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It's all cute and sh*t, but to convince people, to break their personal incredulity it would be much more effective to just show people speaking modern languages that kept that long and short syllable distinction: look, those people exist, it's not some made up or misunderstood bee ess 20th century scientists came up with.
The fact that o and ō were indistinguishable for afrikans doesn't prove they had the same quality. No, I'm not disbelieving you, I'm just saying that this fact is probably one of the weakest pieces of evidence. To a russian ear, for example, ee from sheep and i from mist are the same sounds. To us it's just и. And we mostly rely on (you're gonna laugh) syllable length to distinguish ship and sheep.
Just show us some practical steps how to learn to pronounce long vowels when speaking fast. Nobody has problems with them when saying "noooooonegonoooooobiliuuuuuumseteyoooooo..." at 10 words per minute.
As a native Czech speaker I cannot agree more. However, if you learnt typing on a computer in the 80’s or early 90’s on an EN keyboard layout you may tend to type without any diacritis in informal context. Since I program on an EN keyboard it’s more natural for me to drop diacritics when chatting. I switch to CZ keyboard only when I writing documentation, letters (formal) emails or filling forms. Younger generations taught to CZ keyboard layout even program on it. Which makes my head spin, seeing all those AltGr combinations for things like {}&@#. And don’t even let me start about the QWERTY vs. QWERTZ. BTW, there’s a joke coming from the times of various incompatible character encodings of 90’s: “Effing diacrtitics! Why the heck was Hus not burnt earlier?!?” (Jan Hus replaced earlier Czech digraphs with diacritics in his Czech language reform, before he tried to reform the Church which led him to a pyre...). Actually, the old spelling is still preserved in the English word “Czech” itself.
@@vaclavblazek Czech letters are good for all Slavic languages. I sometimes use the Czech keyboard layout for chatting with a Russian friend. I thought I would prefer the correct transliteration of Russian with Latin letters. But I also often just use the plain English transcription with sh, ch, zh etc. And I use the Russian “phonetic” keyboard layout where keys are located like on the Western one, although there are some inconsequences that annoy me: Russian X should be at Latin H, but is at Latin X. Instead, Russian Ч is at Latin H. And other oddities. The special Russian letters Ш Я Ю Э Ж are spread over the edges of the keyboard, often under Latin symbol signs. The ь is always difficult to find. But most annoying is that .,:;-/? signs are at other locations than I’m used to from the Danish layout, where .,?: etc are located differently from the standard American layout. The result is even between the three methods. In basic, neither seems faster than the other. The Czech transliteration looks correct, but feels clinical and scientific. But with the Cyrillic layout I get Russian spelling control, at least on my iPhone. Which means autocomplete. Then I only need to write half a word and it knows what I am thinking. The Bolsheviks had several plans to switch to Latin writing. Eščë ėto ne polučilos’.
@@vaclavblazek I understand the struggle, I use an Italian layout for both programming and normal writing. Now, for some weird reason "È" was not included in the standard Italian layout and I couldn't even write "È una bella giornata" ("it's a nice day") - or any sentence starting with "it's" fot that matter - without opening charmap. So I used MSKLC (Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator) to map some characters to my keyboard. I added ~, ` for programming, thankfully {}[]()! were already present; I also added some Greek letters and they're really useful for writing engineering/math formulas like ω=2πf or v=λf... and some german characters, äöüß, because why not. Every key can have 4 different characters mapped to it, so there should be plenty of space to add new characters (can be ascii or unicode, so even emojis work I think. For emojis though, I just press Windows + . (dot) 😂).
Your reading of poetry is beautiful. I'm a new Latin learner, and I had no idea how incredible its poetry can sound. Gave me shivers, I've never heard anything like it before
This is a breakthrough for me. Like so many others, I was taught Latin at school but hated it, mainly because it just didn't feel like language to me. It didn't sound like human utterance. It just wasn't taught with any sense that there was anything beautiful about it. It was more akin to a mathematical puzzle. But the way you speak it, I can hear the music and imagine real people using this as language, and the poetry comes alive too and actually sounds poetic! Who knew? 😊
Ditto for Dutch (duplicated vowel = long, single vowel = short); for example, as in the first syllable of the following two words: appel = apple aardvarken = aardvark
@@posfr292 in het Nederlands verandert de klinker niet alleen van lengte maar ook van, nahja, klinker! Korte a,e,i,u,o klinken als /ɑ/,/ɛ/,/ɪ/,/ʏ/,/ɔ/ en lange aa,ee,ie,uu,oo klinken als /aː/,/eː/,/i/,/y/,/oː/ (de driehoekjes na een klinker duiden aan dat zij lang is). Lange ie en uu zijn qua duur even lang als korte i en u! In het Latijn is echt het enige verschil tussen korte e (/ɛ/) en lange ē (/ɛː/) hoe lang je de klinker aanhoudt.
When I studied Latin in Italy I had 2 types of symbols: ă and ā. The first was for short vowels, but was only written for disambiguation (example: rosă - nominative - versus rosā - ablative), and no one cared to pronounce long vowels, including the teacher. Thank you for being a much better teacher. The way you read is like a chant, it's beautiful, and makes me want to learn again 😍
16:14 Oh my goodness, I've never heard an American doing a perfect impression of a German speaking Latin... immediately followed by an equally impeccable impression of an Italian speaking Latin.
So interesting! It’s hard to believe that I’ve studied Latin for years and years without knowing that the Romans marked long vowels. By the way, I’ve been listening to Daniel Pettersson’s recording of Ad Alpes, and at least to my ear it sounds like he adheres to vowel quantity distinctions not only assiduously but mellifluously!
Luke, soy de Argentina, y recién comienzo a estudiar Latín Clásico (pronuntiatio restituta). Me has abierto un mundo fascinante con tu profundo conocimiento de esta Lengua. La cuestión de la cantidad vocálica es absolutamente central, y veo que los profesores no tratan este tema con la importancia que se merece, y que tú le das. Gracias por abrirme este aspecto tan importante sobre el Latín!!
It is. I never heard an italian speaking latin, even with Reconstructa, like you. 😅😅😅 Anyway, dear Luke, you are making a very interesting work. Thank you. I hope Latin will be the language of European Union, as Uk leave it.
@@mauropodda4258I also believe Latin should be a anguage of the European Union. I prefer Classical Latin, by the way, with its beautiful idioms and the long and short vowels preserved.
That is really interesting, man. I did not know the heightened "i" was used to indicate length, and was not very familiar with the use of apices, since, as you indicated, most of them have worn away with time. I love learning about vowel length in Latin, because it's so inextricably bound up with the study of the poetry. Superbly presented video, dude.
Thanks for watching, bro! And thanks for your comments. Much obliged again for showing me Ausonius! That was very enlightening and filled a gap I had in the Late Latin period.
I just added Māori onto my keyboard and then immediately afterwards watched this video. It was a little tricky to do on my own, but there are videos on youtube showing us how to do it, which I guess is what took UA-cam to take me here. Thanks for this, the amount of time and effort you must put into them is much appreciated.
Some people use the apex, but the acute is generally used for other qualities (Such as stress), so it's better to use the macron to avoid confusion imo.
I am about to start teaching Latin at a grammar school this autumn I've never been shown the importance of this in my previous 12 years of study. And I'm Czech, too, so we understand what a difference it can make! :O
I’d like to thank you for these videos. You are enriching our parish Latin class with your talks. Many of us have found them immensely helpful. For myself, I think the videos on the use of macrons and on the proper pronunciation of the letter R to be the most useful. And I’ve come to MUCH better understand why young Romans would study Rhetoric. It must have gone much further than grammar and vocabulary, and included how to make your speeches sound almost musical in nature, to heighten their impact. It has made little difference that we use ecclesiastical pronunciation, but has made us happy at the respect you have given to our “accent” 😂
I think these videos are very interesting because Spanish, Italian, French, English, German... speakers tend to neglect vowel quantity, which is really important in Latin. Writing Latin with macrons can help to give vowel quantity the significance it deserves. I love that you always claim the difference between short and long vowels
Very fascinating topic. What interests me is that your English accent has not completely undergone the wine-whine merger. You sometimes pronounced the digraph as [ʍ] and sometimes as [w]. Did you grow up in the South Eastern US?
Thanks so much for watching! And haha yes you noticed that. This comes from being a teacher and also studying many English dialects, accents, and pronunciations. I don’t natively pronounce wh as a distinct phoneme, but when I read it or speak slowly I often pronounce it out of habit since I do this when I speak Shakespearean English in the original pronunciation. Natively I wouldn’t explode the T in Latin either, but I often do out of habit from public speaking.
Thanks for this video. I have always ignored the macrons... I will start writing, ornouncing and learning them 😅 I had always strugled to find audios of good read latin poetry. I am happy to have found you 😊
Great stuff! It is interesting how the apex resembles an acute accent (such as in Spanish), but instead is indicating vowel length instead of stress. Very interesting!
Interestingly, English does use phonemic vowel length-to help distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants. For example, say, "Have a seat." Now say, "Have a seed." The ē in the second example is longer. If you try to say, "Have a seed," but shorten it to the same length as "seat," you will sound like you're saying, "Have a seat," but with a cold. The same holds true for other voiced/unvoiced word-final consonant distinctions, such as "rope" vs. "robe," etc.
Salut, Henri! 😃 Merci pour ton commentaire! You are absolutely right about this distinction. It's a seemly subtle difference that native speakers recognise instantly when it's absent in the voice of a foreigner, and I always teach to my ESL students. However, I would not call this a phonemic contrast, since that usually applies to minimal pairs. There are no English words where we have a short /rob/ next to a long /ro:b/ that we distinguish, nor /rop/ vs. /ro:p/. The environment of the vowel, namely the following consonant's being voiced or unvoiced, makes the determination.
@@polyMATHY_Luke "There are no English words where we have a short /rob/ next to a long /ro:b/ that we distinguish, nor /rop/ vs. /ro:p/.".....erm, doesn't the English word "banāna" do that ?
@@bazcuda No, because it's a difference in vowel quality. Generally speaking, if there is some other factor involved, like a difference in vowel quality or consonant voicing which is implicated in the distinction alongside an apparent distinction in phonemic vowel length, the other factor is considered to take precedence, and the difference is explained as an allophonic variation forced by the relevant factor-at least, that's my understanding. In American varieties of English, banana is pronounced /bənænə/, for instance. In other varieties, I'm not so sure of the exact vowel qualities-I think it'd be something like /bənanə/ in RP-but the tendency is analogous.
Nope. seat and seed have the same length. But the t and d are different. But I think a lot of t-vowels are dropped or reconstructed to /d/. And actually the vowels aren't pronounced the same in different words. like school, but blood. Or tear and bear. So it is just historical orthography.
@@SchmulKrieger I think Henri de Marcellus is on to something here. I've been exploring his idea and it does seem we have some form of vowel length distinction in English in certain pairs of words, even though we don't identify it linguistically as such. Take the following word pairs: - greet vs. greed - beat vs. beed - feat vs. feed - crip vs. crib - but vs. bud - cup vs. cub - chuck vs. chug - puck vs. pug - bat vs. bad - mop vs. mob - cap vs. cab - cease vs. seize - peace vs. peas - sight vs. side - light vs. lied - rate vs. raid If you lengthen the vowel in the first word of each pair, or shorten the vowel in the second word of each pair, you will sound like a foreigner speaking English and will potentially be misunderstood. In the pairs involving a "t", this is especially true if the final "t" is unaspirated, as is often done in everyday English. It seems there is an unspoken rule that when a monosyllabic word ends in an unvoiced consonant, the vowel in that syllable becomes shortened in length. When the word ends in a voiced consonant, the preceding vowel is lengthened much in the same way as was shown in this video.
The funny thing is that although modern German does have phonemic vowel quantity distinction (cf. Miete - rent - vs. Mitte - middle, centre), most German Latin speakers ignore vowel quantity completely, because they were never taught in school.
