Latin Pronunciation

Latin Pronunciation The first part of Latin Pronunciation is the double consonant. When you have a double consonant, you should pronounce both. In English, we might skip over a double consonant and pronounce it like a single consonant. For example, with “puella”. In English we say “poo-EL-a,” quickly on the double-L. But in Latin, you want to say “poo-EL-LA.” For “gessi,” you want to say, “GES-SEE.” “FER-RUM,” “Mel-IS-SA.” So, those double consonants get a little bit longer than they would in English. Another part of Latin pronunciation is the diphthong. These come into English as well. However, if we already speak English, then we’re used to seeing them, and don’t give them a second thought. However, in Latin, some vowels are grouped that we’re not used to seeing. A diphthong is, by definition, two vowels that make one sound. The first one is “-ae”, pronounced like “aisle, lie, or dry.” We see this in the words “puellae” and “saepe”. The second one, “-au”, is pronounced like “house or mouse”. And we’ll see it in “laudo” and “aut”. “-ei” like in “reign and mane”, and we see it in the word “deinde”. It still might sound like both vowels are being pronounced, but they really do come across as one. “Deinde.” The next one is “-eu”. You won’t ever find this sound in English, so I can’t really give you an equivalent. Two words in Latin, “e-oo-gay and e-hay-oo” is what they look like in English, but you want to mash those two vowels together a little bit more: “euge" "ehou”. This sound is really uncommon in Latin, and you won’t see it very often. “-oe”, as pronounced in “oil, boil, broil”, and we see it in the verb “coepit.” “-ui”, just like the French word for yes, “oui”, it’s pronounced the same way. like “wee or gooey”. The only words in Latin where we see this pronounced as a diphthong are, “huius, cuius, huic, cui, and hui”. All these are examples of parts of the declension for “qui, quae, quod” and “hic, haec, hoc.” Every time, except for when you see it in these words, the letters “u” and “i” together do not make a diphthong. Additionally in Latin, you’ll have some non-diphthong double vowels. In this case, the vowels are pronounced each separately. We’re not used to seeing a double “i” in English, but in Latin you’ll pronounce it “ee-ee”. In “meus, mea, meum”, we have this “e-u” sound, the “e-a” sound, and another “e-u” sound. Each of these vowels should be pronounced individually. “mea, meus, meum.” In the Latin word for “today”, “hodie”, you should pronounce both the “i” and the “e” on the end, sort of like “ho-dee-ay.” “Hodie.” The “i” makes a sort of “y” sound in this case. Additionally in Latin, sometimes students don’t know where to emphasize a particular syllable. Romans didn’t really use emphasis so much as they used long and short vowels. You can think of it as emphasis for now, because that’s good enough for introductory Latin, but as you get into higher levels of Latin, when you’re doing poetry, the long and short vowels will come into play. We see those indicated through the macrons -- the long lines over the letters, which, by the way, the Romans never used, and we have put those in as a sort of after-the-fact way to indicate long and short vowels. So, you’re gonna see emphasis usually before a double consonant, like in “pu-EL-lae.” The “ell” is longer. “PuELLae.” You’ll also see diphthongs usually emphasized. “Puellae” emphasizes both the “el” sound and the diphthong. “Deinde”, the other word we saw earlier, has the emphasis on “dein”. If the word has neither a double consonant nor a diphthong, the emphasis will go on the second-to-last syllable a lot of the time. As in English, no rules are really hard or fast, and there’s always exceptions to the rules. So, you may have noticed in your foray into Latin that there’s no letter “J” showing up. Sometimes you’ll see a “J”, sometimes not. But, the “J” makes an “i” or a “y” sound, like “yuh”. So, in a translation, you may have “Jupiter”, who’s the equivalent for Zeus. It’s going to be pronounced “Yoo-piter” in Latin. Sometimes you might have the “J”, sometimes it might just be an “i” at the beginning. It just depends on the text you’re using. For “Juno” it’s the same thing: “Yoo-no.” For “youth”, you’re gonna have two vowels at the beginning, but you’re gonna pronounce it like a “J” at the start: “Yoo-way-niss.” You may also have noticed that there’s no “W”. In Latin inscriptions, sometimes you’ll notice that the “U” is replaced with a “V”, and they’re in all caps. So, like in “Yoo-piter”, you’ll see that the “U” is replaced with a “V”, and here too for “Yoo-no”. That’s where the idea of a “W” comes from, and why it’s written like two “V”s instead of two “U”s. I know on the lower case, and sometimes in the capital, we can get away with rounding off our “W”s, however, in the typeface, as in this video, you’ll notice it’s two “V”s put together, and so it all kind of blends into this linguistic phenomenon. “V” changes to the sound of a “W”. “You-way-niss,” “way-nee-oh, way-nee-ray, way-nee, went-uss,” “wall-ay-oh, wall-ay-ray, wall-oo-wee.” So, in all cases, this “V” changes to the sound of a “W”. Some patterns of sound for pronunciation of the various verbs. When you’re saying the four principle parts in a first conjugation, which is governed by the letter “A”, you’re going to say, “laborO, laborARe, laborAVI, laborAtus.” For “laudo, to praise,” you’re going to say, “LAUdo, lauDARe, lauDAVI, laudAtus.” “Ambulo” has the same pattern: “ambulO, ambulARe, ambulAVI, ambulAtus.” Second conjugation has a long “e” sound on the penultimate “e”. “MonEO, monEre, monUI, monitus.” “ValEO, valEre, valUI.” So the long “e” creates emphasis before the “O”. That’s different from the third conjugation that has a short penultimate “e”. “ere” instead of “ay-re.” So, “intellegere” has a quicker “-ere” on the end. If it were 2nd conjugation, it would be pronounced “-AYre.” But, it isn’t. It’s “intellegere.” In “ago,” we see “ago, agere”; the “-ere” is quicker. If we’re looking back at the 2nd conjugation. The long “e” comes into play on the 1st principle part: “mon-AY-oh.” Notice, in the 3rd conjugation, there is no “e” before this “o”. That’s how you can identify the verbs in a dictionary setting. The other type of 3rd conjugation -- the 3rd-io -- has a short “-ere” as well. “capio, capere -- capere -- cepi, captus.” Finally, the 4th conjugation, which is governed by the letter “i”, will have a similar appearance in the 1st principle part to the 3rd-io conjugation. However, it’s in the 2nd principle part where we see the change. 3rd conjugation and 3rd-io have this “-ere”, whereas “audio, audire” is going to have this “i” instead of an “e”. “Audio, audire, audivi, auditus.” “Venio, venire, veni, ventus.”