The Latin Alphabet - Vowel Pronunciation
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- Опубліковано 3 лют 2025
- The vowel in Latin is the most important part of pronunciation. This video covers the difference between long and short vowels, along with diphthongs (everyone's favorite word).
a 0:37 e 0:50 i 1:03 o 1:18 u 1:28 y 1:40
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You need to remake this video; latin has a temporal length on vowels, the macron is NOT a stress mark and does not change how an individual vowel is pronounced. This is essential, since Latin stress is dependent on syllable length, which is determined by vowel length/diphthong presence, so treating the macron as a stress mark will lead to goofy-sounding Latin. Latin has 5 vowels: a, e, i, o, u; the difference between “Ītalia” and “Ītaliā” in terms of pronunciation is that the final vowel is pronounced for a longer period of time, this applies to all vowels in latin, for example, “i” in latin is NEVER pronounced like the “i” in the English words “it” or “fish”, but always like the “ee” in English.
Yes! I was going to comment this exactly
He's not even pronouncing like he's describing. He's pronouncing the vowels all short form but with accent emphasis like you are saying.
There should be at least a pinned comment added.
I came here because in a different video pronouncing "Posse Comitatus" the guy pronounces the 'U' in two different ways. Like a long 'O' and like a long 'U' which I'm pretty sure both are incorrect. It should be a short 'u.'
I'm learning Latin on my own from some high school Latin textbooks I found that were dated from the 40's. They were intended to have a teacher to help them with learning it, so this video was incredibly helpful. Thank you.
Veja no UA-cam , o site VIA LATIA.
You Tube- VIA LATINA - PROCURE
when the intro started I thought the ten duel commandments was gonna play.
Same omg
Same
Hamilton Fans are everywhere!
THANK YOU
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9- it’s the ten duel commandments! It’s the ten duel commandments!!
Well I'm 13 studying for my SAT test and I decided that if I wanted to do a language on the SAT it would be Latin. You sir just helped me profoundly :)
So are you in college now?
@@charlesdarwin6224 I love this
@@charlesdarwin6224 awww
@@christophermccarthystudent4830 nope
Happy late 20th birthday
I (mercifully) stopped learning Latin two years ago, but I came back here to brush up on my pronunciation for some songs I'm learning (Clamavi de Profundis!) and listen to latintutorial's soothing lovely voice. It's the best.
Be careful. It is likely that in opera or choral works that the ecclesiastical or national pronunciation is what is required.
@@Florida1213 i think at that time I insisted on pronouncing everything in classical Latin for like.. snob reasons 😂
Can’t believe it was published in 2011 thank you so much! I’m watching it in 2020
Yes, the classical pronunciation is standard in most non-religious schools in America, and I have taught Italian students, so I understand the modern pronunciation you speak about.
I'm glad that your pronunciation is much closer than modern assumptions (it still drives me batty to hear "vinny viddy vitchy" instead of "waynee weedee weekee"), but it's a shame that it's nonetheless somewhat corrupted by being skewed toward familiar modern pronunciations. For a significantly more-accurate rendition, I'd suggest Gregory Myles' video on Latin pronunciation.
@@darkarima”waynee” is not the right pronunciation 🤨.
English is not my fist language, and I’m not sure how to transcribe “Vēnī” but there sure isn’t any diphthong
Everyone Latin class, we watch this video and my classmates and I jam out to the intro.
P.S. If my future class is in Latin and have scrolled down, Hello
Hey! 🙂
This must be such an awesome comment for the video maker to read
Ah, the good ol days
Interestingly enough, the Greek character upsilon (Υ,υ) has also shifted in modern Greek and is pronounced using IPA as /i/. So it's also important to note that the origin in classical Latin is shared with the Ancient Greek pronunciation rather than just "Greek"
@sallypotmeandfred Thanks for the kind words, you're welcome, and good luck!
Congratulations, now you can pronounce Finnish too!
Sure, everything except that Ö!
Ö
Ianus think of ö as the diphthong at the start of ‘earth’.
@@baileyharrison1030 there is no diphthong in earth /ʔɚθ/
Ianus just make a surprised face whenever you have to use it and be done.
i attempted latin for the first time reading a book called learn to read latin. i was at the vowels and diphthongs stuggling and feeling like quiting, but you sire help me a ton. thank you!