I also found out that if one knows the macrons, the five conjugations of regular verbs in Latin become systematic. am(ā)- |(ē)- | bā- | rē- | bi- monē- | ā- | bā- | rē- | bi- reg- | ā- | ē+bā- | (i>e)rē- | ē- capi- | ā- | ē+bā- | (i>e)rē- | ē- audī- | ā- | ē+bā- | rē- | ē- 1. Short "i" before "r" becomes short "e". capi+re > capere. Same happens with a placeholder "i". reg+i+re > regere. 2. In future indicative, ē+bi- seems to have contracted due to "bi" being unstressed. amā́bis monḗbis regḗbis → regēs capiḗbis → capiēs audiḗbis → audiēs
Right, but only in stressed syllables. English, especially UK English, has the same phenomenon, but because both German and English don't have this in long words with multiple syllables, it's useful to figure out how to achieve the same thing in Latin, Ancient Greek, Finnish, Hungarian, Japanese, Estonian, Czech, etc.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I'm a bit confused, would say having two (or more) long vowels in one word is quite common German.. idk Vortrag, Fahrrad etc. I think the difference is that one can often shorten the unstressed syllable without sounding off, because there's no difference in meaning. Maybe an artificial example, but here this is not possible: Polenstaat, Polenstadt, Pollenstadt, Pollenstaat.
Arabic also has phonemic vowel length, but most vernacular forms lost the distinction. It is retained in Literary Arabic, which has only 4 vowels, and the distinction is most critical in Classical (Quranic) Arabic, which has only 3 vowels.
@@galliumarsenide Try the same without compound words. "Allee" vs "Ahlee" (still with stress on the "e") does not work. It may sound a bit weird, but it will not register as another word. Or if you take "Gebrechen" and "Gehbrechen" (clearly different words) and make the second e long and stressed, they are not different anymore.
Another difference in German is that not only the length changes but also the vowel quality, the "a" in Stadt is not a shorter version of the "a" in Staat but a slight different sound that make a vowel pair
I have an Android phone (Samsung Galaxy series) and my language settings menu has a selection for "lingua Latīna", which I have selected. What happens is, when I hold my finger on a vowel key, I get a display with various diacritical marks applied to that vowel, including one with a macron, which I have to move my finger over in order to type it.
I will start to use macra on my own writings. You convinced me ^^ Edit: Also as I revise my exercises and place the macra I see HOW MUCH more texture it gives to the language. Suddenly I am able to differentiate between the Noun Rēgis and the verb regis. Or the verbs mīseris and mīserīs. I feel like an entire universe of the language has opened to me and I can only say thank you!
Hey! I am just starting on this journey but for me, somehow, the beauty is in the slow deliberate pronunciation of each word. Like each word is precious and needs to be savored. It seems to give a sense of authority and power to the language that I haven't heard in any other language.
SALVE I"m all for marking long vowels, but prefer the use of letter height & APICES rather than macrons for Classical Latin. I also like to write in a single case-Capital, and use PVNCTA (or nothing) rather than word spacing &c. I also forgo modern punctuation and do not use anachronistic letters (j,u). I like the aesthetic of it as well as find it easier.
@Polymathy The keyboard SwiftKey, at least present on Android, has Latin as a language option, and enables macrons. Unfortunately, though it has a built in Latin library, and enabling macrons when typing, doesn't include the macrons in the quick type/auto correct library.
Truth is that even today in Italy we do instinctively use long and short vowels according to the effect we want to achieve So "OTTIMO" (OPTIMUS) can actually become "Ottimoo" or "OOttimo".
That's true. The only thing is that Latin has distinguished long and short vowels both in the spelling and the pronunciation. Latin grammar would not fully work without this distinction. Italian, however, only has echoes of Latin's long vowels due to double consonants and radoppiamento fonosintattico.
It's just an impression. It's probably from medieval "osu" with the standard dropping of the final vowel which is nonetheless retained in Aromanian in certain dialects. But I agree we're (mostly) awesome!
2:28 In Slovak, the vowel lengths aren't always obeyed though, like they are in Czech. They are subject to a "rhythmic law", which doesn't allow e.g. two long syllables to directly follow each other, so even if e.g. a certain verb form would regularly call for a long vowel, it will be shortened in some occasions. While I could intuitively pick up the strict vowel length rules in Latin, Japanese and Czech, the Slovak intonation/rhythm has always remained a mystery to me. I somehow notice how it's very different from Czech, but cannot reproduce it myself. I guess you have to be born that way 😄
There are esceptions in slovak, e.g. "páví". Slovak language has also etymologic rule, mean, need find source of the word. E.g. "hypermarket" (as in greek is hypo), but in polish is "hipermarket", as they use phonetic only unfortunately. There are more examples. But Slovak, is very cool, and use many time old vocabulary, lost in other languages. Can you read "Strč prst skrz krk"? And Slovak has also long R Ŕ (fŕkať), and long L Ĺ (jabĺk).
@@marekrejko strç prst skrz krk... Interesting. Since it's obviously impossible to pronounce that as is, my instinct as a Romanian is to add some minimal interconsonantal ʉ like "stʉrç pʉrst skʉrz kʉrk". Would that be correct? Obviously the vowel quality prolly differs. We have somewhat similar sounding words "stârc"(heron), "pârș"(dormouse), "cârcă" (lower neck + shoulders).
Great video, I never knew about apices! Fun fact, when I saw fēstā at 9:18 it reminded me of the confusion I had recently surrounding the fact that the romance languages point to the e being short in the substantivised noun, e.g. Sp. fiesta, Fr. fête! In all likelihood this is probably evidence that for uneducated speakers of Vulgar Latin vowel length was generally becoming less important. Also thanks for making me aware of that quote at 13:14; it's good evidence to show how important analogy was in the evolution of Latin. For example by Classical standards the Vulgar Latin insignāre should have had a long initial ī because it precedes 'ns', but Spanish and French both point to a short i, e.g. enseñar, enseigner. Thus there were probably speakers of VL who said ĭnsignāre, by analogy with the fact that in other positions in- was generally short. Such analogy can also explain why the 'n' wasn't lost as is usual. Allen talks about it on page 66 :)
Very good point about "fiesta"! Vulgar Latin has certain re-analysations that aren't exspected. Also very good point about in/en! I see you have read Vox Latina by Allen! :D
I know you've put more effort into pronunciation than most, but it's still surprising to hear an American get such a clean and natural [y]. Often people slip into one of the nearby vowels (as distinguished in the standard IPA vowel chart) like [ɨ] or [ʏ]
Great video! Two remarks: 1) We don't need to search for analogies in Finnish or Czech. Many other languages, among them German and English, do have vowel quantities, although they are combined with some difference in openness and place of articulation, which makes it less obvious. I'm not a specialist, but I've heard that in English you can actually indicate no less than FOUR very distinct vowel quantities (long, short, shortened long and lenghtened short). Think of the difference between words like "sheep" and "ship" - the difference consists mainly in the vowel length! In this case the difference is not phonemic, that's true, but this doesn't make it any easier for foreigners ;) and it can be used as an analogy to Latin. 2) You made it sound like the fact that people wrote metric poetry in Latin throughout the ages is evidence that they consistently pronounced vowel leghts correctly. It seems, however, that most of them didn't - writing poetry was part of the school curriculum for many centuries even in those parts of the world where we know for sure that vowel quantities were not pronounced. Writing hexameter is a science, you can learn it from dedicated textbooks and dictionaries. To be sure, it's not as exciting as Ovid's "sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos, et quod temptabam scribere versus erat", but it will do the job equally well.
Hi Katarzyna! I'm glad you (and Anbrūtal Brussian below) addressed the alleged pronunciation of vowel lengths in the post-classical times, as that was my main objection as well when watching Luke's thorough presentation. As you state, one does not have to pronounce the vowel lengths in order to write poetry. And as we all know, it is possible to "make sense" of quantitative verse without employing the full system of free distribution of long and short vowels in both stressed and unstressed syllables in the pronunciation, namely by stressing the ictus, a method that has existed at least as a pedagogical device from late antiquity and on. I know from my own experience (as I was taught to scan in that way in my first years of Latin study), that you can even internalize the syllable lengths in this way, and use it actively when composing poetry. For example, having read a lot of Vergil in this way, you would intuitively feel that it is wrong to use "cano" as a spondee, since you have never run across this word with the first syllable stressed (bearing the ictus). Anyway, I'm not claiming that, say, Petrarch read quantitative verse in this manner; it is quite possible that he retained the prose stresses. (I must admit I am not as knowledgeable in this question as I would want to be.) But even in that case I would be quite strongly inclined to believe that the extent to which he made an effort to preserve the classical vowel lengths in his pronunciation was restricted to poetry, and that when conversing in (prose) Latin, he used vowel lengths and qualities in the same way as in his native Italian. I think it is safe to say that it is true for all the various traditional pronunciations of Latin throughout Europe that they are restricted by the same phonotactical rules as the surrounding living languages; I can't really see how that could not be the case. Of course it is possible to use an Italianate pronunciation, but with classical vowel lengths, but that is not what is generally understood as the traditional Italianate (or "ecclesiastical" pronunciation), rather it is a mixture, I would say, of the traditional and the restored pronunciation.
Thanks for the comments, doctissima amīca! As to point 2) per my response to Victor below, I do *not* believe that Mediaeval people spoke Latin with consistently correct syllable length; my purpose in demonstrating the hexameters was to show that the best educated were capable of composing, and therefore reciting Latin in such a way. Since our Latin is a literary language first, and we neither seek to imitate the manner of speech or writing of the Oscan bread-sellers in Pompeii nor the jesters of Charlemagne, and instead strive to make alive the best of literature of all ages, I assert that it is appropriate to favor recognising syllable length in all varieties of Latin save the Mediaeval drinking songs inter alia - one of which will soon appear in the coming weeks on ScorpioMartianus with non-Classical pronunciation to boot! ;) - especially in our contemporary 21st century Latin, since that represents the highest achievement of our humanist majjōrēs: the revival of Classical Latin in word and sound. Though do not think me opposed to the exciting slang of common speech! for I do believe it has its place for us; J.N. Adam's Anthology of Informal Latin has given me a great many things to use in my discourse when I wish to be less urbane. And we know Martinus Loch is the true expert in these matters! :D To point 1) you are quite right about the vowel lengths in German and English, and having taught English as a second language, I am keen to explain that the difference between "cat" and "cad" and "pot" and "pod" is mostly a question of vowel duration, caused by the following voiced consonant (which is a fascinating phenomenon!), and as a German speaker I am also aware of the distinctions in German; in fact I would say they are more important in German, notably exemplified in their orthography, such as per the post-1996 German Spelling Reform, which now clarifies the usage of ß only after long vowels, e.g. 'Fuß', but not after short vowels as in 'muss'. I tend to favor using non-English/German vowel length examples, however, since, as you mentioned, these long vowels tend to occur exclusively in stressed syllables, and languages that dissociate stress from length, such as Finnish and Czech which both have syllable-initial stress (like proto-Latin is suspected to have had) and frequently end words with long syllables - Latin words like "animā," "iterum," "dominō" etc. are rhythmically comparable - or ones that don't have a concept of lexical stress at all, like Japanese, are much better to help the Anglo-Germanic mind (and Italian mind, for that matter) escape the familiarity of only lengthening stressed syllables. So anyway, that's my ratiō agendī. :)
Non rhotic accents of English are the ones which have vowel length distinction. In Southern British English is /bɪːd/ and contrasts with /bid/, is /fɛːd/ and contrasts with /fɛd/, the rest of the long vowels besides /ɪː/ and /ɛː/ are /ɑː/ /əː/ /oː/ as in START NURSE and FORCE (/ʊː/ as in POOR having merged with /oː/). Those long vowels of non rhotic English usually have a linking r when a vowel follows.
