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Re: Quick Latin pronunciation question

From:Jeffrey Jones <jsjonesmiami@...>
Date:Sunday, May 25, 2008, 7:23
On Sun, 25 May 2008 16:31:03 +1000, Tristan McLeay
<conlang@...> wrote:
> >On 25/05/08 16:13:27, Eugene Oh wrote: >> >> "Radius, radii" is an example. And "-ii-" words I presume should be >> more or less plural-only in English. > >Oh of course... > >> If I'm not mistaken they're pronounced as sequences of the vowel. I >> suppose one could detect a faint glide in between if one so chose. >> Then again I'm not necessarily correct. But that's how I pronounce my >> Latin. I'd like to be corrected too, if I'm wrong. > >But how did it interact with length? Was one element or the other >invariable long? (and if so, was it consistently one or the other --- I >notice that English treats the first vowel of "continuum" as long, but >the second of "radii"). Were they necessarily distinct from a long >vowel? (if not, that could explain "vacuum"). Was length completely >independent of this issue? > >-- >Tristan.
1. I assume you're asking about classical Latin pronounced the way the ancients are thought to have done, at least when giving speeches or reciting poetry. 2. By "long" WRT English, I assume you're referring to historical length, not the phonetic length occurring in the various kinds of modern English. 3. I also assume length in Latin is used in a strictly quantitative sense. First, length in English has little to do with length in Latin. As a rule, a vowel is short before another vowel is short. Exceptions include forms of FIO, pronominal genitive singulars (such as UNIUS), and a few other things. Final I is long, except in a few words. Except in diphthongs, two consecutive vowels were in separate syllables, so: /"ra.di.i:/ and /"wa.ku.um/. I'm not sure how hiatus was handled -- differences in vowel quality may have helped in some cases -- but I think that if the vowels were combined into a single long vowel that the Romans would have written one letter. Probably Ray will come along with a better answer. Jeff

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Ray Brown <ray@...>