I read so many latin words for my law classes, but never knew how to pronounce them until now. Thank you!
thanks. I'm just starting to learn Latin, and this video helped explain the pronunciation of vowels better than the other sources I've seen.
No clear cut rules about longs, especially vowels that are naturally long, but you can search for patterns in verb forms, e.g., the longs in the present and imperfect tense are before -s, -mus, and -tis. The more you pay attention to the longs and shorts of a word, the easier it becomes to predict vowel length.
(N.B., in poetry, there is such a thing as a vowel that is "long by position", where it is followed by 2 consonants. Often, Latin texts won't mark longs by position.)
@stoicfan "three" is a great starter word for rolling. As the tongue retreats from the teeth to the back of the mouth, try to flap it. It helps to open up your mouth a little bit, which is different from the North American flat, straight mouth.
Good luck! I like to say principal parts out loud so your ear learns the patterns behind the perfect tense stem. That and repetition are really the only things that work. Have you watched my video over principal parts?
Whoah, calm down. I understand Italian pronunciation of Latin is different (I have Italians in class right now), but we do Latin in the classical style with classical pronunciation in America (well, most American classes). So yes, you are right - these are the old rules, but they are what we teach.
Thank you. I needed a refresher after too many years.
No, you wouldn't ignore the i. In the restored classical pronunciation: Flah-vih-ae ("eye").
Sorry, that question must have slipped by me. If long marks aren't being marked at all, then it's tough to tell if the vowel is long and short by nature, especially for a newcomer. If long marks are being marked, then a short vowel won't be marked, and a long vowel will be.
In many texts, only long vowels by nature are marked, but if a vowel is followed by two consonants (with some exceptions), it is long by position, which changes only the quantity of the vowel, not its quality.
For two syllable words: the stress falls on the first syllable.
For words with three or more syllables: it all depends on the length of the second to last syllable (called the "penult", literally the "almost last" syllable). If the penult is long, it is stressed. If it is short, then the stress is on the third to last syllable (called the "antepenult", literally the "before the almost last" syllable).
Yes, I had the emphasis wrong for puellā because I was emphasizing the ā. Hard to do both.
The vowel in "cat" (IPA æ) isn't found in classical Latin, although it's similar to a short e (especially before an r, as in ducere). Vowels change quite a bit over time (just look at differences in American English, even regionally now), so it wouldn't surprise me if your æ was around in vulgar Latin in classical times, or if it came about in late antiquity. But not in what we know of classical Latin.
latintutorial Does the e become a schwa /ə/ when unstressed?
I recently sat on a committee where an esteemed and respected classicist used "Maa-crawn" and "May-crawn" practically interchangeably.
Most of this vowels are alive in Portuguese language, but we write them in a different way: á ã, ê é, í i, ô õ, ú u. Diphthongs are sounds the same.
No ã, no õ and... in italian and french you also have the é, a, ó, u, ê, ô (not this one in french), i
@@schadenfreude000 no it didn't. The tilde was not developed until the middle ages and it used to represent ommited letters. Ñ,for example, was a way to shorten nn.
@Killie Bloody some of these graphemes represent tones, not vowel length
We do have texts of ancient grammarians that actually do address Latin pronunciation, and they reinforce the classic pronunciation which you dismiss here. I strongly encourage you to look into these authors and see whether your opinions mesh with the ancient texts: Marius Victorinus, Pompeius Festus, Quintilian, and Priscian.
This is extraordinary because Icelandic shares all the same sounds still to this day, with the exception of the "long e" and the "au".
y also changed in the same way in Icelandic as mentioned at 1:55 and we still have æ and pronounce it as aye (unlike in Danish and Norwegian) This is so cool because the Icelandic alphabet was based on Latin 1000 years ago and it has retained both the characters and pronunciation of them for all this time.
I do appreciate how you ended with the word “poetry”.
Here's a good way to differentiate the t and th in Latin (and Greek). Put your hand in front of your mouth and say "tin" and "top". The t in "tin" is breathless (unaspirated), while the t in "top" should have a breath accompanying it, and you should feel it on your hand. You can do the same with "kit" and "character", "pin" and "pot".
