Ecclesiastical Latin vs Classical Pronunciation History | Latin: The Immortal Language
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- Опубліковано 23 лип 2020
- Where did the Ecclesiastical Pronunciation come from? Is it the natural evolution of Late Latin? or of so-called "Vulgar" Latin? Is Classical Pronunciation the proper sound for Latin, or is it merely a fad of the past century? What is the history of this Immortal Language? All these questions and more will be answered in this video!
SOURCES: see below.
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You can find Late Latin and Early Romance by Roger Wright at this link on Amazon:
www.amazon.com/gp/product/090...
Thanks for your comments, and for liking and sharing the video. I'm very grateful to have you as a subscriber. 😊 Please see these videos relevant to the topic of this video:
Romans did write with macrons! Video essay on Latin Apices & Hidden Quantity
• Romans *did* write wit...
Dr. Randall Buth on Ancient Greek pronunciation:
• Randall Buth - Pronunc...
My talk on Latin & Greek Pronunciation Evolution 500 BC to 500 AD
• Latin & Greek Pronunci...
In Defense of the Ecclesiastical Pronunciation of Latin
• In Defense of the Eccl...
Gospel of John with 5th century AD Latin pronunciation:
• The Bible in 3 Greek &...
Dē rēctā Ecclēsiasticā prōnūntiātiōne - Correct Ecclesiastical Latin Pronunciation
• Dē rēctā Ecclēsiasticā...
Many thanks to Raphael Turrigiano for his help in the research and editing of the script! See his videos here: / paleogloss
And here are the websites of three prominent Latin speakers from Italy who use the Restored Classical Pronunciation:
Irene Regini:
saturalanx.eu
Alessandro Conti:
alexanderveronensis.com
Roberto Carfagni:
scholalatina.it
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SOURCES
The Pronunciation of Greek and Latin, Edgar Howard Sturtevant
amzn.to/3W4nt45
Vox Graeca, by w. Sidney Allen
amzn.to/3FsiCT6
Vox Latina, by W. Sidney Allen
amzn.to/3WdPxSY
Greek: A History of the Language and its People, Geoffrey Horrocks
amzn.to/3FXYedR
The Regional Diversification of Latin 200 BC - AD 600, by JN Adams
amzn.to/3TRGZ2w
An Anthology of Informal Latin, 200 BC-AD 900: Fifty Texts with Translations and Linguistic Commentary, by JN Adams
amzn.to/3gSPOdM
Social Variation and the Latin Language, by JN Adams
amzn.to/3TQ4tVF
Early and Late Latin: Continuity or Change?, by JN Adams
amzn.to/3WcqzDn
Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France (Arca Classical and Medieval Texts, Papers and Monographs, by Roger Wright
amzn.to/3gVkgE0
Breve grammatica storica dell’italiano, by Paolo D’Achille
amzn.to/3fcfv8V
🤠 Take my course LATIN UNCOVERED on StoryLearning, including my original Latin adventure novella "Vir Petasātus"
learn.storylearning.com/lu-promo?affiliate_id=3932873
🦂 Sign up for my Latin Pronunciation & Conversation series on Patreon:
www.patreon.com/posts/54058196
🦂 Support my work on Patreon:
www.patreon.com/LukeRanieri
📚 Luke Ranieri Audiobooks:
luke-ranieri.myshopify.com
Ah yes, my favorite English-speaking Roman.
Adsum tibi! 😃🦂
polýMATHY Salve! :)
@@polyMATHY_Luke But are you Roman?
@@roseguber3240 haha I’m Italian-American
@@polyMATHY_Luke Not Roman then...haha
I've always known that Lex Luthor was a man of culture
Alberto Bruni indeed. 😂 😈
I now know why polýMATHY makes me uncomfortable hahaha.
*Victor Zsasz
Can you just imagine how proud a Roman would be to learn that 2000 years later Latin is still so widespread and important.
Very proud!
Roma Victrix!
They wouldn't be happy at all learning that Rome was not in fact eternal.
@@AverageAlien to keep it remembered is to make it immortal. So long as one person remembers it, it will never die.
With no native speakers it is a dead language. Greek, older, more comprehensive, is still spoken by millions.
"If you strike me down I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine" - Latin to the Germanic languages.
No one actually speaks Latin and French has Germanic cognates in it I discovered some. Then the word guard is just a transliteration of warden.