Dear Luke, this is an excellent and well-structured video that makes important and convincing points on a topic where there is only one correct conclusion, and what's disguised as disagreement is in reality mere excuses for the inability to follow and implement the correct conclusion on the part of the "disagreeing". However, I just cannot help pointing out to your viewers that the view that there existed *no vowel quality differences* in Classical Latin is purely your own and is *not shared by one single grammar or even paper* that I've seen (and I've specifically looked for them). Even the paper by Calabrese you're referencing here openly states that "the process differentiating the [ATR] values of short and long vowels must have already occurred around this time (= 1st century AD)." The pronunciation that you favour did of course exist, and it persisted in Cicero's times in the countryside. I believe this is precisely what he's referring to when he says: "Cotta from his habit of *using broad vowels* was as far removed as possible from resemblance to Greek enunciation, and, in contrast to Catulus, his speech had *a rural, downright rustic sound".* Remember that in rural Latin, there was a 7-vowel system with both closed (from original /ei/ and /ou/, which became /i:/ and /u:/ in Urban Latin) and open (from the original /e:/ and /o:/ as well as from monophthongisation of /ae/ and /au/, which were preserved in Urban Latin) long mid vowels. However, this is the non-strandard pronunciation; in the standard pronunciation of Urban Latin of Cicero's time, long vowels were most certainly pronounced higher in relation to short vowels. This is why Cicero heard the rustic closed /e:/
Speaking of thick French accent: can you honestly believe that father de Jouvancy, who wrote these extremely beautiful verses in the late 17th century, would even think of preserving vowel lengths? Or that anyone at the court of the Polish king, to whom this collection of poems was addressed, would bother to do so? ua-cam.com/video/Fl3772iUKd0/v-deo.html
*Even the paper by Calabrese you're referencing here openly states that "the process differentiating the [ATR] values of short and long vowels must have already occurred around this time (= 1st century AD)."* I think you'd better reread that paper xP. Calabrese states that the process of differentiating long and short vowels began as a phenomenon towards the end of the 1st century, but it certainly didn't exist when Classical Latin was standardized, and never spread to Sardinia, parts of Southern Italy, or Africa. *Remember that in rural Latin, there was a 7-vowel system with both closed (from original /ei/ and /ou/, which became /i:/ and /u:/ in Urban Latin) and open (from the original /e:/ and /o:/ as well as from monophthongisation of /ae/ and /au/, which were preserved in Urban Latin) long mid vowels.* Excuse my ignorance, but what's the source of this? *in the standard pronunciation of Urban Latin of Cicero's time, long vowels were most certainly pronounced higher in relation to short vowels.* No lol, reread the Calabrese paper. The five quality system was the only system until the 2nd half of the classical period. *I know you believe they did, but this is a conjecture I've yet to see any indications towards.* I don't think that's what Luke's arguing, nor do I think it has much to do with his argument. Rather, he's arguing that we need to acknowledge it in order to appreciate their poetry.
Thanks for the response! I don't have time just at the moment to address everything your wrote about, but to the last point: you and Katarzyna both interpreted by understanding of the Mediaeval texts as being - a truly mad conclusion! - that the Mediaeval people, when speaking Latin, actually preserved these vowel lengths consistently. I do not think that, and I regret if my wonderment at the poetry made it seem that way. At best, in speech an educated fellow or two might have dabbled with it for fun (as some of us do today). What interests me is the *literature* - which in all periods at least partially preserved the knowledge of syllable quantity. I have heard many times that syllable quantity ought to be disregarded when working with post-Classical literature. My point in the chronology of hexameters was to show that the aspiration of post-Roman authors was indeed to intuit this Golden & Silver Age rhythm as we do ourselves today, and that we are right to emulate the Classical Latin syllable quantity as much as we are able, because our Mediaeval and Renaissance majjōrēs were aspiring to do the same, but lacked the philological science to achieve that dream. Standing on their shoulders, we can achieve that dream.
@@NoctesWratislavienses I love that recording! I think the author would have recited those verses much as you did, in a traditional national pronunciation, whether Polish like yours or in his French rendition, with as much understanding of Classical rhythm as possible in order to convey the music of it.
Wow, that bit of Ovid's poetry really shines for illustrating the vowel and consonant length and the fluid, sing-song quality to it. You gave the latin vowels with open/short E and O, without the close É and Ó. Is there any evidence that Latin had these, or rather, when did they become phonemically distinct? By comparison, Old English and Middle English had long close E and O and long open E and O, which morphed at each stage before morphing again in Early Modern English with the Great Vowel Shift. Is there any evidence, besides how Æ was adopted into Old English using the Latin alphabet, that Latin had [æ, æ:, æi] before it became [è, é] ? It seems like that would be the more natural progression in between [ai] to [æ] to [e].
I'm familiar with the _lack_ of vowel beat length or consonant length in French and Spanish, but I know consonant length (gemination) is crucial in Italian, although I don't speak it. So hearing the demonstrations of both in proper Latin was really convincing and beautiful. Thanks, Luke!
As an alternative, the Faroese keyboard has a "dead key" to imput apexes (acute accents, in reality) on all vowels. The dead key in question is the + key on conventional QWERTY keyboards.
I have to wonder, does wovel length also influence quality over time? (Thinking of what happened in my own language. "á" is not just a long "a" anymore, but it's own thing, for example.)
Thanks for mentioning Old Norse on the subject of the diacritics and gemination, too, because a lot of this stuff is definitely familiar to students of that language, especially since the doubled consonants are often the result of important phonological changes in the language, and both characteristics are significant in reading the poetry. There's a lot to be learned from the comparison of ancient Indo-European languages.
I realise that Danish schools make a mockery out of Latin. In Danish, all syllables with either primary or secondary stress, has a vowel which is either distinctly long or distinctly short. So, much of what you say with emphasis, or even reverence, about Latin, is self-evident for Danes when it comes to Danish. It would therefore be no problem for Danish students to learn the correct vowel lengths of all Latin syllables. But they don't. The pronunciation of Latin words in for instance scientific literature is taught following a mechanical distribution rule for vowel length with no regard for original Latin pronunciation. I hope this is not the case in proper Latin classes. I wouldn't know. But in scientific classes, Latin is treated like a dead skeleton supposed to be dipped in the same standard meat dough, no matter what Latin word is articulated.
A doubled consonant makes preceding syllable long? Yet in English hoper has long o, person who hopes, long vowel o (or diphthong) ow, but hopper has short vowel o, ah in my dialect). Rule taught for English: double consonant make preceding vowel short, single consonant make preceding vowel long! (as long & short have been traditionally used in my experience)
I type a lot of Pinyin. I type Pin1yin1 like this. then I have a word macro to change it to macrons and other accents over the letters. With Latin. You could write a text with 1 or other symbol after the letter, and then run five substitutions to change them to macronned letters.
So... even the Romans recognized that their alphabet had too few vowels. I guess if the long and short vowel sounds are the same (except for length), the 5 letters would be sufficient, with the modifiers, but that hasnt worked out well for all the other Latin-script languages out there with far more vowel sounds...
but why using macrons when the apex romans used was so similar to the modern acute accent, why not use the acute accent which is so common and easy to write and recognize for everyone? is there a specific reason?
Using apices (“acute accents”) in place of macrons is absolutely reasonable! I find it tends to confuse people more than not because words like “canó” might convince the uninitiated that the final syllable is stressed. But sure! Use it. 😊 Macrons are quite inveterated at this point, so they might be better for consistency; still, apices are much better than nothing!
@@polyMATHY_Luke i see, that's a good point, as an italian I would actually be conditioned to read a word like "canó" stressing the final syllable without leghtening it. I guess both points have equally logical arguments, I'll just have to make up my mind as I go along with the journey of latin learning
I think if acute marks, which are similar to the original apex, are used instead of macron, people are less likely to ignore them because acute marks are used in many languages.
What a fascinating video, have you studied Oscan or Etruscan incidentally? I’m fascinated in Etruscan in particular and have such a hard time finding out where the understanding of the language stands, in terms of corpus and agreed upon definitions. I’ve found many dictionaries that posit connections with Nakh-Dagestani languages, Uralic language, and even Anatolian IE languages, but despite wading through many white papers, don’t know which theory holds the most water. Do you have any personal theories? There is even a very bizarre children’s picture book called Le Mie Prime Parole Etrusche put out by Ipazia books with words I can’t find attested anywhere. Also rather funny that a picture book exists, as if anybody is trying to raise their kids speaking such a mysterious language.
Luсhino Palermo ciao Luchino! I have studied a bit of Etruscan and it is fascinating. We don’t have a huge amount of text. We keep finding more but it is scant.
In fact German distinguishes between long and short vowels. They have different lengths and qualities. Short vowels can be marked with 2 consonants or remain unmarked. Long vowels can me marked with 'h', 2 of the same vowels, different vowels (''ie"), special consonants (ß) or remain unmarked Some minimal pairs are: Höhle - Hölle, Massen - Maßen, Miene - Minne, wohne - Wonne, Nuthe - Nutte. If pronounced wrong people might not get the meaning. Latin is as well taught with this distinction, but usually teachers don't care for pronunciation cause it's not taught well in universities.
Absolutely, but rarely in unstressed syllables, and for this reason I don’t include it in the list of languages that truly demonstrate the concept as in Latin or Finnish.
I would make a similar argument for writing Japanese in Romaji: e.g.: for "sake" (rice wine) one should write saké [higher pitch & stress on second syllable] whereas for "sake" (salmon) it should be sáke If this were done consistently in textbooks it would help people learning Japanese to get those stresses right.
The pitch accent can indeed be important in Japanese, but it is difficult to deal with for a lot of non-natives due many languages not having such a system. This form of tonality, in my opinion, is just as interesting as that of languages using full tonal systems, and should very much be taught.
Excellent video, I had no idea about this! Btw in Hungarian _fiuk_ means their son and _fiúk_ means boys; _szár_ means stem (of a plant) but _szar_ means sh*t, so watch out (though _á_ is not the long version of _a)._ The double consonants in action: _hal_ means fish but _hall_ means to hear; _megy_ means to go but _meggy_ means sour cherry. And we have other diacritics too: _szoros_ means tight but _szőrös_ means hairy.
I'm surprised by how much more obvious the importance of the vowel length seems to me (native German speaker) when written with double vowels instead of the macron. When we learned Latin in school we were told to just ignore the macrons that were present in our book and never memorized them when learning vocabulary, but I feel that if it was written with double vowels everyone would have intuitively accepted it as an essential part of the language.
In the German keyboard in Linux (at least the dead_tilde variety), the macron is on Shift-Alt Gr-tilde: ā ē ī ō ū ȳ ĀĒĪŌŪȲ. A Windows solution (mostly) is to install the Maori keyboard, which has them on Alt-Gr-a e i o and u, but not y or capitals.
I wish that the translations of modern novels into Latin (like Winnie Ille Pu, or Hobbitus Ille) actually employed macrons. It throws me off whenever I don't see them now.
Very interesting video. I was not aware of macrons in Latin. I know Greek macrons were used up until a few decades ago. They have now eclipsed mainly because their phonetic use has diminished over the ages and hence they ended up being mainly cosmetic. Perhaps you can also make a reference to those? Maybe talk about the connection with ancient and Byzantine music and lyrics?
Those who want to type Latin with macrons you can use the Latin (QWERTY) Gboard. It has all the long vowels both in the uppercase and the lowercase. Uppercase: Ā, Ē, Ī, Ō, Ū and Ȳ. Lowercase: ā, ē, ī, ō, ū and ȳ. Btw, I typed the macrons in my English (India) (QWERTY) Gboard.
Learning macrons should have helped at school when translating from latin, expecially if they were showed in the text of our classworks. They said us that in latin there are some words that may be confused, and the correct translation depends on the subject, but learning macrons would have made it easier translating.
Luke, I still have this doubt: a long syllable WITHOUT a long vowel is pronounced differently than a long syllable WITH a long vowel, right? So HOW do we pronounce it differently, then? For example: -tus -tūs How are they pronounced differently? In the 1° case (-tus, no macron), is it pronounced ttuss, and in the 2° tuus? Just trying to understand it. Thanks!
In teaching us Latin, professor took off points for writing "j" when it was pronounced as a consonant, yet exspected us to write "u" and "v" distinctly. This seems to be an unfair treatment to "j", probably because in Western European vernacular languages it is not pronounced as {y}.
if you were studying Classical Latin that would also be anachronistic to the point of unfairness as the letters j and u had not been invented, nor had letter case or word spacing or grammatical punctuation (although PVNCTA were optionally used to separate words etc at times).