Note that the "th" in French does work this way (e.g., thé and bibliothèque), and the "ch" in Italian works this way as well.
I was completely distracted by "may-cron"
Both "may-cron" and "mah-cron" are acceptable pronunciations.
But one sounds good, and the other sounds like an American hipster trying to say 'macaron'
@@latintutorial it is /makron/
@@danielsjogren1553 ahah))))
@@servantofaeie1569 indeed you are right. Maycron is how english people would pronunce it.
These LatinTutorial videos are for the most part excellent. Here, though, the speaker occasionally, incorrectly shifts the ACCENT to a final syllable in an attempt to differentiate between long and short vowels, e.g., with manUs (which should be ACCENTED on ma-) and puellA (which should be ACCENTED on - el -). GRATIAS for this fine work! :)
i wish there was a video format like this for learning german. so comprehensible
After watching this and the consonant pronunciation this morning, my English teacher happened to be giving us the Latin words many words derived from... She was pronouncing everything horribly wrong not just for Classical Latin but for Church style Latin as well.
My latin teacher chooses to not teach us pronunciation besides the hard c’s and the v’s-she did tell us about the long vowels, but didn’t explain how to pronounce them-but with my AP Latin 4 test coming up I’ve realized that understanding vowel pronunciation might make scansion easier. After my Brit lit class last semester, I’ve realized how much more natural meter is supposed to feel in a language I actually speak, and I’ve been thinking that maybe the scansion procedure we’ve learned would be simpler if I understood the sound of Latin more intuitively like with English.
My Latin teacher herself said that for the longest time scansion didn’t click for her, so it might be that she didn’t realize that pronunciation is at least somewhat fixed in scansion, which based on our poetry unit in Brit lit I assume is true. Maybe I can learn pronunciation on top of all my vocab, story, and grammar work I need to do before the test comes around.
villae is "houses". (it can also mean "of the house" or "to/for the house", but that's not something you should worry about just yet)
We get the word "village" from it.
Why is this commentator pronouncing the letters like in English?
He doesn't know proper pronounciation. Scorpios Martianus is way better.
Always funny to see Americans trying to pronounce Latin.
He's using the Classical Latin pronunciation as traditionally taught in British and American schools. It uses a pronunciation meant to mimic the Classical but through the generations it developed to be taught with an accent. A similar thing happened in every other European country hence French, German, and Polish variations of Latin (and that's not even to mention Italian Latin, otherwise known as Ecclesiastical Latin). So, he's technically not incorrect in his teaching, but his pronunciation is still less valid than something like a truly Classical pronunciation would be and a Roman would probably think you sounded like a barbarian if you spoke to them this way lol
Similar, but there's a very brief bit of the i at the end of "ei".
Lovely clear delivery and explanations, thank you👌🤗
Thank you!
No, I haven't watched any of your other videos. But I'm going to try to run through many of them in the next couple days.
@insidetrip101 I make no guarantees about my English pronunciation, but I believe "macron" can be pronounced both ways (the Merriam Webster and Random House dictionaries give my may-kron first position, over your mah-kron). The pronunciation of μακρός is like what you say, but in this instance, I'm speaking English, not Greek.
The fact that you use words like "profoundly" at 13 tells me you're probably going to do well.
This video is like a documentation of the evolution of our understanding of Classical Latin pronunciation. Because the video claims that in nearly all vowels when you don't have the long sound it should rather sound relaxed almost close to a ə(schwa) sound. But thanks to Andrea Calabrese's contribution building upon and criticizing Sydney Allen's "Vox Latīna", we now estimate that no matter the length, the value of the vowel doesn't get effected in Classical Latin (Rustic Latin is an exception). So a short i would be as potent to the ear so to say as long ī. In the same way e and ē. I don't know if the narrator is unconsciously anglicizing the pronunciation of "habēre", but he quite plainly puts a schwa at the last syllable and says /ha-bey-ruh/ which is false.
Really he sounds like an American tourist in ancient Rome....
Thank you. I've been trying to make a conlang for a book based off of Latin, and this was very helpful.
It would be helpful if you updated the video description to indicate which pronunciation system this is. Presumably it is the classical reconstruction that is common in English-speaking instruction (as opposed to, say, ecclesiastical)-but as a novice, there is no way of telling.