@@Robwolf28 Yes they do. There's been a Latin radio broadcast in Finland for decades
@@Robwolf28 also, this is way too literal. 🙄
😆
Latinized pronounciation of English sounds just like an Italian speaking English
Kind of but his accent is weird.
I mean it sounds like "Latin accent".
'Pro nunce iation' please.
Also similar to how someone in soain with 0 idea of english would read aloud a text 😅😅😂
I am Italian and I can confirm, it doesn't sound so unnatural to me
I joked to my father this days that Latin is the language that all timetravels should spoke.
If you go to much back in time your native language isnt the same as you speak, and if you go too much in the future no one will speak like you do but Latin will never changed.
Definitely! Certainly the written language.
What if want to travel before the raise of the Roman Empire? 😂😂 Proto indoeuropean maybe?
@@iosusito5683 Greek?
If you knew Classical (or, even Modern Standard Arabic), you would have the same advantage in the Arab world. To an extent, you'd have that advantage in the entire Islamic world when communicating with individuals who learned Arabic as a second, liturgical language. It's really cool to see languages that can do that. I wonder if there are more languages besides Arabic and Latin that can?
@@iosusito5683 Classical Latin is still closer to Proto Indoeuropean than any contemporary language.
As a medical laboratory science student, I always prefer to pronounce the name of microorganisms in Classical Latin.
"This is when latin died ; said better, it became immortal".
More than erudition, this is pure poetry.
Very kind.
16:50 This is actually a very correct pronunciation, we should make that the new universal standard spoken English :)
bring back the thorn and yogh
honestly i wouldnt mind that. im tired of so many inconsistancies in English pronunciation, from a cot-caught pin-pen GAE speaker
I agree. People always want to reform English writing, but it isn't broken. Simply native English speakers don't know how to correctly pronounce what is written.
hahaha
@@polyMATHY_Luke i could actually understand it about 80%, its the lack of s-sh distiction that threw me off the most
16:50 as a Finnish speaker, this sounds more natural to me than current English pronunciation
Same for Russian.
Same for Hungarian. On the contrary, the current English (and American etc.) pronunciations are irritatingly "unnatural". :D
Same for Spanish
@@holywarrior5059 As an American and native English speaker, I agree with you! I wish we would go back to a reconstructed phonetic pronunciation.
This part made me laugh. Basically, we East-Europeans speak "restored English". :D
Thanks for clarifying! :)
My pleasure!
I honestly just like the sound of Ecclesiastical better. It amazes me that there are people who look down on others for using the "wrong" pronunciation as uneducated. Really? Didn't those "other" speakers learn the same language? Why get mad because someone speaks with an accent? Bonus points if the snobs don't maintain vowel length.
The late Latin sounds like a grumpy Romanian.
😆
@@polyMATHY_Luke He didn’t forget Romanian!
Grumpy? You should have heard my German grandma yelling, "himmel arsch, und swirn!"
When I was in school, in Poland, we used to learn only Ecclesiastical Latin - I don't know why. No one explained it to us.
I was even 100% sure that the rules I knew were correct, so I had to check if you were not making mistakes, when I started to follow you and then for the very first time I got to know that there were couple systems of pronunciation. :)
Cześć! Thanks so much!
My mom learned Latin in high school and I knew a lot about the language since I was little. But she could never explain me how Latin became "dead" or in your terms, "Immortal" (or how she knew how to pronounce if the language was dead), and how the Romance languages branched off, or, again in your well-put terms, how Latin branched off from them. I even forgot how desperate I was to find the answer back then.
Today, I'm not only reminded of that, but finally got my answer. Thank you!
So many people get so worked up about this. I'm a Catholic who attends the traditional Latin mass. As long as people respect our priests and our traditions for pronouncing Latin in the Ecclesiastical way and don't force them to use Classical Latin, then I'm completely fine with the academic circles (Edit: Or literally any other circle for that matter) using Classical Latin. Does anyone seriously think that Julius Caeser would have used Ecclesiastical Latin? Come on. This "debate" has been something I have been utterly perplexed about ever since I started learning Ecclesiastical Latin, it's such a non-issue.
Thanks, Murray! Yeah I concur. I really like both a lot, so it’s a shame how people will seek to vilify the other.
