Re: Latin vowel inventory

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003 21:39:52 -0400, Christopher Wright <faceloran@...>
wrote:

>Hello.
>
>I was reading a TY (Teach Yourself) Latin book and looked at the
>pronunciation section. This is what it said, converted to SAMPA, of course:
>
>(left indicates "long" vowel, right indicates "short" vowel)
>a /A/, /@/
>e /e/ (or /ej/), /E/
>i /i/, /I/
>o /o/, /A/
>u /u/, /U/
>y /y/
>
>Needless to say, I was dismayed that Latin might be so similar to English.
>I think rather that the writer of the book, namely one Gavin Betts, is an
>idiot who has no idea how it was pronounced. It's good for my sanity.
Note that Teach Yourself books are originally published in England, and
they always use British pronunciations. So "o as in not" is [Q], like the
vowel in some American pronunciations of "naught" (for American English
speakers who distinguish between "naught" and "not"). Similarly, "u in but"
isn't as high as [@] in British pronunciation, more like [6]. But these
vowels differ in length as well as quality in British pronunciation, so I
imagine it's the length in this case that's significant, and the exact
quality of the vowels probably isn't very much like the way Latin was
actually pronounced.