Firstly, you are a diamond, Luke, for making such a video(and for having such a youtube channel). Secondly, I have a doubt in Imo/Immo (at 1:22). So, the difference is in the vowel just like in english the difference is noted between heat and hit? I thought the difference in saying immo, just like you say in the video, and imo was in saying a fainted "I" and a long "o"( like in Immo(the second syllable -mo). To make what I´m saying more understandable: take the word "emo", and you will say "i-mou" - the tonic accent, with more proeminence, is definitely the first, a simple written vowel -e-(or a sounding i). Anyway, now say the same word but as if the word had an accent in the second syllable -mo - that´s what I mean, more or less, by fainted I. In this case, where the macron has been written, we would produce a long sound like in the word "emo"(first syllable, here a vowel, is tonic). Where there isn´t a macron, we´d say a "hypothetical" Emo(with a second syllable that is tonic). So, to conclude: the difference I had in mind was always that Imo (and Immo) would be read like e-MO (if the second syllable were tonic) E-mo. I know it is too simplified but I hope you or any other person can undertand what I just wrote and explain to me, if possible, what is wrong with my thought.
Hi Charles! You have a good grasp of the idea, I think, but it's hard to communicate these ideas without hearing each other. Have you seen my videos on ua-cam.com/users/ScorpioMartianus ? they may help.
You know what's also annoying? when people write Pinyin or Vietnamese without the tone marks. As for typing, on my Android phone, I use Gboards with special characters enabled so you can get the most common vowel diacritics even on the QWERTY keyboard by pressing and holding vowel letters. (I also have selected languages I can switch to by pressing and holding the space bar.) For really hard to find characters, the fastest way to get use them in Gboards is often to pin them in you clip tray, but I wish Gboards would just let you edit the lists of characters accessible by pressing and holding on keys. On my Ubuntu Linux computers, I have the "compose key" set to one of the "win[dows button]s". (Go to Settings Manager, Keyboard, Layout, and there is dropdown menu where you can set the compose key. You can also add other keyboard layouts and a button to switch between them. I don't know if you also have to separately enable keyboard shortcuts.) To use the compose key method, you have to memorize combination of keys. Macrons are typed with the following combinations by default (using [WIN] to represent whatever you choose as the "compose key"). ([WIN] must be held throughout, but the order of the other keys doesn't matter, at least in this instance, as long as all 3 keys are being held down simultaneously at some point. It is also possible to release [-] or [_] entirely before pressing the letter, as long as [WIN] is held throughout.): āēīōū = [WIN]+[-]+{[a],[e],[i],[o], or [u], resp.} āēīōūȳ = [WIN]+[_]*+{[a],[e],[i],[o], [u], or [y], resp.} ĀĒĪŌŪ = [WIN]+[-]+{[A],[E],[I],[O], or [U], resp.}* ĀĒĪŌŪȲ = [WIN]+[_]*+{[A],[E],[I],[O], or [U], resp.}* *On my keyboards at least, [_] is actually typed as [SHIFT]+[-], and the capital letters obviously also must be typed with [SHIFT], while [-] and the lowercase letters must be typed without [SHIFT]. Thus, the 2nd and 3rd methods are difficult because [SHIFT] must be held while producing one of the latter 2 letters, but NOT while producing the other ALL WHILE KEEPING THE COMPOSE KEY PRESSED DOWN. The only macron-related reason for intentionally doing this is to type , though the computer's flexibility to accept these inputs also helps for if you accidentally do them out of a lack of coordination. If you want, there is a text file (that I've found before though I don't remember where it is, so you'll have to look that up) which lists all of the keyboard shortcuts. You can edit this text file to change them if you want to. There is also a way to type unicode characters by number if you can be bothered to memorize the numbers of certain unicode characters. I've forgotten how to enable it, but I think it uses something like [CTRL] + [SHIFT] + [u] (or I guess [CTRL]+[U]) + , and I don't know if the number is decimal or hexidecimal or what. What I do know is that, on the keyboard I'm using now, typing [CTRL] + [SHIFT] + [u] temporarily makes it impossible for me to type.
Let's take, for example, the word corvus. It has two syllables: cor- and -vus. Both are ending with a consonant. So, should I consider them long? Should I pronounce both of them with long vowels? And should I write this word cōrvūs or cōrvus? Or corvus?
I feel you Luke! I have the same feeling then when people forget long vowels in Japanese, because basic Hepburn transcription of Japanese (English phonology based) doesn't mark them in any way. The best and simplest example being the name of current Japanese Capital: Tokyo (Hepburn) vs Toukyou (Kunrei, Japanese kana based transcription). In the latter "u" after "o" acts basically as a macron, signifying that "o" from the previous "to" or "kyo" should be stretched for another mora. Best Regards, Marko from Estonia, with inborn long sound distinction :D (I know though, how people struggle with those pesky "double letters" :D)
Tere ja aitäh! I’m very exited to hear from an Estonian! We need more Estonians, Finns, and Hungarians teaching Latin to help Western European language users learn these things. ありがとう！
@@polyMATHY_Luke You are the first American I have heard who does long vowels really well. Congrats, you have done a lot of amazing work!!! Though I must say that when you speak Classical Latin for a video your long vowels sound overemphasized - a great phonetics tutor's language, but not how a native speaker would speak. Basically I miss imperfections of the native speaker's pronunciation in your perfect presentation. べんきょうになりました、ルキウスせんせい。ありがとうございました!
@@polyMATHY_Luke Being an Estonian/Russian bilingual speaker thought to add a thing I noticed among Russian speakers, which might be interesting to you as a person natively alien to long vowels but the one who perfectly mastered them. Russian written language does never mark long vowels, since mostly it doesn't change the meaning of the word, which interestingly makes Russian native speakers completely oblivious to the vowel quantity they use every day. It is especially funny when they have problems with hearing difference while learning Estonian, but have no problem using long and short vowels unconsciously explaining the specific pronunciation problem in Russian. I am not a language teacher, just have helped some of my friends and found it peculiar that if not trained natively, perception of the vowel quantity can miss completely - like, "It is right there, dude! You just said "short-long-shot" vowel" -- "Huh, what are you talking about???" Russian native speakers here usually say that vowel length doesn't exist in Russian language. :D :D
Lucius, what do you think of using apices/ acute accents vs. macrons? (Perhaps it would make a good topic for a future video). If my understanding is correct- and stress is predictable for most Latin words- then I'd think that we could do with just apices, no? And although macrons certainly have historical usage, would you consider apices "more" authentic to Classical usage? Thanks
In my handwriting, I use Spencerian cursive most of the time, and I use apices there since they're easier to read with cursive. But when I write in uncials, or on the computer, macrons.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I see! Would you say it's more of an aesthetic choice, using macrons on the computer? I think macrons do look a lot more... well, Latin. Haha. And I just watched your video on Spencerian script! Funny enough I've been working on my cursive handwriting skills. I'll have to give Spencerian a try, it's very attractive! Thanks for making me aware of it ^_^
Hi Luke. Do you know of a printed Vulgata edition that has macrons? I've been trying to read the gospel of John in Latin, since I remember the text quite well, but Nestle-Aland edition of Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft that I have doesn't use any. And do you think that correct vowel length could be preserved in Gregorian chants by its ties with the melody even when singers are not used to making the distinction between short and long vowels or even are not aware of it?
Hi there. I don’t know do any such full edition, just my audiobooks PDFs that are at LukeRanieri.com. The various Gregorian chants and psalms etc don’t take into account vowel length. There is evidence that Old Roman chant did through ornamentation on long vowels, for which see Farya Faraji’s channel
Fantastic video. Also regarding keyboards, I would find it easier to mark them with acute accents since my keyboard is in Spanish. Would it be understood if I used these instead of the macron? I already have too many keyboards configured haha (Spanish, Greek, Russian and Japanese)
Using a French keyboard, the Maori keyboard isn't very useful to me, do you think I should just use à è î ô ù instead, since they are easy to use on my keyboard? Or perhaps â ê î ô û for consistency?
Polymathy It also has couple of other uses, mind that if you decide to learn Turkish one day :). And I have some questions, answer if you have time. Should "e" in Latin be pronounced as "a" in "cat" or "bed"? Also how double "ii" should be syballised? Eg. "filii". Should it be "i-i" or "iyi"? Thanks.
@@memish26237131903 It should be pronounced as in "bed" :) Ah, how to pronounce « iī » - this is harder for English speakers to accept, but the vowels should blend together seamlessly. The result is that « ī » and « iī » will sound almost the same; the second will sound slightly longer, and the speaker may perceive two syllables, even though they are not distinctly divided. I am sometimes able to distinguish the final two syllables of « fīliī » if I change the pitch of my voice to be slightly lower on the final long vowel. I do hope to learn Turkish some day!
@@memish26237131903 Merhaba, burada bir Türk ile karşılaşmak beni gerçekten mutlu etti. Anladığım kadarıyla Latince'yle ilgileniyorsunuz, size ulaşabileceğim başka bir platform var mı?
I find it very hard to produce long vowels consciously, even though my native language (Dutch) makes the difference. This has especially been clear since using English words has become so popular during the past decades. We have no trouble hearing nor producing the difference between "streaming" with the long [i:] and "striemen" (=gashes/welts) with a short [i]. Not even with homonyms like "bar" (cafe) and "bar" (very bad) where the first has a long and the second a short vowel. Sometimes we even use different spellings in cases of possible ambiguity (doubling the written vowel). Education makes it hard for children to become aware of this, though. The terms long and short are used for vowels that are spelled with the same letter, but have different phonetic qualities. I was over 50 before awarenes doomed - despite having had five years of Latin classes at school. Needles to say that long and short vowels where only mentioned twice: in the very first lesson and while explaining the rythm of Ovidius' Metamorphoses...
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It's all cute and sh*t, but to convince people, to break their personal incredulity it would be much more effective to just show people speaking modern languages that kept that long and short syllable distinction: look, those people exist, it's not some made up or misunderstood bee ess 20th century scientists came up with.
The fact that o and ō were indistinguishable for afrikans doesn't prove they had the same quality. No, I'm not disbelieving you, I'm just saying that this fact is probably one of the weakest pieces of evidence. To a russian ear, for example, ee from sheep and i from mist are the same sounds. To us it's just и. And we mostly rely on (you're gonna laugh) syllable length to distinguish ship and sheep.
Just show us some practical steps how to learn to pronounce long vowels when speaking fast. Nobody has problems with them when saying "noooooonegonoooooobiliuuuuuumseteyoooooo..." at 10 words per minute.
It's a blessing, that I had some Czech and they never miss marking their long vowels.
Do not not be critical of diacritics.
As a native Czech speaker I cannot agree more.
However, if you learnt typing on a computer in the 80’s or early 90’s on an EN keyboard layout you may tend to type without any diacritis in informal context. Since I program on an EN keyboard it’s more natural for me to drop diacritics when chatting. I switch to CZ keyboard only when I writing documentation, letters (formal) emails or filling forms.
Younger generations taught to CZ keyboard layout even program on it. Which makes my head spin, seeing all those AltGr combinations for things like {}&@#. And don’t even let me start about the QWERTY vs. QWERTZ.
BTW, there’s a joke coming from the times of various incompatible character encodings of 90’s: “Effing diacrtitics! Why the heck was Hus not burnt earlier?!?” (Jan Hus replaced earlier Czech digraphs with diacritics in his Czech language reform, before he tried to reform the Church which led him to a pyre...). Actually, the old spelling is still preserved in the English word “Czech” itself.
@@vaclavblazek Czech letters are good for all Slavic languages. I sometimes use the Czech keyboard layout for chatting with a Russian friend. I thought I would prefer the correct transliteration of Russian with Latin letters.
But I also often just use the plain English transcription with sh, ch, zh etc.
And I use the Russian “phonetic” keyboard layout where keys are located like on the Western one, although there are some inconsequences that annoy me: Russian X should be at Latin H, but is at Latin X. Instead, Russian Ч is at Latin H. And other oddities. The special Russian letters Ш Я Ю Э Ж are spread over the edges of the keyboard, often under Latin symbol signs. The ь is always difficult to find. But most annoying is that .,:;-/? signs are at other locations than I’m used to from the Danish layout, where .,?: etc are located differently from the standard American layout.
The result is even between the three methods. In basic, neither seems faster than the other. The Czech transliteration looks correct, but feels clinical and scientific.
But with the Cyrillic layout I get Russian spelling control, at least on my iPhone. Which means autocomplete. Then I only need to write half a word and it knows what I am thinking.
The Bolsheviks had several plans to switch to Latin writing. Eščë ėto ne polučilos’.
Praise Jan Hus.