I'm Catholic too. Unfortunately I came into the Church long after Latin had been marginalised, however one local Parish has been re-introducing Latin into their English Masses and also does a Latin Mass each week. When singing/chanting/responding I use the reconstructed Classical pronunciation I learned in school a half-century ago (it's all I know).
@@RichardDCook The preservation of Romanism, Judaeo-Christianity is not confined to one language.
@@Thelaretus The usages of personifications as to say the community of disciples of Messiah Yeshua the Lord, makes no sense outside of the context. So if you were making an analogy perhaps but outside of that, it seems like nothing. Then people need to understand what a community means it is not just gathering at a building.
@@Robwolf28 That's true enough, though somewhat random, having no relationship to anything I said in my own comment.
I have to admit I do kind of like the ecclesiastical pronunciation a little better, maybe because I'm Italian or because that's the one I'm most familiar with. But yeah, as they say, dē gustibus et colōribus nōn disputandum est
Exactly! And I think that's fine.
i don't like ecclesiastical latin for the same reasonXD looks like an italian reading latin for the first time.
@@deumevet yes, but after all Italian is the evolution of Latin...
La pronuncia classica è molto meglio perchè si capisce l'etimologia delle parole odierne.
@@ariannabinaghi5222 As is Portuguese, French, Castillan, Gallician, Astur-Leonese, Aragonese, Catalan, Occitan, Romanian and other dialects...
It's not a reason to pronounce it in the French or the Portuguese way
polyMATHY: Latin has become immortal
Classical Arabic: Hold my coffee
hahaha. Well, Arabic is in the situation where Latin was circa 800 AD: a high style register exists above various dialects and pronunciations that are rapidly diverging. Eventually, if Classical Arabic is retained as a non-native instrument of international communication, it will become 'immortal.'
eherm twitter.com/ArabiEdris/status/1287326104152408065
@@polyMATHY_Luke An old friend of mine grew up in Afghanistan, speaking Pushtun, but learned classical Arabic at his Islamic school. Many years later, he visited Morocco - where they speak Arabic, of a kind. He tried ordering food in a restaurant, using the only Arabic he knew. The waiters gathered round, awestruck by his beautiful pronunciation. Then one of them muttered, 'We are so sorry, Sir - we didn't really understand a word you said'.
Well Arabic didn’t exist really at the time of the Roman Empire as a written language, Syriac was the most common language at the time of Mohammed, there is even a lot of influence of Syriac in the Quran.
@@ic.xc. Arabic dates back from the age of Hammurabi, doesn't it?
Not that the "immortality" of Latin has anything to do with its age.
How you read the English text with classical Latin pronunciation at ~16:52 is almost exactly as Slovaks, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and many others, who don't actually speak any English, read English naturally :) Of course with our local qualities of individual sounds, which are, however, very similar to classical Latin (I'm simplifying)! Thanks for an awesome video :)
In a word: true.
(estonian too, so it's quite intelligible for me as well!)
Very true! (I'm from Hungary.)
Ancient Latin came from the Cimmerian tongue or language ? It spread from THRACE through out Europe with their DNA ?
I refuse to believe that this guy sounds American. No he sounds Latin. He should speak American with a Latin accent. Such a shock coming from Norbert.
I would love to see a comparison/deep-dive into the various national pronunciations of Latin prior to the Restored taking hold (i.e., what Latin sounded like in Portugal, Spain, France, etc. before Restored was adopted.)
Jônatas Cabral nice idea! I’ve done a few on my other channel ScorpioMartianus which you can find.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Bizarre, I looked before but I must have missed it. I'll check again more thoroughly!
@@Spvrinnaeli I thought the same thing! Also, I looked and couldn't find any of those other videos either.🤔
I am Catholic, so I prefer Ecclesiastical, because that is where I am going to use Latin most.
But I do appreciate Classical, because that is what many of the great works of Rome were written in.
Latin Mass 🇻🇦🇻🇦🇻🇦
I prefer Ecclesiastical latin
But the written is the same, no? Just the pronunciation differs now.
@@Riposte821 yep
"SO I prefer". I don't see the compulsory connection.
You deserve every single Patreon supporter. So much free and well-presented information. amazing
Wow, thank you! You're so kind.
How amazing would it be to travel back in time and plant a hidden microphone to capture Cicero's Catiline orations to the Senate? Just imagine having those high-def MP3 files on your phone and being able to listen to them while reading the corresponding texts...