I think its clarified on his website
It's a english version for english speakers to approximate the real classical latin sounds.
*note* to be picky (and since this video is about pronunciation) the word "macron" would be pronounced with a much less nasally and short a, much more like "ah". The Greek letter alpha is nearly always pronounced like a short "a". I'm not sure if there are any/what the exceptions are). Either way, I'm fairly certain the word "macron" comes from the Greek adjective, "macros" (pronounced with a short "a"), which usually means "long".
Sorry to be nitpicky but if the video is about pronunciation...
I stand corrected. I should note that I don't aspirate as much in "pin" or "tin" as I do in "pot" and "top", but the English p and t are aspirated in stressed syllables (unless preceded by an "s", as in your examples). Thanks.
I don't quite know why you think pronouncing Latin the way Caesar, Vergil, and Augustus pronounced it is horrible. And yes, we have pretty good evidence (from ancient writers too) that this *is* how Latin was pronounced 2000 years ago.
For non-Italian speakers, this isn't necessarily very hard, and maybe that's where the difference lies.
@latintutorial First of all, thank you very much and congratulatiors for your great content. Now, as a Romance speaker: the horrible part is mostly about how you pronounce the short vowels, and no, there's no good evidence that they were pronounced as shown in the video (so-called "Allen" system): in fact, the most probable pronunciation is that they were equal in quality to the long ones, only shorter (Calabrese system). That, plus pronouncing the plosives _without_ aspiration would make the pronunciation nicer and easy to understand for us, Romance speakers (your American "o as off" is very close to an "a", your short "i" sound like "e" to us and your short "u" is hard to understand, plus the reduction makes your Latin get very close to a sentence stressed language, whcih Latin wasn't) and, more important, much more accurate historically. Watch this presentation about the topic: ua-cam.com/video/eH8E5RKq31I/v-deo.html which provides links to the relevant research. Notice that, even if the "Allen system" was accepted, your instructions for English speakers and your own pronunciation still differs from it ("o" as in "holy" is not correct, much less "o" as in "off", at least the way that most American speakers pronounce those sounds).
Thank you again for your content. All best
Thank you so much for this. I'm a writer and it was tricky to discern how some names sounded. Thank you!
A problem with this video is that it puts the word stress on the wrong syllable sometimes. In both manus and puella, the variety with the long final vowel is pronounced with the stress on the last syllable. This is exactly what English-speakers have to learn not to do.
Thank you for showing how to pronounce the vowels.
Not in classical Latin. I believe this works its way into the Medieval pronunciation (i.e., Italian), and that's how we get Lazio from Latium.
Soy latinoamericano hablante de español (Argentina), y tuve que buscar un video para poder pronunciar la "æ" por miedo a que sonara distinta. Suena exactamente en español (lógicamente). Muchas gracias por este tutorial. 💙
efgæẋǰa ēẋah klokanĭs
I love your Latin videos, keep it up please! :D
This looks so much easier than thai.
Thai has long and shory vowels, written in syllable cluster. The vowels are written before, above, bellow and after a consonant.
In addition thai is also a tonal language. The tone depends on the initial consonant in a word + the length of the vowel + any tone markers used. the consonants are divided into 3 classes high, mid and low. The vowel length is divided into short (dead) and long (alive). Tone markers change to tone, this is different for all classes high, mid and low
Oh thx mr i were looking for that thanks again 😀👍 keep going
Thanks! I now must be one of the few who knows how to pronounce it correctly! :)
Sure, that's fine, and the other way (may-kron) has also seemed to catch on in modern English and is an acceptable pronunciation. It's the same with a whole bunch of other words that have made their way wholesale into English, though: there's the modern acceptable English way, and the more authentic classical way, e.g., caesura, which I always pronounced the more authentic way, keye-suh-rah, but is also often pronounced by classicists as seh-zuh-rah. Both are acceptable in English.
@GrandeSalvatore96 The th is like the British "Thames", rather than "the". It's an aspirated t, so really a t with a breath after it, similar in form to the ch in character (itself an aspirated c/k sound).
This is extremely helpful. Thank you!
Thank you so much! I'm beginning to study Latin. I'd like to find more audio materials. Is there a Latin software package that you'd recommend?