@@vaclavblazek I understand the struggle, I use an Italian layout for both programming and normal writing. Now, for some weird reason "È" was not included in the standard Italian layout and I couldn't even write "È una bella giornata" ("it's a nice day") - or any sentence starting with "it's" fot that matter - without opening charmap. So I used MSKLC (Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator) to map some characters to my keyboard.
I added ~, ` for programming, thankfully {}[]()! were already present;
I also added some Greek letters and they're really useful for writing engineering/math formulas like ω=2πf or v=λf... and some german characters, äöüß, because why not.
Every key can have 4 different characters mapped to it, so there should be plenty of space to add new characters (can be ascii or unicode, so even emojis work I think. For emojis though, I just press Windows + . (dot) 😂).
Your reading of poetry is beautiful. I'm a new Latin learner, and I had no idea how incredible its poetry can sound. Gave me shivers, I've never heard anything like it before
I had this exact experience. I’ve always wanted to learn Latin now I really have the bug. At 61, lord help me! 😂
@@haywardgaude8589 It's never too late. I'm doing it at age 43 and having tremendous success with Luke's methods. :)
Glad to review the comments. Such clarity and organized sequences of historical facts Luke provides is very rewarding
Exactly. Listening to this channel really helped with my pronunciations as a beginner Latin student.
This is a breakthrough for me. Like so many others, I was taught Latin at school but hated it, mainly because it just didn't feel like language to me. It didn't sound like human utterance. It just wasn't taught with any sense that there was anything beautiful about it. It was more akin to a mathematical puzzle. But the way you speak it, I can hear the music and imagine real people using this as language, and the poetry comes alive too and actually sounds poetic! Who knew? 😊
Thanks so much! 😃 I have an audiobooks store if you're interested: luke-ranieri.myshopify.com
In Finnish, we have the same thing. However, we add two vowels together:
tuli = fire
tuuli = wind
tulli = customs
Excellent example! 🇫🇮 ♥️
Ditto for Dutch (duplicated vowel = long, single vowel = short); for example, as in the first syllable of the following two words:
appel = apple
aardvarken = aardvark
@@posfr292 in het Nederlands verandert de klinker niet alleen van lengte maar ook van, nahja, klinker! Korte a,e,i,u,o klinken als /ɑ/,/ɛ/,/ɪ/,/ʏ/,/ɔ/ en lange aa,ee,ie,uu,oo klinken als /aː/,/eː/,/i/,/y/,/oː/ (de driehoekjes na een klinker duiden aan dat zij lang is).
Lange ie en uu zijn qua duur even lang als korte i en u! In het Latijn is echt het enige verschil tussen korte e (/ɛ/) en lange ē (/ɛː/) hoe lang je de klinker aanhoudt.
@@posfr292 In the case of dutch it's the quality of the vowel which changes, not the length.
Didn't Latin used to do the same?
When I studied Latin in Italy I had 2 types of symbols: ă and ā. The first was for short vowels, but was only written for disambiguation (example: rosă - nominative - versus rosā - ablative), and no one cared to pronounce long vowels, including the teacher. Thank you for being a much better teacher. The way you read is like a chant, it's beautiful, and makes me want to learn again 😍
16:14 Oh my goodness, I've never heard an American doing a perfect impression of a German speaking Latin... immediately followed by an equally impeccable impression of an Italian speaking Latin.
So interesting! It’s hard to believe that I’ve studied Latin for years and years without knowing that the Romans marked long vowels.
By the way, I’ve been listening to Daniel Pettersson’s recording of Ad Alpes, and at least to my ear it sounds like he adheres to vowel quantity distinctions not only assiduously but mellifluously!
He does indeed! Daniel's recordings are top notch.
Luke, soy de Argentina, y recién comienzo a estudiar Latín Clásico (pronuntiatio restituta). Me has abierto un mundo fascinante con tu profundo conocimiento de esta Lengua. La cuestión de la cantidad vocálica es absolutamente central, y veo que los profesores no tratan este tema con la importancia que se merece, y que tú le das. Gracias por abrirme este aspecto tan importante sobre el Latín!!
Your German and Italian accents at 16:14 are hilarious ... :-)
Haha thanks! :D hopefully not too silly.
It is. I never heard an italian speaking latin, even with Reconstructa, like you. 😅😅😅 Anyway, dear Luke, you are making a very interesting work. Thank you. I hope Latin will be the language of European Union, as Uk leave it.
@@mauropodda4258I also believe Latin should be a anguage of the European Union. I prefer Classical Latin, by the way, with its beautiful idioms and the long and short vowels preserved.
That is really interesting, man. I did not know the heightened "i" was used to indicate length, and was not very familiar with the use of apices, since, as you indicated, most of them have worn away with time. I love learning about vowel length in Latin, because it's so inextricably bound up with the study of the poetry. Superbly presented video, dude.
Thanks for watching, bro! And thanks for your comments. Much obliged again for showing me Ausonius! That was very enlightening and filled a gap I had in the Late Latin period.
Also indicates the diffences between JI and IÏ.
I just added Māori onto my keyboard and then immediately afterwards watched this video. It was a little tricky to do on my own, but there are videos on youtube showing us how to do it, which I guess is what took UA-cam to take me here. Thanks for this, the amount of time and effort you must put into them is much appreciated.
Thanks so much, Kris!
I was wondering: why does the Latin community use the macron, when the Romans used the apex? Who started it and why?
Some people use the apex, but the acute is generally used for other qualities (Such as stress), so it's better to use the macron to avoid confusion imo.
I am about to start teaching Latin at a grammar school this autumn I've never been shown the importance of this in my previous 12 years of study. And I'm Czech, too, so we understand what a difference it can make! :O
Indeed! See my other videos on the subject. It is vital
I’d like to thank you for these videos. You are enriching our parish Latin class with your talks. Many of us have found them immensely helpful. For myself, I think the videos on the use of macrons and on the proper pronunciation of the letter R to be the most useful. And I’ve come to MUCH better understand why young Romans would study Rhetoric. It must have gone much further than grammar and vocabulary, and included how to make your speeches sound almost musical in nature, to heighten their impact. It has made little difference that we use ecclesiastical pronunciation, but has made us happy at the respect you have given to our “accent” 😂
I think these videos are very interesting because Spanish, Italian, French, English, German... speakers tend to neglect vowel quantity, which is really important in Latin. Writing Latin with macrons can help to give vowel quantity the significance it deserves. I love that you always claim the difference between short and long vowels
Very fascinating topic. What interests me is that your English accent has not completely undergone the wine-whine merger. You sometimes pronounced the digraph as [ʍ] and sometimes as [w]. Did you grow up in the South Eastern US?
Thanks so much for watching! And haha yes you noticed that. This comes from being a teacher and also studying many English dialects, accents, and pronunciations. I don’t natively pronounce wh as a distinct phoneme, but when I read it or speak slowly I often pronounce it out of habit since I do this when I speak Shakespearean English in the original pronunciation. Natively I wouldn’t explode the T in Latin either, but I often do out of habit from public speaking.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Thanks for the reply. That makes sense now.
Thanks for this video.
I have always ignored the macrons... I will start writing, ornouncing and learning them 😅
I had always strugled to find audios of good read latin poetry. I am happy to have found you 😊
Thanks! I also have a lot of audiobooks on my audiobooks store
Great stuff! It is interesting how the apex resembles an acute accent (such as in Spanish), but instead is indicating vowel length instead of stress. Very interesting!
Indeed!
Agustine appears in modern Spain: "Os"
"¿Eh?"
Agustine rolls his eyes. "Ossum."
"¡Hueso!"
Agustine: O_O
Agustine faints.
Osso
Calabrese recites latin and poetry is discovered. Hours of latin at school are appreciated.
I always thought that Latin sound like reading a logarithm table. But actually it sounds like music on a sunny day.
THIS is a fantastic video! It really brings Latin frodried out bore into an attractive living thing.
Interestingly, English does use phonemic vowel length-to help distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants. For example, say, "Have a seat." Now say, "Have a seed." The ē in the second example is longer. If you try to say, "Have a seed," but shorten it to the same length as "seat," you will sound like you're saying, "Have a seat," but with a cold. The same holds true for other voiced/unvoiced word-final consonant distinctions, such as "rope" vs. "robe," etc.
Salut, Henri! 😃 Merci pour ton commentaire! You are absolutely right about this distinction. It's a seemly subtle difference that native speakers recognise instantly when it's absent in the voice of a foreigner, and I always teach to my ESL students. However, I would not call this a phonemic contrast, since that usually applies to minimal pairs. There are no English words where we have a short /rob/ next to a long /ro:b/ that we distinguish, nor /rop/ vs. /ro:p/. The environment of the vowel, namely the following consonant's being voiced or unvoiced, makes the determination.
@@polyMATHY_Luke "There are no English words where we have a short /rob/ next to a long /ro:b/ that we distinguish, nor /rop/ vs. /ro:p/.".....erm, doesn't the English word "banāna" do that ?
@@bazcuda No, because it's a difference in vowel quality.
Generally speaking, if there is some other factor involved, like a difference in vowel quality or consonant voicing which is implicated in the distinction alongside an apparent distinction in phonemic vowel length, the other factor is considered to take precedence, and the difference is explained as an allophonic variation forced by the relevant factor-at least, that's my understanding.
In American varieties of English, banana is pronounced /bənænə/, for instance. In other varieties, I'm not so sure of the exact vowel qualities-I think it'd be something like /bənanə/ in RP-but the tendency is analogous.
Nope. seat and seed have the same length. But the t and d are different.
But I think a lot of t-vowels are dropped or reconstructed to /d/.
And actually the vowels aren't pronounced the same in different words. like school, but blood. Or tear and bear. So it is just historical orthography.
@@SchmulKrieger I think Henri de Marcellus is on to something here. I've been exploring his idea and it does seem we have some form of vowel length distinction in English in certain pairs of words, even though we don't identify it linguistically as such. Take the following word pairs:
- greet vs. greed
- beat vs. beed
- feat vs. feed
- crip vs. crib
- but vs. bud
- cup vs. cub
- chuck vs. chug
- puck vs. pug
- bat vs. bad
- mop vs. mob
- cap vs. cab
- cease vs. seize
- peace vs. peas
- sight vs. side
- light vs. lied
- rate vs. raid
If you lengthen the vowel in the first word of each pair, or shorten the vowel in the second word of each pair, you will sound like a foreigner speaking English and will potentially be misunderstood. In the pairs involving a "t", this is especially true if the final "t" is unaspirated, as is often done in everyday English.
It seems there is an unspoken rule that when a monosyllabic word ends in an unvoiced consonant, the vowel in that syllable becomes shortened in length. When the word ends in a voiced consonant, the preceding vowel is lengthened much in the same way as was shown in this video.
The funny thing is that although modern German does have phonemic vowel quantity distinction (cf. Miete - rent - vs. Mitte - middle, centre), most German Latin speakers ignore vowel quantity completely, because they were never taught in school.
I also found out that if one knows the macrons, the five conjugations of regular verbs in Latin become systematic.
am(ā)- |(ē)- | bā- | rē- | bi-
monē- | ā- | bā- | rē- | bi-
reg- | ā- | ē+bā- | (i>e)rē- | ē-
capi- | ā- | ē+bā- | (i>e)rē- | ē-
audī- | ā- | ē+bā- | rē- | ē-
1. Short "i" before "r" becomes short "e". capi+re > capere.
Same happens with a placeholder "i". reg+i+re > regere.
2. In future indicative,
ē+bi- seems to have contracted due to "bi" being unstressed.
amā́bis
monḗbis
regḗbis → regēs
capiḗbis → capiēs
audiḗbis → audiēs
Thank you! Makes sense!
German does have phonemic vowel length, for example in Staat versus Stadt.
Right, but only in stressed syllables. English, especially UK English, has the same phenomenon, but because both German and English don't have this in long words with multiple syllables, it's useful to figure out how to achieve the same thing in Latin, Ancient Greek, Finnish, Hungarian, Japanese, Estonian, Czech, etc.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I'm a bit confused, would say having two (or more) long vowels in one word is quite common German.. idk Vortrag, Fahrrad etc. I think the difference is that one can often shorten the unstressed syllable without sounding off, because there's no difference in meaning. Maybe an artificial example, but here this is not possible: Polenstaat, Polenstadt, Pollenstadt, Pollenstaat.