Sei così carismatico che riusciresti a vendere una fornitura annuale di assorbenti ad una comunità di soli uomini
... or ice to an Inuit.
😂😂😂 grazie!
@@Philo-math lol
Bravissimo
i study roman history and latin literature in Italy, at the university of Macerata, and our teacher of latin reads with ecclesiastical pronunciation
Great video! We tend to see "Latin" as one homogenous thing, the same everywhere, which it was not. Even the Roman soldiers from the Italian peninsula had their "dialects" that evolved into the Italian languages of today. When conquering and settling foreign territories they mixed and incorporated the vocabulary and grammatical features of languages already spoken there into their colloquial or "vulgar" speech which later got standardized and evolved into the Romance languages of today. It was a great exchange of language and culture. Latin (with Vulgar Latin dialects) likely existed in this state of diglossia for most of the time. And to mention, there has been a wave of re-latinization of the modern languages in the last 300 years.
Definitely! Thanks. 😊
I really appreciate the research and effort that must have gone into making this video. Great stuff, Luke!
Thank you Yamen!
This was REALLY interesting and helped clear up a lot of confusion I have had about Latin for decades.
I'm so glad! 😃
I kinda wish that in movies where they depict actual Romans, they would speak classical latin instead of ecclesiastical
Me too, if they're in historical ancient Roman times, using a pronunciation of that time would be fantastic.
@Dave Zav Not only that, but in Judaea the Roman officials would have spoken Greek with the local elites, not Latin. They would still speak Latin among themselves in private, but Greek was the administrative language of the eastern half of the empire at that time. Even so, Jesus would probably have had only very basic knowledge of Greek, if at all, let alone Latin.
@Dave Zav At least he made some sort of effort...
@Dave Zav Actually, the actor who played Pilatus was from central Europe, and you can hear him speak with a strong Slavic twang, esp. when he says, 'Quod est veritas, Claudia?' I was quite chuffed to catch that.
That depends on the epoch of course. With Silver Age you would expect residual palatalization even amongst the elites. For golden or classical era reconstructed pronunciation is indeed fairer and universally applicable.
What an absorbing video, and Luke is obviously a very gifted linguist. In my old age I am starting to 'tip my toe' into the deep lake which is the Latin language, as I have an interest in the history of the Roman Republic, and, also (as a catholic) in Ecclesiastical Latin. This was a stimulus to my studies; thanks Luke. (UK)
I'm very happy you liked the video! :D Much obliged for the kind comments. Have you seenmy LLPSI and Lingua Latina Comprehensibilis course on my other channel ScorpioMartianus? That's the fastest way to fluency!
16:50 is how my father reads english :) Slovak language has specific sound for each letter and as he don't speak english, he reads it as Slovak.
I love Slovak! 🇸🇰
I am a native Latin speaker of the Castilian variation who also happens to speak the parisian variation of Latin. Also the most important thing I learned from this video is that I'm not the only one who has beef with Ecclesiastical Latin #teamclassicalLatin.
magnifico video!
I just discovered your channel and I have to say that I have never been so impressed in my life. God bless you and never stop what you are doing Brother !
That’s so nice of you to say! Welcome!
Absolutely fascinating! Particularly your highlighting the Carolingian standardisation of Latin and its role as a formative precursor of the Renaissance.
"Latin the Immortal Language", love it, more tee shirt material.
Thank you! haha I'll make that shirt.
Wow this channel deserves more credit :O very informative! during my 5 years of linguistic studies noone ever tried to explain this switch.. it was always Roman Empire and Latin and then razzle dazzle poof and Latin is no more - only localized stumps of modern era languages... thank you for making this easily understandable :)
I laughed so hard on English text reading with Latin pronunciation 👏👏👏😂 Understood everything, this is the accent and pronunciation lots of Slavs have when they start learning English and some still have it even though they're already fluent :D Loved it!!
Back when I was first learning english as a kid, because I also knew polish when I learnt how to spell words it would sound much like how you spoke at 16:50. I still pronounced it the correct way but internally when spelling it out it sounded very pure and classical. Your pronunciation seems very natural to me as I often read with a very hard, calculated pronunciation when reading part of an english article while talking with my parents in Polish as my standard r.p. accent is difficult to understand for non native speakers sometimes and I spend a great deal of my time speaking Polish in general
Revisiting this video three years later......one of your best projects! Quality content!