What's your opinion on Andrea Calabrese's proposed pronunciation changes outlined in his "On the Feature and the Evolution of the Short High Vowels of Latin into Romance"?
I'm only hear to customise a name for my character lol. Only a few years late 😅
@Jayden Scopp i ended up going for harrī, by the way
Oh same my guy
Me rn in persona 5
Seems to me that he's a bit off where the examples "date", and "holy" are given since these are dipthongs (as far as I know). Thus, the a in date actually sounds like /ei/ while the o in holy /ou/. I don't know a lot about latin, but I doubt these vowels will sound like the English dipthongs.
Thank you! Brief and neat! Appreciated!
it's true, I'am french and I speak spanish too (and a little bit of italian) and even if in french there is "th" is only a regular "t". The "h" after the "t" is just to show from where the word comme from, for example with the greek origin words
The i in "adiuvat" is consonantal, so it's like "ad-you-wat". If you're using all caps and writing in the old Roman way, like, say, on an inscription, it would be ADIVVAT, but why do that when you have lower case letters at your disposal?
you`ve made some nice videos. do you advise people always to write the macrons?
Someone already asked this, but it wasn't answered; and I have the same question. How do you tell whether the vowel is long or short if there is no macron? And thank you so much for your vids. I am trying to teach myself, and I'm brand new to Latin. I learned the alphabet from your alphabet vid, and now I'm working on vowel pronunciation:)
This was so helpful ty. I just wanted to know what a macron does and I didn't understand cause everywhere else I looked made it too complicated. ty.
Wait, so we've been pronouncing T-Rex wrong THIS ENTIRE TIME.
yes
care to explain?
@@8is
tYrannosaurs rex- refers in latin to the german y vowel s pronounciation
@@balazsradnoti1881 So he has produced the y like in English were they very rarely use the actual y/ü vowel.
@@servantofaeie1569 Te-Recks
Channel magna!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In the classical period the long vowels were indicated by the apex.
Do you teach other languages? I love your videos and I've been subscribed for years. Any chance that you would be teaching Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin) and Japanese? So thorough and clear.
I am doing a classical Latin module for the Open University BA in arts and humanities
this was great! only thing I would love is just the definitions of the words you use, I'm just beginning to learn latin (I had a class in 7th grade for it, but my new school does not offer latin, so I want to learn on my own), so I don't recognize most of the words.
I see now. Thank you!
I'm learning Latin, from Wheelock's Latin, on my own. I am taking it slow, limiting myself to one chapter every two weeks. I use the supplementary texts as well (workbook and scribblers, sculptors, and scribes).
I have trouble remembering the principal parts of each verb. I find myself only able, reliably, to recall the first and second principal parts. Do you have any suggestions on how this can be more easily accomplished than by my current rote memorization technique?
It would've been immensely more useful if you'd included IPA. The pronunciation of the long E is in fact [eː], not the [ɛɪ] in "date". The long O and U are also different from the English examples. Please upload IPA!
This would be so much easier would people know the international phonetic alphabet.
The vowels as they are pronounced in English have little in common with Latin based pronunciation. It makes it that much harder that they share symbols but not the sound.
I'm studying Latin now and since there are a lot more people speaking English it's easier to find content in English than my native language, Swedish. But Swedish pronunciation is closer to Latin than English. In my mother tongue i would pronounce the vowels much like in the video.
@latintutorial Thank you SOOO much! That really helps!
Could you make a video about the Ecclesiastical pronunciation, please?
These videos are extremely helpful. Just this one is a bit inaccurate. A careful reading of e.g. W. Sidney Allen's Vox Latina will supply slightly different values for the vowels. The biggest difference is that there is no shwa in Latin. That is, there is no unstressed medial vowel. English abounds with this sound, and a puzzling plethora of Latin scholars include it in their pronunciation. The key point here is that the long vowels are simply lengthened forms of the short ones, and so conversely the short vowels are brief renditions of the long. So short 'a' is a short form of the sound in "father" and sounds like the 'u' in the English "cup", and so forth.
While this is an old video of mine, it does follow the pronunciation as emphasized in Allen and Greenough and Wheelock's. Take that for what you will. Point for discussion with your long/short vowels, consider the grammarian Pompeius's description of vowels: "De istis quinque litteris tres sunt, quae sive breves sive longae eiusdemmodi sunt *a*, *i*, *u*: similiter habent sive longae sive breves. *O* vero et *e* non sonant breves. *E* aliter longa aliter brevis sonat..." And other evidence suggests that short and long *i* could also differ in their quality.