Arabic also has phonemic vowel length, but most vernacular forms lost the distinction. It is retained in Literary Arabic, which has only 4 vowels, and the distinction is most critical in Classical (Quranic) Arabic, which has only 3 vowels.
@@galliumarsenide Try the same without compound words. "Allee" vs "Ahlee" (still with stress on the "e") does not work. It may sound a bit weird, but it will not register as another word. Or if you take "Gebrechen" and "Gehbrechen" (clearly different words) and make the second e long and stressed, they are not different anymore.
Another difference in German is that not only the length changes but also the vowel quality, the "a" in Stadt is not a shorter version of the "a" in Staat but a slight different sound that make a vowel pair
Kudos to you Paul! You seem to be a great interviewer in the making. I am looking for watching more!😀
I have an Android phone (Samsung Galaxy series) and my language settings menu has a selection for "lingua Latīna", which I have selected. What happens is, when I hold my finger on a vowel key, I get a display with various diacritical marks applied to that vowel, including one with a macron, which I have to move my finger over in order to type it.
I will start to use macra on my own writings. You convinced me ^^
Edit: Also as I revise my exercises and place the macra I see HOW MUCH more texture it gives to the language. Suddenly I am able to differentiate between the Noun Rēgis and the verb regis. Or the verbs mīseris and mīserīs. I feel like an entire universe of the language has opened to me and I can only say thank you!
My problem is that I can't do long vowels when speaking fast... I don't know how should I pronounce them. ☹️
It takes practice! You can do it.
Hey! I am just starting on this journey but for me, somehow, the beauty is in the slow deliberate pronunciation of each word. Like each word is precious and needs to be savored. It seems to give a sense of authority and power to the language that I haven't heard in any other language.
SALVE
I"m all for marking long vowels, but prefer the use of letter height & APICES rather than macrons for Classical Latin. I also like to write in a single case-Capital, and use PVNCTA (or nothing) rather than word spacing &c. I also forgo modern punctuation and do not use anachronistic letters (j,u). I like the aesthetic of it as well as find it easier.
This may be the most valuable 20 minutes you've spent, or will spend, in studying Latin for a very long time.
Thanks, Rick! Much obliged for your kind words and support.
Agreed!!
@Polymathy The keyboard SwiftKey, at least present on Android, has Latin as a language option, and enables macrons. Unfortunately, though it has a built in Latin library, and enabling macrons when typing, doesn't include the macrons in the quick type/auto correct library.
Thank you! I have copied your message to the pinned post above.
You're the best, you have no idea how much i enjoy these videos
Thank you so very much
You've convinced me. I'll start to use diacritics when writing (modern) Greek
Truth is that even today in Italy we do instinctively use long and short vowels according to the effect we want to achieve So "OTTIMO" (OPTIMUS) can actually become "Ottimoo" or "OOttimo".
That's true. The only thing is that Latin has distinguished long and short vowels both in the spelling and the pronunciation. Latin grammar would not fully work without this distinction. Italian, however, only has echoes of Latin's long vowels due to double consonants and radoppiamento fonosintattico.
In Romanian we kept the "os" for bone as it were in Classical Latin. It's interesting that we did not go down the "ossum" route.
That’s because Romanians are awesome! 🇷🇴 ♥️
In catalán "òs" has the same meaning. An has the open O. "ós" with the closed O means bear.
In French too, although knowing the history of our language, we probably went through a million changes before coming back to os
It's just an impression. It's probably from medieval "osu" with the standard dropping of the final vowel which is nonetheless retained in Aromanian in certain dialects. But I agree we're (mostly) awesome!
@@empyrionin that's possibly true, in which case I may be incorrect!
Though it's interesting how we went full circle
Great video, thank you. You are a true classicist.
Very kind
2:28 In Slovak, the vowel lengths aren't always obeyed though, like they are in Czech. They are subject to a "rhythmic law", which doesn't allow e.g. two long syllables to directly follow each other, so even if e.g. a certain verb form would regularly call for a long vowel, it will be shortened in some occasions.
While I could intuitively pick up the strict vowel length rules in Latin, Japanese and Czech, the Slovak intonation/rhythm has always remained a mystery to me. I somehow notice how it's very different from Czech, but cannot reproduce it myself. I guess you have to be born that way 😄
There are esceptions in slovak, e.g. "páví". Slovak language has also etymologic rule, mean, need find source of the word. E.g. "hypermarket" (as in greek is hypo), but in polish is "hipermarket", as they use phonetic only unfortunately. There are more examples. But Slovak, is very cool, and use many time old vocabulary, lost in other languages.
Can you read "Strč prst skrz krk"? And Slovak has also long R Ŕ (fŕkať), and long L Ĺ (jabĺk).
@@marekrejko strç prst skrz krk...
Interesting. Since it's obviously impossible to pronounce that as is, my instinct as a Romanian is to add some minimal interconsonantal ʉ like "stʉrç pʉrst skʉrz kʉrk".
Would that be correct? Obviously the vowel quality prolly differs.
We have somewhat similar sounding words "stârc"(heron), "pârș"(dormouse), "cârcă" (lower neck + shoulders).
Great video, I never knew about apices! Fun fact, when I saw fēstā at 9:18 it reminded me of the confusion I had recently surrounding the fact that the romance languages point to the e being short in the substantivised noun, e.g. Sp. fiesta, Fr. fête! In all likelihood this is probably evidence that for uneducated speakers of Vulgar Latin vowel length was generally becoming less important.
Also thanks for making me aware of that quote at 13:14; it's good evidence to show how important analogy was in the evolution of Latin. For example by Classical standards the Vulgar Latin insignāre should have had a long initial ī because it precedes 'ns', but Spanish and French both point to a short i, e.g. enseñar, enseigner. Thus there were probably speakers of VL who said ĭnsignāre, by analogy with the fact that in other positions in- was generally short. Such analogy can also explain why the 'n' wasn't lost as is usual. Allen talks about it on page 66 :)
Very good point about "fiesta"! Vulgar Latin has certain re-analysations that aren't exspected. Also very good point about in/en! I see you have read Vox Latina by Allen! :D
I know you've put more effort into pronunciation than most, but it's still surprising to hear an American get such a clean and natural [y]. Often people slip into one of the nearby vowels (as distinguished in the standard IPA vowel chart) like [ɨ] or [ʏ]
Very kind
One of the best examples are the infintive suffixes in present: -ere and -ēre.
That part of Ovids Amores was beautifully recited!
Thanks so much!
This argument is winning me over.
I am pleased to hear it ☺️
Great video!
Two remarks:
1) We don't need to search for analogies in Finnish or Czech. Many other languages, among them German and English, do have vowel quantities, although they are combined with some difference in openness and place of articulation, which makes it less obvious. I'm not a specialist, but I've heard that in English you can actually indicate no less than FOUR very distinct vowel quantities (long, short, shortened long and lenghtened short). Think of the difference between words like "sheep" and "ship" - the difference consists mainly in the vowel length! In this case the difference is not phonemic, that's true, but this doesn't make it any easier for foreigners ;) and it can be used as an analogy to Latin.
2) You made it sound like the fact that people wrote metric poetry in Latin throughout the ages is evidence that they consistently pronounced vowel leghts correctly. It seems, however, that most of them didn't - writing poetry was part of the school curriculum for many centuries even in those parts of the world where we know for sure that vowel quantities were not pronounced. Writing hexameter is a science, you can learn it from dedicated textbooks and dictionaries. To be sure, it's not as exciting as Ovid's "sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos, et quod temptabam scribere versus erat", but it will do the job equally well.
Hi Katarzyna! I'm glad you (and Anbrūtal Brussian below) addressed the alleged pronunciation of vowel lengths in the post-classical times, as that was my main objection as well when watching Luke's thorough presentation. As you state, one does not have to pronounce the vowel lengths in order to write poetry. And as we all know, it is possible to "make sense" of quantitative verse without employing the full system of free distribution of long and short vowels in both stressed and unstressed syllables in the pronunciation, namely by stressing the ictus, a method that has existed at least as a pedagogical device from late antiquity and on. I know from my own experience (as I was taught to scan in that way in my first years of Latin study), that you can even internalize the syllable lengths in this way, and use it actively when composing poetry. For example, having read a lot of Vergil in this way, you would intuitively feel that it is wrong to use "cano" as a spondee, since you have never run across this word with the first syllable stressed (bearing the ictus). Anyway, I'm not claiming that, say, Petrarch read quantitative verse in this manner; it is quite possible that he retained the prose stresses. (I must admit I am not as knowledgeable in this question as I would want to be.) But even in that case I would be quite strongly inclined to believe that the extent to which he made an effort to preserve the classical vowel lengths in his pronunciation was restricted to poetry, and that when conversing in (prose) Latin, he used vowel lengths and qualities in the same way as in his native Italian. I think it is safe to say that it is true for all the various traditional pronunciations of Latin throughout Europe that they are restricted by the same phonotactical rules as the surrounding living languages; I can't really see how that could not be the case.
Of course it is possible to use an Italianate pronunciation, but with classical vowel lengths, but that is not what is generally understood as the traditional Italianate (or "ecclesiastical" pronunciation), rather it is a mixture, I would say, of the traditional and the restored pronunciation.
Thanks for the comments, doctissima amīca! As to point 2) per my response to Victor below, I do *not* believe that Mediaeval people spoke Latin with consistently correct syllable length; my purpose in demonstrating the hexameters was to show that the best educated were capable of composing, and therefore reciting Latin in such a way. Since our Latin is a literary language first, and we neither seek to imitate the manner of speech or writing of the Oscan bread-sellers in Pompeii nor the jesters of Charlemagne, and instead strive to make alive the best of literature of all ages, I assert that it is appropriate to favor recognising syllable length in all varieties of Latin save the Mediaeval drinking songs inter alia - one of which will soon appear in the coming weeks on ScorpioMartianus with non-Classical pronunciation to boot! ;) - especially in our contemporary 21st century Latin, since that represents the highest achievement of our humanist majjōrēs: the revival of Classical Latin in word and sound.
Though do not think me opposed to the exciting slang of common speech! for I do believe it has its place for us; J.N. Adam's Anthology of Informal Latin has given me a great many things to use in my discourse when I wish to be less urbane. And we know Martinus Loch is the true expert in these matters! :D
To point 1) you are quite right about the vowel lengths in German and English, and having taught English as a second language, I am keen to explain that the difference between "cat" and "cad" and "pot" and "pod" is mostly a question of vowel duration, caused by the following voiced consonant (which is a fascinating phenomenon!), and as a German speaker I am also aware of the distinctions in German; in fact I would say they are more important in German, notably exemplified in their orthography, such as per the post-1996 German Spelling Reform, which now clarifies the usage of ß only after long vowels, e.g. 'Fuß', but not after short vowels as in 'muss'.
I tend to favor using non-English/German vowel length examples, however, since, as you mentioned, these long vowels tend to occur exclusively in stressed syllables, and languages that dissociate stress from length, such as Finnish and Czech which both have syllable-initial stress (like proto-Latin is suspected to have had) and frequently end words with long syllables - Latin words like "animā," "iterum," "dominō" etc. are rhythmically comparable - or ones that don't have a concept of lexical stress at all, like Japanese, are much better to help the Anglo-Germanic mind (and Italian mind, for that matter) escape the familiarity of only lengthening stressed syllables. So anyway, that's my ratiō agendī. :)
Non rhotic accents of English are the ones which have vowel length distinction. In Southern British English is /bɪːd/ and contrasts with /bid/, is /fɛːd/ and contrasts with /fɛd/, the rest of the long vowels besides /ɪː/ and /ɛː/ are /ɑː/ /əː/ /oː/ as in START NURSE and FORCE (/ʊː/ as in POOR having merged with /oː/). Those long vowels of non rhotic English usually have a linking r when a vowel follows.
Dear Luke, this is an excellent and well-structured video that makes important and convincing points on a topic where there is only one correct conclusion, and what's disguised as disagreement is in reality mere excuses for the inability to follow and implement the correct conclusion on the part of the "disagreeing". However, I just cannot help pointing out to your viewers that the view that there existed *no vowel quality differences* in Classical Latin is purely your own and is *not shared by one single grammar or even paper* that I've seen (and I've specifically looked for them). Even the paper by Calabrese you're referencing here openly states that "the process differentiating the [ATR] values of short and long vowels must have already occurred around this time (= 1st century AD)."