Grātiās, amīce!
Loved the video! One of my favourite documents that shows the transition from latin to medieval italian is in the"placiti cassinesi" , essentially a trial transcription where the witness testimony was reported in the original vulgar from the 10th century.
"Sao ko kelle terre, per kelle fini que ki contene, trenta anni le possette parte Sancti Benedicti." I think the use of the letter "K" in front of e and i already showed that back then in Italy, the "C" sound had the current soft sound
The english spelling pronuntiation is pretty much a spanish speaker reading english without knowing a single bit of it
Very interesting video!! Watching previous videos I’ve been wondering why your Latin pronunciation sounded a bit different from the Latin pronunciation we are taught in Italy and I finally know why now. Good job
Your videos are always a treat.
And so are your comments! Thanks 😊
THANK YOU. This cleared up all my questions! I used to love singing the Carmina Burana with all the different pronunciations!
Glad it was helpful!
This is the most interesting video I ever watched about the origin of my language (italian). 😱
THANK YOU
Sono molto contento se ti è piaciuto!
❤️🇮🇹
i'm always waiting for the next video, thank you Luke!
Thanks, JJ!!
I'd never really thought of Latin being immortalized this way. Thanks for the new perspective.
Handsome man, handsome voice, handsome knowledge sharing. 👍🏾
You got a new subscriber from Ινδονησία. 😊
Thank you to you in Indonesia!
Très informatif et en plus tellement agréable !! Merci mille fois de partager votre passion avec nous !
Merci a vous!
This explains a lot. Thank you for this insightful explanation!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Seu canal é ótimo! Parabéns!
Another great video Luke👍
Fascinating stuff, excellent work as always Luke!
Cameron Paul thanks so much!
que buen video y muy interesante, Lucas
oh thanks a lot for this video! I just learned that what I learned at school was the ecclesiastical pronunciation. I was not even aware that another pronunciation existed (sorry). I studied Latin so many years ago and your videos are trying to pull out long discarded memories from my brain!!
Great!
Well that was fascinating. Watched the whole thing. Much appreciated!
Video eccezionale. Ho scoperto il tuo canale da poco, la mia fidanzata, che conosce la pronuncia ecclesiastica, criticava la tua pronuncia classica. Incuriosito, ho trovato la tua spiegazione illuminante. Grazie!
Sono contento! 😃 Sì, abbiamo molte pronunce che possiamo usare in latino.
Thank you for this video, very instructive.
Grazie a te, Maria! 😊
Good to see you finally put all of this in a single video! I was looking forward to it! You know I prefer to use mostly the Ecclesiastical, but I also like the Classical for some cases regarding recitation of some poems and also reading ancient texts, while Ecclesiastical sounds quite better when praying, for reading some medieval texts (especially from Saints Augustin and Thomas Aquinas) and also for talking (although I've been trying to get better at Classical so I can talk with you guys more properly in the chats). Thank you again for this class!
Also, I hope that guy finally gives up on his repeated comments in your video trying to attack the RLP.
Thanks, Emanuel! Haha, that guy, you mention, is Russell, who has already become infamous in the comments sections of my videos for his posts. 😂And yes, he did comment. You'll find my response to him here in the comments below.
@@polyMATHY_Luke dude...He doesn't give up, does he?
this channel is awesome and unique it deserves a lot more views and subscribers !!!
This is fantastic! Thank you!
When you pronounce knight the old english way suddenly for me as a german speaker the word suddenly makes sense.knight is closed to Knecht
Exactly!
The great vowel shift really did a doozy on mutual intelligibility for other Germanic languages. And then the damn Germans had to do a whole consonantal shift to make it worse!
Hey Luke! I just uploaded my first youtube video where I read a Latin text towards the end, could you please tell me what you think about my pronunciation?
Almost the whole video is in Spanish but there is that one part in Latin
Greetings from Mexico!
Manuel Bravo I enjoyed it very much! Thanks for showing me. I left a comment on your video. 😊
@@polyMATHY_Luke Thank you very much, Luke, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Excellent history of the language evolution. One of your best. I learned a lot.
Very kind of you. 😃
Bro, this video is great. I am very glad I found it precisely after hearing a beautiful lecture about Erasmus.
