Re: VW (was: Digest 2 Apr)

> At 2:25 pm -0400 4/4/01, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> >On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Raymond Brown wrote:
> [snip]
> >> is unprovable.  We can be fairly certain, I think, that it was a labial
> >> approximant of some sort; but whether it was the bilabial [w] of British &
> >> American English, or the labio-dental (denoted rather oddly IMO as [P] in
> >> SAMPA, a stylized lower case upsilon in real IPA) of Indian sub-continental
> >> English, we simply do not - and cannot - know.
> >[snip]
> >Oh dear.  This will teach me not to take Wheelock's pronunciation guide
> >literally.  <guilty look>
>
> Wheelock is actually one of the best text books I've come across in showing
> a fairly accurate (as far as one can tell) guide to classical Latin
> pronunciation; he is particularly good at indicating vowel length and word
> stress in a consistent way.
Okay.  Thanks for clearing that up.

(I do confess that in the 3rd ed., which we're using in class, I have to
squint to tell if accented syllables are also long syllables...but that's
attributable to my lousy eyesight more than anything else.)

> But it is a text-book for people who want to learn a language no longer
> spoken; so one cannot expect it to go into the finer points of what may or
> may not have been exactly the way particular sounds were made.  In any
> case, even if we did have precise knowledge that the Roman u-consonant was
> a labiodental approximant, would there be any point in a text book like
> Wheelock's making a fuss about this when the English /w/ is a close enough
> sound?  One's not likely to meet an ancient Roman  :)
<G>  The prof told us we didn't have to bother rolling the r's if we
couldn't manage it (I still can't do trills consistently).

> Wheelock, I think, would not claim that the pronunciation he shows is 100%
> accurate.  If you followed Wheelock, you could probably say Latin that
> would be intelligible to an educated Roman around the 1st centuries BC and
> AD; but your Latin would necessarily be spoken "modo barbaro"  ;)
OC any Roman meeting someone of my appearance would definitely take me as
a barbarian Asian.  =^)  O, for a horse and a bow...

YHL, dreaming friendly Mongol-inspired dreams

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