The pronunciation that you favour did of course exist, and it persisted in Cicero's times in the countryside. I believe this is precisely what he's referring to when he says: "Cotta from his habit of *using broad vowels* was as far removed as possible from resemblance to Greek enunciation, and, in contrast to Catulus, his speech had *a rural, downright rustic sound".* Remember that in rural Latin, there was a 7-vowel system with both closed (from original /ei/ and /ou/, which became /i:/ and /u:/ in Urban Latin) and open (from the original /e:/ and /o:/ as well as from monophthongisation of /ae/ and /au/, which were preserved in Urban Latin) long mid vowels. However, this is the non-strandard pronunciation; in the standard pronunciation of Urban Latin of Cicero's time, long vowels were most certainly pronounced higher in relation to short vowels. This is why Cicero heard the rustic closed /e:/
Speaking of thick French accent: can you honestly believe that father de Jouvancy, who wrote these extremely beautiful verses in the late 17th century, would even think of preserving vowel lengths? Or that anyone at the court of the Polish king, to whom this collection of poems was addressed, would bother to do so? ua-cam.com/video/Fl3772iUKd0/v-deo.html
*Even the paper by Calabrese you're referencing here openly states that "the process differentiating the [ATR] values of short and long vowels must have already occurred around this time (= 1st century AD)."*
I think you'd better reread that paper xP. Calabrese states that the process of differentiating long and short vowels began as a phenomenon towards the end of the 1st century, but it certainly didn't exist when Classical Latin was standardized, and never spread to Sardinia, parts of Southern Italy, or Africa.
*Remember that in rural Latin, there was a 7-vowel system with both closed (from original /ei/ and /ou/, which became /i:/ and /u:/ in Urban Latin) and open (from the original /e:/ and /o:/ as well as from monophthongisation of /ae/ and /au/, which were preserved in Urban Latin) long mid vowels.*
Excuse my ignorance, but what's the source of this?
*in the standard pronunciation of Urban Latin of Cicero's time, long vowels were most certainly pronounced higher in relation to short vowels.*
No lol, reread the Calabrese paper. The five quality system was the only system until the 2nd half of the classical period.
*I know you believe they did, but this is a conjecture I've yet to see any indications towards.*
I don't think that's what Luke's arguing, nor do I think it has much to do with his argument. Rather, he's arguing that we need to acknowledge it in order to appreciate their poetry.
Thanks for the response! I don't have time just at the moment to address everything your wrote about, but to the last point: you and Katarzyna both interpreted by understanding of the Mediaeval texts as being - a truly mad conclusion! - that the Mediaeval people, when speaking Latin, actually preserved these vowel lengths consistently. I do not think that, and I regret if my wonderment at the poetry made it seem that way. At best, in speech an educated fellow or two might have dabbled with it for fun (as some of us do today).
What interests me is the *literature* - which in all periods at least partially preserved the knowledge of syllable quantity. I have heard many times that syllable quantity ought to be disregarded when working with post-Classical literature. My point in the chronology of hexameters was to show that the aspiration of post-Roman authors was indeed to intuit this Golden & Silver Age rhythm as we do ourselves today, and that we are right to emulate the Classical Latin syllable quantity as much as we are able, because our Mediaeval and Renaissance majjōrēs were aspiring to do the same, but lacked the philological science to achieve that dream. Standing on their shoulders, we can achieve that dream.
@@NoctesWratislavienses I love that recording! I think the author would have recited those verses much as you did, in a traditional national pronunciation, whether Polish like yours or in his French rendition, with as much understanding of Classical rhythm as possible in order to convey the music of it.
Gosh, for me that's the most difficult part of Latin and I am quite irritated I didn't learn it at all during my Latin courses.
Wow, that bit of Ovid's poetry really shines for illustrating the vowel and consonant length and the fluid, sing-song quality to it.
You gave the latin vowels with open/short E and O, without the close É and Ó. Is there any evidence that Latin had these, or rather, when did they become phonemically distinct? By comparison, Old English and Middle English had long close E and O and long open E and O, which morphed at each stage before morphing again in Early Modern English with the Great Vowel Shift. Is there any evidence, besides how Æ was adopted into Old English using the Latin alphabet, that Latin had [æ, æ:, æi] before it became [è, é] ? It seems like that would be the more natural progression in between [ai] to [æ] to [e].
I'm familiar with the _lack_ of vowel beat length or consonant length in French and Spanish, but I know consonant length (gemination) is crucial in Italian, although I don't speak it. So hearing the demonstrations of both in proper Latin was really convincing and beautiful. Thanks, Luke!
As an alternative, the Faroese keyboard has a "dead key" to imput apexes (acute accents, in reality) on all vowels. The dead key in question is the + key on conventional QWERTY keyboards.
Thanks for this great presentation.
I have to wonder, does wovel length also influence quality over time? (Thinking of what happened in my own language. "á" is not just a long "a" anymore, but it's own thing, for example.)
Yes.
Thanks for mentioning Old Norse on the subject of the diacritics and gemination, too, because a lot of this stuff is definitely familiar to students of that language, especially since the doubled consonants are often the result of important phonological changes in the language, and both characteristics are significant in reading the poetry. There's a lot to be learned from the comparison of ancient Indo-European languages.
Yes exactly! Oh yeah, I just love comparative philology. It's super interesting!
But the example text used doesn't look Old Norse? It has the Icelandic
-ur ending
Great work, like your videos and information contained within.
Thanks!
I realise that Danish schools make a mockery out of Latin. In Danish, all syllables with either primary or secondary stress, has a vowel which is either distinctly long or distinctly short. So, much of what you say with emphasis, or even reverence, about Latin, is self-evident for Danes when it comes to Danish.
It would therefore be no problem for Danish students to learn the correct vowel lengths of all Latin syllables. But they don't. The pronunciation of Latin words in for instance scientific literature is taught following a mechanical distribution rule for vowel length with no regard for original Latin pronunciation.
I hope this is not the case in proper Latin classes. I wouldn't know. But in scientific classes, Latin is treated like a dead skeleton supposed to be dipped in the same standard meat dough, no matter what Latin word is articulated.
A doubled consonant makes preceding syllable long? Yet in English hoper has long o, person who hopes, long vowel o (or diphthong) ow, but hopper has short vowel o, ah in my dialect). Rule taught for English: double consonant make preceding vowel short, single consonant make preceding vowel long! (as long & short have been traditionally used in my experience)
23 centuries. That’s magical.
Well, this was an eyeopener
Thanks!
Is there any difference in pronunciation in fīliī and fīlī?
Something that I learned from this video is that dactylic hexameter sounds very beautiful.
It really does
I type a lot of Pinyin. I type Pin1yin1 like this. then I have a word macro to change it to macrons and other accents over the letters. With Latin. You could write a text with 1 or other symbol after the letter, and then run five substitutions to change them to macronned letters.
Very interesting, grátiás tibi agó!
I’ve found I actually prefer using the spices over the macrons.
So... even the Romans recognized that their alphabet had too few vowels. I guess if the long and short vowel sounds are the same (except for length), the 5 letters would be sufficient, with the modifiers, but that hasnt worked out well for all the other Latin-script languages out there with far more vowel sounds...
That’s their fault for using a script not made for their language
I really did learn something new today, thank you!
Thanks so much for watching!
Superb and informative video. Grātiās tibi agō!
but why using macrons when the apex romans used was so similar to the modern acute accent, why not use the acute accent which is so common and easy to write and recognize for everyone? is there a specific reason?
Using apices (“acute accents”) in place of macrons is absolutely reasonable! I find it tends to confuse people more than not because words like “canó” might convince the uninitiated that the final syllable is stressed. But sure! Use it. 😊 Macrons are quite inveterated at this point, so they might be better for consistency; still, apices are much better than nothing!
@@polyMATHY_Luke i see, that's a good point, as an italian I would actually be conditioned to read a word like "canó" stressing the final syllable without leghtening it. I guess both points have equally logical arguments, I'll just have to make up my mind as I go along with the journey of latin learning
I think if acute marks, which are similar to the original apex, are used instead of macron, people are less likely to ignore them because acute marks are used in many languages.
What a fascinating video, have you studied Oscan or Etruscan incidentally? I’m fascinated in Etruscan in particular and have such a hard time finding out where the understanding of the language stands, in terms of corpus and agreed upon definitions. I’ve found many dictionaries that posit connections with Nakh-Dagestani languages, Uralic language, and even Anatolian IE languages, but despite wading through many white papers, don’t know which theory holds the most water. Do you have any personal theories? There is even a very bizarre children’s picture book called Le Mie Prime Parole Etrusche put out by Ipazia books with words I can’t find attested anywhere. Also rather funny that a picture book exists, as if anybody is trying to raise their kids speaking such a mysterious language.
Luсhino Palermo ciao Luchino! I have studied a bit of Etruscan and it is fascinating. We don’t have a huge amount of text. We keep finding more but it is scant.
In fact German distinguishes between long and short vowels. They have different lengths and qualities. Short vowels can be marked with 2 consonants or remain unmarked. Long vowels can me marked with 'h', 2 of the same vowels, different vowels (''ie"), special consonants (ß) or remain unmarked Some minimal pairs are: Höhle - Hölle, Massen - Maßen, Miene - Minne, wohne - Wonne, Nuthe - Nutte. If pronounced wrong people might not get the meaning. Latin is as well taught with this distinction, but usually teachers don't care for pronunciation cause it's not taught well in universities.
Absolutely, but rarely in unstressed syllables, and for this reason I don’t include it in the list of languages that truly demonstrate the concept as in Latin or Finnish.
Yay, Hungarian, Spanish, and Japanese speaker here. For me reading Latin is a walk in a barrel of fish.
Love your pronunciation. Where are you from?
I would make a similar argument for writing Japanese in Romaji: e.g.:
for "sake" (rice wine) one should write saké [higher pitch & stress on second syllable]
whereas for "sake" (salmon) it should be sáke
If this were done consistently in textbooks it would help people learning Japanese to get those stresses right.
The pitch accent can indeed be important in Japanese, but it is difficult to deal with for a lot of non-natives due many languages not having such a system.
This form of tonality, in my opinion, is just as interesting as that of languages using full tonal systems, and should very much be taught.
Indeed, those who are fearful of diacritics are too timid to be let out into the world.
ā ē ī õ ū
Excellent video, I had no idea about this!
Btw in Hungarian _fiuk_ means their son and _fiúk_ means boys; _szár_ means stem (of a plant) but _szar_ means sh*t, so watch out (though _á_ is not the long version of _a)._
The double consonants in action: _hal_ means fish but _hall_ means to hear; _megy_ means to go but _meggy_ means sour cherry.
And we have other diacritics too: _szoros_ means tight but _szőrös_ means hairy.
I'm surprised by how much more obvious the importance of the vowel length seems to me (native German speaker) when written with double vowels instead of the macron. When we learned Latin in school we were told to just ignore the macrons that were present in our book and never memorized them when learning vocabulary, but I feel that if it was written with double vowels everyone would have intuitively accepted it as an essential part of the language.
In the German keyboard in Linux (at least the dead_tilde variety), the macron is on Shift-Alt Gr-tilde: ā ē ī ō ū ȳ ĀĒĪŌŪȲ. A Windows solution (mostly) is to install the Maori keyboard, which has them on Alt-Gr-a e i o and u, but not y or capitals.
Yup!
Another keyboard for the use of any diacritical symbols is the IPA keyboard or alternatively the Keyman app (Esperanto keyboard).
I wish that the translations of modern novels into Latin (like Winnie Ille Pu, or Hobbitus Ille) actually employed macrons. It throws me off whenever I don't see them now.
Very interesting video. I was not aware of macrons in Latin. I know Greek macrons were used up until a few decades ago. They have now eclipsed mainly because their phonetic use has diminished over the ages and hence they ended up being mainly cosmetic. Perhaps you can also make a reference to those? Maybe talk about the connection with ancient and Byzantine music and lyrics?
