Well, I had a lengthy guide to actual period accurate soundings but kept getting 404.
So I'll just summarise. Spatha should equal sbat(h)aa e.g the p is medial to a b (softer than in our language) the th is NOT fricative and the final vowel in long. Oh and all vowels are very open like Greek or Italian (though ignore Italians accentuation) and the /s/ is voiced exactly how it is in Greek too.
Good luck with that. I'm not even going to open the can of worms that is the other words though out of all these Tarbicus' examples are perhaps the most accurate. It doesn't matter though, did you grow up mono lingual only speaking English? yeah you'll never get these meditteranean/asiatic soundings down then. Plenty of professional Classicists only get it after years and years in this case.
Out of all the modern European languages I can think of, Greek is the only one to be able to render these phonemes repeatedly with accuracy. Oh and final nasals were often elided too btw hence the myriad problems we face in reconstituting texts.
Good luck...I'd personally just ignore any pedant telling you off.
Well... this is how we pronounce these words in Greek : Notice that we do not stress consonants as much as Anglosaxons do and that our vowels are open and simple.
Had to zip these sound files. Unfortunately I could not just post the wmas...
How close our understanding of phonetics is to the original (Byzantine, Hellenistic, Classical, Archaic etc etc etc) is of course highly debatable but I think that it still is the best guess and the "Greekest" way of pronouncing stuff...
Macedon MODERATOR Forum rules
George C. K.
῾Ηρακλῆος γὰρ ἀνικήτου γένος ἐστέ
Yep, pretty much how I pronounce stuff when not having to put on my philologists hat. I recently had a very odd situation where a first year undergrad tried to correct my reading of Homer based on taking a too modern Greek pronunciation, so I sat them down explained why they're being an idiot and sent them off with a reading list. Grrr.
Incidentally though our grasp of the phonetics of ancient Greek etc is pretty damn good. I know this constantly surprised non philologists but..yeah...its a highly complex thing where the sound of ancient Greek is a very very small part. Basically disagreeing with it in most cases is also like saying you're against the way how German, Hindi, English (and their older versions too) are pronounced. The sheer amount of evidence is ridiculously overwhelming. In the case of Greek the modern speech itself provides many clues to the ancient.
Do suggest some good read on ancient Greek phonetics. I have in vain been (albeit casually) trying to look into the way that such approaches are being made for long and have found none that have satisfied me in terms of methodology and actual study rather than a pronunciation guide. Would you try to read Homer as an archaic Greek would, as an inhabitant of classical Athens or hellenistic Alexandria? It stands to reason that all these people read Homer in their own "dialects" which could be as different in pronunciation as British English is to American (or in Greece of today, as Corcyrian to Cretan)...
Macedon MODERATOR Forum rules
George C. K.
῾Ηρακλῆος γὰρ ἀνικήτου γένος ἐστέ
Quote:I'm not even going to open the can of worms that is the other words...I'd personally just ignore any pedant telling you off.
I think most people, excepting very scrupulous classicists, would have to draw the line somewhere in the pursuit of 'accurate' pronunciation. Not many English speakers seem comfortable with Yulius Kaiser and his 'Weni Widi Wiki' :wink:
Besides, 'correct' latin doesn't necessarily reflect the way that the ancients themselves might have pronounced the language. I was amused to read (in Potter's The Roman Empire at Bay) that Septimius Severus, who retained a strong Punic accent throughout his life, may have referred to himself as Sheptimiush Sheverush (which makes him sound a bit like Sean Connery...) Georgacus, in his essay The Names of Constantinople, suggests (based on papyrii and inscriptions) that both Latin and Greek speakers may have called their emperor Costantinus... :|
Well Nathan you do bring up something interesting; dialectical variation in Latin. We know from inscriptions that it was pretty rampant, in particular in areas which previously spoke related Italic languages. As for Septimus...well I can't say, one of the apparent phonological features of Punic rendered into Latin was the tendency to aspirate like that. HOWEVER we know that from an early period people specifically attempted to change their elocution...so I'd be sort of surprised if he didn't manage to de-punicise.
the V in Latin was indeed a /w/ for a long period of time, but obviously before we get to Juvenal's time this was changing. The /r/ was in fact an alveolar sound.
Macedon:
Interesting questions, I love grappling with these. It depends on period! the Greeks viewed the form and function of language/literature in a different light than we did. There are a few salient points here:
Homeric Greek is a fake language built of many dialects in the first place, however the rhapsodic context would have ensured a level of uniformity in the pronunciation. Even in Hellenistic times necessity of metrics would ensure this long after the major guilds had perished.
Later dialectical variation isn't massively a problem, literary forms were often tied to dialect. It would be madness for, say, an Aeolic speaker to write Bucolic in anything other than Doric.
Re: studies. Well it depends what you're after, there is general agreement amongst linguists nowadays in the salient points so there isn't much stuff fun to argue over anymore. I would say that in general its best to approach from a general grounding in phonetics first.
However I would in particular have to recommend Horrock's "A History of the Greek Language and its Speakers" (the new, 2011, edition) and Lejeune's "Phonétique historique du mycénien et du grec ancien" though slightly out dated, the newer edition remains a handy guide to pronunciation over and above the usual stuff (Allen's Vox Graece etc).
Other than that the usual comparative philology stuff is very helpful, so Fortson (Oxford), Clackson (Cambridge)etc.
Its hard to whittle the list down, I have several pages worth of reading. But then again I guess most people just want to see how we work/the evidence and don't care about the evidence (or lack of) for a soft delta earlier than the 4th century etc.
EDIT: PS "correct" Latin/Greek is wholly dependant on the period you're working on. Don't read the bible whilst trying to be Plato, similarly Ennius is voiced much differently to Cicero.
Quote:HOWEVER we know that from an early period people specifically attempted to change their elocution...so I'd be sort of surprised if he didn't manage to de-punicise.
I believe it's the dubious Historia Augusta that mentions Severus retaining a Punic accent until old age - but Birley, I think, found it 'plausible'.
Quote:the V in Latin was indeed a /w/ for a long period of time, but obviously before we get to Juvenal's time this was changing.
That's good to know! So we don't have to call the Wigiles or read Wegetius! Why specifically before Juvenal though?
It seems like the kind of perverse thing the Historiae author would write doesn't it? I suppose it is possible.
Well I cite Juvenal largely for the fact that its roughly around that time and during that text specifically that I noticed that tendency for /w/ to behave like /v/. I also noticed the kind of...well not exactly misuse but the beginning of the decline of the future tense i.e instead we get either participle or habeo + infinitive formations instead of "I will X".
I'm not sure how exact the timing is off the top of my head, in truth I'm not a Latinist outside of my comparative philology role and begin to lose interest in the tongue during the early empire so after that I've only read what I've been forced too.
I just checked Sihler's grammar and sv phonology of says that whilst it began to fricatise during the Imperial period* there is some evidence that as late as the 5th century AD some dialects kept the softer /w/ sound!!!!!
* So essentially around Juvenal's time, maybe later. We can tell due to a) inscriptions and b) loanwords into other languages like Greek (so the month name noembros, or names like Oualerios < Valerius) or Germanic (so we say "wine" < vinum) and c) copyist errors in texts.
