgium and France. Indeed we use /v/ in all these words.
Wiktionary gives both pronunciations.
It's not as if "couenne" were such a common word around here, so maybe I (and the few people I've heard pronounce it) just assumed the /ɛ/ pronunciation from the spelling.
Yeah, hard to say with such a rare word. All I know is that other than that Incident with that girl, I'd never heard that pronunciation for most of my life until I started hearing it from people in cooking shows, including some who otherwise seemed to speak the exact same dialect as I do.
Also, only now does it occur to me that that difference in the treatment of <w> between French of France and Belgian French may be due to the influence of Flemish?
Also, only now does it occur to me that that difference in the treatment of <w> between French of France and Belgian French may be due to the influence of Flemish?
It sounds possible but I don't really know.
We also have /w/ in words like nuit whereas you guys have some weird kind of sound there that I can't quite wrap my head around.
I remember a few years ago Godmy was comparing the sound of the u in Latin qui to that French sound of yours, saying something to the effect of "The qu wasn't actually /kw/ but the u was a sound more like in French nuit" and I was like "What the hell? The sound in nuit is /w/ to me" and Godmy told me that no, it was different and I must be mishearing myself. Then I said perhaps it was a matter of dialect... and a while later I found out that it was indeed so. I had to post again on the thread to let Godmy know that I had proof I hadn't been mishearing myself.
(See: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nuit)
I remember a few years ago Godmy was comparing the sound of the u in Latin qui to that French sound of yours, saying something to the effect of "The qu wasn't actually /kw/ but the u was a sound more like in French nuit" and I was like "What the hell? The sound in nuit is /w/ to me" and Godmy told me that no, it was different and I must be mishearing myself. Then I said perhaps it was a matter of dialect... and a while later I found out that it was indeed so. I had to post again on the thread to let Godmy know that I had proof I hadn't been mishearing myself.
(See: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nuit)
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I love that sound, probably in part due to its rarity. I really like Belgian French phonology, but you're missing out on loads of fun with that one!
I'd never heard that it was how it was pronounced in Latin, very interesting! Funnily enough in the traditional French pronunciation of Latin (which I suppose is pretty much the same in France and Belgium) we pronounce it /kw/.I remember a few years ago Godmy was comparing the sound of the u in Latin qui to that French sound of yours, saying something to the effect of "The qu wasn't actually /kw/ but the u was a sound more like in French nuit" and I was like "What the hell? The sound in nuit is /w/ to me" and Godmy told me that no, it was different and I must be mishearing myself. Then I said perhaps it was a matter of dialect... and a while later I found out that it was indeed so. I had to post again on the thread to let Godmy know that I had proof I hadn't been mishearing myself.
It'd doubly interesting that you should bring up that sound because actually I've noticed that some Belgians, who unsurprisingly pronounce nuit /nwi/, actually tend to use /ɥ/ in English words where we would use /w/. Here's an example:
And I noticed the same phenomenon from other people as well and came to the conclusion it was standard in Belgian French, but apparently not from what you're saying. In any case, strange stuff happening with /w/ in French.