Those who want to type Latin with macrons you can use the Latin (QWERTY) Gboard. It has all the long vowels both in the uppercase and the lowercase.
Uppercase: Ā, Ē, Ī, Ō, Ū and Ȳ.
Lowercase: ā, ē, ī, ō, ū and ȳ.
Btw, I typed the macrons in my English (India) (QWERTY) Gboard.
Learning macrons should have helped at school when translating from latin, expecially if they were showed in the text of our classworks. They said us that in latin there are some words that may be confused, and the correct translation depends on the subject, but learning macrons would have made it easier translating.
We used metronomes in latin class back in high school
Luke, I still have this doubt: a long syllable WITHOUT a long vowel is pronounced differently than a long syllable WITH a long vowel, right?
So HOW do we pronounce it differently, then? For example:
-tus
-tūs
How are they pronounced differently? In the 1° case (-tus, no macron), is it pronounced ttuss, and in the 2° tuus? Just trying to understand it. Thanks!
You're right. In any language that has phonemic vowel lengths, a long vowel is usually twice the length of a short vowel.
In teaching us Latin, professor took off points for writing "j" when it was pronounced as a consonant, yet exspected us to write "u" and "v" distinctly. This seems to be an unfair treatment to "j", probably because in Western European vernacular languages it is not pronounced as {y}.
if you were studying Classical Latin that would also be anachronistic to the point of unfairness as the letters j and u had not been invented, nor had letter case or word spacing or grammatical punctuation (although PVNCTA were optionally used to separate words etc at times).
Great video, thank you.
Firstly, you are a diamond, Luke, for making such a video(and for having such a youtube channel). Secondly, I have a doubt in Imo/Immo (at 1:22). So, the difference is in the vowel just like in english the difference is noted between heat and hit?
I thought the difference in saying immo, just like you say in the video, and imo was in saying a fainted "I" and a long "o"( like in Immo(the second syllable -mo).
To make what I´m saying more understandable: take the word "emo", and you will say "i-mou" - the tonic accent, with more proeminence, is definitely the first, a simple written vowel -e-(or a sounding i). Anyway, now say the same word but as if the word had an accent in the second syllable -mo - that´s what I mean, more or less, by fainted I.
In this case, where the macron has been written, we would produce a long sound like in the word "emo"(first syllable, here a vowel, is tonic). Where there isn´t a macron, we´d say a "hypothetical" Emo(with a second syllable that is tonic).
So, to conclude: the difference I had in mind was always that Imo (and Immo) would be read like e-MO (if the second syllable were tonic) E-mo.
I know it is too simplified but I hope you or any other person can undertand what I just wrote and explain to me, if possible, what is wrong with my thought.
Hi Charles! You have a good grasp of the idea, I think, but it's hard to communicate these ideas without hearing each other. Have you seen my videos on ua-cam.com/users/ScorpioMartianus ? they may help.
I kinda like the german accent. Musa Pedestris early videos were a pleasure to hear.
You know what's also annoying? when people write Pinyin or Vietnamese without the tone marks. As for typing, on my Android phone, I use Gboards with special characters enabled so you can get the most common vowel diacritics even on the QWERTY keyboard by pressing and holding vowel letters. (I also have selected languages I can switch to by pressing and holding the space bar.) For really hard to find characters, the fastest way to get use them in Gboards is often to pin them in you clip tray, but I wish Gboards would just let you edit the lists of characters accessible by pressing and holding on keys.
On my Ubuntu Linux computers, I have the "compose key" set to one of the "win[dows button]s". (Go to Settings Manager, Keyboard, Layout, and there is dropdown menu where you can set the compose key. You can also add other keyboard layouts and a button to switch between them. I don't know if you also have to separately enable keyboard shortcuts.) To use the compose key method, you have to memorize combination of keys. Macrons are typed with the following combinations by default (using [WIN] to represent whatever you choose as the "compose key"). ([WIN] must be held throughout, but the order of the other keys doesn't matter, at least in this instance, as long as all 3 keys are being held down simultaneously at some point. It is also possible to release [-] or [_] entirely before pressing the letter, as long as [WIN] is held throughout.):
āēīōū = [WIN]+[-]+{[a],[e],[i],[o], or [u], resp.}
āēīōūȳ = [WIN]+[_]*+{[a],[e],[i],[o], [u], or [y], resp.}
ĀĒĪŌŪ = [WIN]+[-]+{[A],[E],[I],[O], or [U], resp.}*
ĀĒĪŌŪȲ = [WIN]+[_]*+{[A],[E],[I],[O], or [U], resp.}*
*On my keyboards at least, [_] is actually typed as [SHIFT]+[-], and the capital letters obviously also must be typed with [SHIFT], while [-] and the lowercase letters must be typed without [SHIFT]. Thus, the 2nd and 3rd methods are difficult because [SHIFT] must be held while producing one of the latter 2 letters, but NOT while producing the other ALL WHILE KEEPING THE COMPOSE KEY PRESSED DOWN. The only macron-related reason for intentionally doing this is to type , though the computer's flexibility to accept these inputs also helps for if you accidentally do them out of a lack of coordination.
If you want, there is a text file (that I've found before though I don't remember where it is, so you'll have to look that up) which lists all of the keyboard shortcuts. You can edit this text file to change them if you want to.
There is also a way to type unicode characters by number if you can be bothered to memorize the numbers of certain unicode characters. I've forgotten how to enable it, but I think it uses something like [CTRL] + [SHIFT] + [u] (or I guess [CTRL]+[U]) + , and I don't know if the number is decimal or hexidecimal or what. What I do know is that, on the keyboard I'm using now, typing [CTRL] + [SHIFT] + [u] temporarily makes it impossible for me to type.
Do you offer intro to Latin aimed at an attorney who is trying to read the Roman jurists in Latin
Let's take, for example, the word corvus. It has two syllables: cor- and -vus. Both are ending with a consonant. So, should I consider them long? Should I pronounce both of them with long vowels? And should I write this word cōrvūs or cōrvus? Or corvus?
Both vowels are short.
I feel you Luke! I have the same feeling then when people forget long vowels in Japanese, because basic Hepburn transcription of Japanese (English phonology based) doesn't mark them in any way. The best and simplest example being the name of current Japanese Capital: Tokyo (Hepburn) vs Toukyou (Kunrei, Japanese kana based transcription). In the latter "u" after "o" acts basically as a macron, signifying that "o" from the previous "to" or "kyo" should be stretched for another mora. Best Regards, Marko from Estonia, with inborn long sound distinction :D (I know though, how people struggle with those pesky "double letters" :D)
Tere ja aitäh! I’m very exited to hear from an Estonian! We need more Estonians, Finns, and Hungarians teaching Latin to help Western European language users learn these things. ありがとう！
@@polyMATHY_Luke You are the first American I have heard who does long vowels really well. Congrats, you have done a lot of amazing work!!! Though I must say that when you speak Classical Latin for a video your long vowels sound overemphasized - a great phonetics tutor's language, but not how a native speaker would speak. Basically I miss imperfections of the native speaker's pronunciation in your perfect presentation.
べんきょうになりました、ルキウスせんせい。ありがとうございました!
Yeah, but just like when Japanese is taught, that’s for pedagogical reasons; this is how I speak normally: ua-cam.com/video/sxz89u2FKpM/v-deo.html
@@polyMATHY_Luke Actually, I have never heard Estonian spoken so fast. That's what Latin In in the court house must have sounded like.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Being an Estonian/Russian bilingual speaker thought to add a thing I noticed among Russian speakers, which might be interesting to you as a person natively alien to long vowels but the one who perfectly mastered them. Russian written language does never mark long vowels, since mostly it doesn't change the meaning of the word, which interestingly makes Russian native speakers completely oblivious to the vowel quantity they use every day. It is especially funny when they have problems with hearing difference while learning Estonian, but have no problem using long and short vowels unconsciously explaining the specific pronunciation problem in Russian. I am not a language teacher, just have helped some of my friends and found it peculiar that if not trained natively, perception of the vowel quantity can miss completely - like, "It is right there, dude! You just said "short-long-shot" vowel" -- "Huh, what are you talking about???" Russian native speakers here usually say that vowel length doesn't exist in Russian language. :D :D
Ok! You convinced me! Onto macrons!
Lucius, what do you think of using apices/ acute accents vs. macrons? (Perhaps it would make a good topic for a future video).
If my understanding is correct- and stress is predictable for most Latin words- then I'd think that we could do with just apices, no? And although macrons certainly have historical usage, would you consider apices "more" authentic to Classical usage? Thanks
In my handwriting, I use Spencerian cursive most of the time, and I use apices there since they're easier to read with cursive. But when I write in uncials, or on the computer, macrons.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I see! Would you say it's more of an aesthetic choice, using macrons on the computer? I think macrons do look a lot more... well, Latin. Haha.
And I just watched your video on Spencerian script! Funny enough I've been working on my cursive handwriting skills. I'll have to give Spencerian a try, it's very attractive! Thanks for making me aware of it ^_^
Hi Luke. Do you know of a printed Vulgata edition that has macrons? I've been trying to read the gospel of John in Latin, since I remember the text quite well, but Nestle-Aland edition of Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft that I have doesn't use any. And do you think that correct vowel length could be preserved in Gregorian chants by its ties with the melody even when singers are not used to making the distinction between short and long vowels or even are not aware of it?
Hi there. I don’t know do any such full edition, just my audiobooks PDFs that are at LukeRanieri.com. The various Gregorian chants and psalms etc don’t take into account vowel length. There is evidence that Old Roman chant did through ornamentation on long vowels, for which see Farya Faraji’s channel
@@polyMATHY_Luke Thank you!
I write with apicés when I am writing on my desktop because they can be accessed easily through the AltGr key.
Fantastic video.
Also regarding keyboards, I would find it easier to mark them with acute accents since my keyboard is in Spanish. Would it be understood if I used these instead of the macron? I already have too many keyboards configured haha (Spanish, Greek, Russian and Japanese)
Using a French keyboard, the Maori keyboard isn't very useful to me, do you think I should just use à è î ô ù instead, since they are easy to use on my keyboard? Or perhaps â ê î ô û for consistency?
You can adapt your keyboard to create a macron. Ukulele does this on a Mac
We use this symbol "^" to indicate long vowels in Turkish.
Very cool! Thanks to adding that. :)
Polymathy It also has couple of other uses, mind that if you decide to learn Turkish one day :). And I have some questions, answer if you have time. Should "e" in Latin be pronounced as "a" in "cat" or "bed"? Also how double "ii" should be syballised? Eg. "filii". Should it be "i-i" or "iyi"? Thanks.
@@memish26237131903 It should be pronounced as in "bed" :) Ah, how to pronounce « iī » - this is harder for English speakers to accept, but the vowels should blend together seamlessly. The result is that « ī » and « iī » will sound almost the same; the second will sound slightly longer, and the speaker may perceive two syllables, even though they are not distinctly divided. I am sometimes able to distinguish the final two syllables of « fīliī » if I change the pitch of my voice to be slightly lower on the final long vowel.
I do hope to learn Turkish some day!
@@polyMATHY_Luke Tecum Turcice loqui optime erit!
@@memish26237131903 Merhaba, burada bir Türk ile karşılaşmak beni gerçekten mutlu etti. Anladığım kadarıyla Latince'yle ilgileniyorsunuz, size ulaşabileceğim başka bir platform var mı?
I find it very hard to produce long vowels consciously, even though my native language (Dutch) makes the difference. This has especially been clear since using English words has become so popular during the past decades. We have no trouble hearing nor producing the difference between "streaming" with the long [i:] and "striemen" (=gashes/welts) with a short [i]. Not even with homonyms like "bar" (cafe) and "bar" (very bad) where the first has a long and the second a short vowel. Sometimes we even use different spellings in cases of possible ambiguity (doubling the written vowel).
Education makes it hard for children to become aware of this, though. The terms long and short are used for vowels that are spelled with the same letter, but have different phonetic qualities. I was over 50 before awarenes doomed - despite having had five years of Latin classes at school. Needles to say that long and short vowels where only mentioned twice: in the very first lesson and while explaining the rythm of Ovidius' Metamorphoses...
Can you make a vid on Books written in Latin recommendation?
Do you mean like ancient Roman books? thelatinlibrary.com has everything