Permultas gratias tibi, Luci, propter curam tuam nostrae vetustae atque neglectae Latinae linguae. Being Italian, ecclesiastical pronuntiation is the way I pronounce Latin, usually. But in spite of this, I prefer and advocate "pronuntia restituta", for two main reasons: 1) It is more consistent, phonetically, and uses less phonemes (sounds). That makes it easier spreading Latin as an international second language 2) It lets you focus on, and understand much better, ethymology. For ex., if you pronounce "ti"+vowel properly and don't use Ramist letters, you can see the relationship between "natio" and "natus", "nauis" and "nauta", "salue" and "salus", etc.
Awesome video! The man really loves the word "thus".
I studied classical latin and some time after that I started studing singing and they wanted me to pronounce with the ecclesiastical pronounciation... I mean. It made sense because I was usually singing masses and other sacred music... But I had to relearn how to pronounce it. Also sometimes I am required to use what musicians call the german pronounciation. So it is confusing!
Thank you for a thorough explanation!
This was so good Luke. Great job!
abbadonnergal thank you!!
So I used to work at a pet store in the fish department and this woman comes in a says a Latin fish name I correct here pronunciation using my Ecclesiastical Latin bias not knowing there even was a classical pronunciation. She said she was a Latin teacher and I was saying it wrong. I say I was taught Latin 10 years and she said “well they taught you wrong”. I can say I was a bit offended.
Great story! Thanks for telling it. Things like you mentioned are the whole reason I made this video. 😊 People need to be aware that there is more than one pronunciation standard. Ecclesiastical isn’t wrong, Classical isn’t wrong. I’m a bit shocked if she had no idea Ecclesiastical even existed, but that’s possible. 🤷♂️ Thanks for the comment!
You were both being pedantic. You probably should not have corrected her, but honestly she should not have started by pronouncing it as classical Latin in the first place, since the convention for scientific names in the English-speaking world is the traditional (pre-reconstructed) English Latin pronunciation.
In Arabic a similar process is currently happening.. separation between so called dialects and the classical formal arabic (that nobody speaks in real life..) very interesting.
Great! Very interesting! Thank you!
I’ve been discussing this matter with my friends for ages. This video helped a lot putting everything together. Benigne facis!
I had had no idea that that Roger Wright book (11:15) existed; just ordered it! I also like Solodow's "Latin Alive" which discusses all the sound changes that come up in this video and also has some excerpts from Romance languages at various periods. Not much about Alcuin, though; I learned about him here!
That's right! Another great book.
I'm so glad I found this channel
So glad you’re here!
Very informative and enjoyable!
Perfeito. Everytime I learn a little bit of latin it is worth my time! There is also law teachers latin...There is a movement in Brazil to avoid the use of latin expressions in the court and roman law is no longer an obligatory subject in law school. Only after finding your channel I knew what I was missing. Thank you! Obrigado.
¡Qué pena! El derecho romano y las expresiones latinas solían marcar la erudición de un abogado.
Obrigado also to you!
É melhor eu nem falar rsrsrs
Isso realmente é uma desgraça.
Awesome work! :D
Grātiās, frātercule! 😃🦂
Fascinating. Thank-you. I falsely assumed educated Latin was much more constant in its pronunciation from the 1st to 5th centuries.
I don't know much about the topic, but this has been pretty interesting. Besides, your voice, narration style and (English) pronunciation are very nice to listen to!
Aw thanks! 🥰
Salve. Your channel is delicious. And your pronunciation is admirable.
Aw htanks, Gonzalo! 🥰 Salvē et tū.
Very interesting and well-presented clarifications. Tolerance seems to be the keyword here.
Thanks! I concur. 😊
Very interesting stuff. I learned a lot of new things about latin from this insightful video. Thank you.
Thanks for watching!
Você é excepcionalmente incrível. Estou muito agradecido pelos vídeos tão bem elaborados e estruturados. Ups e você é também muito atraente.
Obrigado! 😊
@@polyMATHY_Luke com muito prazer :-)
I am so fascinated by your knowledge of the history of Latin. I can't get enough of your videos.
Thanks!
Super interesting video! As an aside, for anyone who is interested in the evolution of one those "vulgar" forms of Latin, the Portuguese/Galician languages, I recently read a book that I highly recommend: "Assim Nasceu uma Língua / Assi Naceu Ũa Lingua" by Fernando Venâncio (2019).
