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.

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  :)

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"  ;)

Also one must remember that the Romancelangs are not directly derived from
Classical Latin, but from the Vulgar Latin of the later Empire which
differed in several ways from the literary language, including the
pronunciation (e.g. the long & short vowel system of Classical Latin was
not preserved; VL, however, had qualitative differences, such as /E/ and
/e/, which were not significant in CL).

Ray.




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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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