I realize that this does confirm your point about the *a*, but also suggests that it's not as simple as you suggest. I'm not an expert on vowel values, however.
Intro plays, I go "Ten Duel Commandments!"
I have to note that this video was made in 2011, well before Hamilton came out!
about the long and the short vowels in a word. Are there any rules or patterns that determines whether a vowel (within a word) is long or short? Or should it be learned with the word?
I'm thinking about the verb conjugations. For example, amo-amare. In 2nd person present it is amas with long second a, but in 3rd person it is amat with short second a. How to know the changing vowel length in conjugations? thanks
C'est faux, les voyelles avaient la même tonalité, juste, il s'agit d'un changement de longueur.
🌎🌞🌈🌠🌟💎💡🎡🎯💻📚📖👪👬👫🐫🐎🐆👍✋👏🙋.Beautiful video Klas Qazaqstandan Assalomu alaykum ➕ How do you do.
Kind of you to answer my question, and so promptly!
I understand your answer. Now a particular instance. If the penult is short as written but it is followed by two consonants, does it become long by position and therefore stressed? Similar to the English "debenture".
Thank you!!! This is very helpful 😁♥️
Kyoto distinguishes long vowels from long:
A E I O U
Ā Ē Ī Ō Ū(Q F L Z V)
Ŋ(X)
English transcription
@latintutorial
That's true, I actually haven't thought about the "Anglicization" of Greek words.
Hello, I'm trying to find the correct latin translation for the phrase, "My chains are broken".
What I believe the correct translation to be is, "Compes mea fracta sunt". Is this right??
idk
"Vincla dissoluta" or "Catenae dissolutae"
Awesome, but I need pronunciations for the other symbols that hover above the vouls as well. Specifically, the symbol that is above the "O" as it is saying the oo sound as in who or moo, or something like that.
I know this is an older video but maybe you can help me. I have an upcoming solo for chorus and the song is in Latin, your video has really helped me pronounce everything else in the song so far but I'm still struggling with how to pronounce "ai" like vedrai and "il". Thank you so much for the help!
Can the short vowel be under accent in a word with a long vowel, or does accent always fall in the long vowel?
I woluld say STRESS rather that Accent
If I got you right of course
isn't huic closer to ooeek sound just like you would say weak in english? Thanks!
Makes sense now, thank you.
thanks, now i will know what the line on top of vowels mean in Maori words when i visit New Zealand
I wondered how to say Roman Empire in classical Latin. Wikipedia says it's the following and shows how to pronounce it: Imperium Rōmānum, Classical Latin: [ɪmˈpɛ.ri.ũː roːˈmaː.nũː]
Problem is, there's no example of u with a tilde in the IPA for Latin. How do you pronounce it? Is the m silent as it seems in the IPA, or is it pronounced as you often hear? An example that I think of is the Latin grammar sketch in Life of Brian where the Roman officer corrects Domus to Domum and pronounces the m as if it was an English word. Is that correct?
I know it's an old video, but I really hope for a reply. Cheers!
In classical latin the m in -um is silent and the u is nasalized (-um -> -ũ, just like wikipedia says). Check out scorpio martianus channel on youtube for pronouncing latin nasal vowels, he teaches classical latin in a special way^^. And yes Monty Python's latin pronunciation is wrong lol. Hope that helps :)
@@loser7755 Oh, that's such a pity that they got the sketch wrong. It's absolutely hilarious!
I'll check it out, thanks!
H
Do you know Appendix Probi? In this book, there are native mistakes with the good spelling. So there are one, is "idem non ide" is idem not ide. So with this mistake we know the pronunciation of romans during the Empire. Also in old French of Normandie, for example the song of Roland, the -um became - on/-un ex Carolum Carlon, Quicumque quiconque in French.
Dirty Poul Nasal u sound. An example of the nasal vowel is the French President Macron’s name. IPA: [ma-kʁɔ̃].
what happens when a vowel has the letter "e" after it. For example, in the word "super" is the u still pronounced the same?
Nice..wish you upload more