Among other things, it makes quite convincing arguments that around 600 AD there were major and rapid changes to the speech in the Northwestern corner of Hispania that clearly split it off from the rest of the Romance world. It also documents the evolution of Old Galician into Portuguese and modern Galician, including attempts after the Renaissance to "re-Latinize" the language.
Luke - this video blew my mind. Fantastic - pithy, and taught me many things I didn't know. It's wonderful to hear Latin spoken fluently! As background, I'm a first generation Canadian, son of Tuscan immigrants. I speak Italian more or less fluently (although after 60 plus years of speaking Canadian-inflected English, I now struggle with the Italian trilled R's - maledetto!) I took four years of Latin in highschool, where we learned the "Classical" pronunciation.
I have an extremely erudite uncle who lives in Rome, a (now retired) gastroenterologist, who fancies himself a Latin scholar, and when he saw my textbook all those years ago, recoiled in horror at how we were being taught "incorrect" pronunciation (it's not KAIZAR, it's CHEZZAR!), presumably because we New World rubes couldn't handle Italianate sounds, and of course who would know better how Latin should sound than the descendants of the Romans? (Sigh.)
At any rate, I had always assumed that "church Latin" was a late evolution of the classical language in parallel with vulgar Latin becoming Italian. But you explained how the change in pronunciation started much earlier.
You observe that there is very little difference in the two forms. But I guess I'd observe that when you look at medieval documents such as Magna Carta, there are terms (related to administration etc.) that perhaps would not have been familiar to the ancient Romans.
I wonder too about the "Vulgate Bible". (I have a print of the first page of Genesis from the Gutenberg Bible in my office.) It seems the vocabulary is fairly basic (I can understand much of it without resorting to a dictionary) and I'm wondering if that reflects a simplification of the language itself or an editorial decision to make it accessible to more people.
Thanks, and look forward to watching the rest of your videos!
Got here from your reply to my comment on your previous video. This definitely confirms my understanding of how the Ecclesiastical Latin behaves and was formed, it seems to have been made to sound somewhat close to Italian afterwards and was not a natural evolution of the language. Great in-depth explanation here! I would love in the future an analysis of the evolution of the pronunciation of the letter written as "c" in romance languages as it still baffles me today. I am very fascinated by how that evolved and became so different. I mean, translated in "english sounds" what once was pronounced as "k" in latin became "ch" in Italian, "s" in Spanish and was often replaced by ch sounding something like "sh" in French, etc. I would love a video in the future about how that might have happened/evolved, I feel like c took so many different directions. 😉 Anyways, love both your channels, keep up the amazing work! 😎
I’m glad you liked the video! Thanks so much for being a subscriber of both channels. 😊 Yes, that’s an interesting topic! I’ll definitely cover it.
So here's more or less what happened:
Firstly, [k] began to shift to [c] before /i/ and /e/. [c] is a palatal stop, a sound you can hear in the modern Greek word και. Compare 'και' (the site 'forvo' has recordings) with the Spanish word 'que' to hear the difference between [ke] and [ce]. This [c] sound then transformed into the [tʃ] sound of modern Italian and Romanian, which fascinatingly has also happened to Cypriot Greek, so in Cypriot 'και' is pronounced like Spanish 'che'. Subsequently in Western Romance (Old French/Spanish/Portuguese etc.) [tʃ] shifted further forward in the mouth to [ts] like the 'ts' in 'cats'. It remained this way for a while until it lost its affrication and became [s]. Then in standard European Spanish it shifted forward to become a dental fricative [θ] to avoid merging with inherited /s/, while in southern dialects it merged with the inherited /s/ sound and that's how you get distinción vs seseo. Latin America was settled by southern Spanish speakers so that's why Latin America has seseo.
Another parallel would be English and German. Compare English 'water' with German 'wasser'. Old High German first turned the original 't' into 'ts', and then into just 's'.
Can’t help but think how upset English speakers in America would be if somebody said, “language is a tool just like any other, and if you change it or add to it whenever you like, you will blunt it. Use it correctly (uniformly) or it will turn into the useless double speech from 1984.”
As a non native English speaker I understood most of what you read in English with that weird pronunciation. Back in the day I used to "speak" English like that with my classmates just for fun.. LOL.
For me he just sounded like a brazilian who knows nothing of the language reading a english text and trying too hard to pronounce everything 😂😂
lol fun!
@@TheZenytram hahahah
The same we did with my classmates, even now that I am older we are speaking English with my friends that way for fun. It is very common to do this for fun here in Greece because every time we laugh :)
Have you ever done any videos about the former, regional pronunciations of Ecclesiastical Latin? Very interested to hear what they were like.
This video is very interesting. I knew almost nothing about the latin language and had no idea that we had clues to the historical pronunciation of Latin back to the Roman Empire. Thank you very much for sharing this knowledge with us.
Thanks so much for watching!
The Roman pronunciation is often called the Roman pronunciation because it pronounced the way Romans speak. If you don't believe it, go to Rome and you will find plenty of people using that pronunciation. If Restored Classical is the de facto international standard, Ecclesiastical is the de jure international standard.
On another note, do we have clips of Roberto Carfagni saying he prefers the Restored Classical pronunciation? I studied under him, and every conversation he has stated that the Restored Classical pronunciation is more common in International communities of Latin speakers thus it helps him reach more people to use the Restored Classical pronunciation. Unless we are just using prefer meaning to use frequently or more frequently.
There is no de jure standard. Latin belongs to everyone - that's the whole point lol.
Naturally I do mean “prefer” to mean “prefer to use more frequently in order to increase international appeal,” which I stated in the video with similar words. If our wonderful friend Roberto subjectively likes the sound of Ecclesiastical more, I would not be surprised. I would expect most Italians feel that way. People usually like what’s familiar.
Ran across you on Ecolinguist's channel & this is the first of your videos I've seen. As someone who speaks Spanish/French, has a Bachelor's degree in the former, & loves history as it relates to language/culture this video was absolutely mindblowing🤯
Thank you!
I'm so glad you think so! Thanks a million. 🥰 I think you'll also like my other channel quite a bit: ua-cam.com/play/PLU1WuLg45SiyrXahjvFahDuA060P487pV.html
I want to learn Latin primarily because I hear it every time I go to Mass. I've had a little unease because the best instruction I can find uses the classical pronunciation. After your video I feel much better. Thank you.
I’m delighted to hear that, Aaron! Yes, it’s very easy to convert one to the other. As you can see I easily can use both, which is just a matter of practice. Mutual tolerance I think is crucial, since otherwise we cut ourselves off from great material in the other pronunciation. It would be like spurning UK English to prefer US material. It’s too limiting.
Your knowledge and performance are admirable. Congrats!
Fernando Pedroza de Mattos thank you, good sir! 😃
polýMATHY I’ll be always expecting a new vídeo. Gratias tibi.
The Ecclesiastical Pronunciation, besides being more similar to Italian, is the Latin we learnt at school in Italy, at the Liceo Classico, for five( looong) years, so it seems to be more prevalent. To us Italians, the so called philological pronunciation sounds really weird and difficult to practice, also because when we were children and the Mass was in Latin, we learnt to say our prayers using te Ecclesiastical Pronunciation. Also in Sacred Music, like Bach High Mass or Mozart Requiem, singers all over the world use of course the E.P.
Per me è la pronuncia più armoniosa di tutte, e credo non sia solo per un fatto di abitudine.
Genuinely, I believe theories and studies that gave birth to Restored Classical pronunciation owe much of their persuasiveness to how alien it sounds. Asking for directions comes across, phonetically, like a veiled threat. Describing little Gaius' plans for the summer sounds like an edict. Something that sounds so awkward sticks around in the mind like tar.
Ecclesiastical pronunciation is the best
Did Alcuin's restored 'classical' pronunciation restore the "k" consonantal pronunciation to all pronunciations of the consonant "c," including pronouncing "Caesar" as "Kaisar" instead of as "Tsesar"? What about Alcuin's pronunciations of classical diphthongs? Did Alcuin pronounce "ae" as "ai" rather than as "e"? Any good secondary sources for Alcuin's restoration? Thanks for any info.
Hi. I came here to learn a few Latin words while having a run, but I ended up googling your audiobooks on top of it. Your voice and tempo are very pleasing, your sense of humor comforting, and your enthusiasm kinda cute. I see a lot of hard work that has paid well. Please keep up the good work.
Also, you made me laugh with the passage in 16:50 because that was most definitely the way I have pronounced English the first time I tried to speak it - except "c" inside words, I would really read as "c" not "k" :D
Love your channel; you're a really nice guy!
Your english is really clear and easy to undertand.
You're very kind. Thanks.