How does latin sound

While there has of course been years of often separate development, the fact that so many different ones have developed gives a suggestion as to how varied pronunciation would have been. Of course not. Not for sure.

No one now alive was alive back then to hear Latin spoken by native speakers, and there are no audio recordings from those times. People have made educated guesses, using misspellings in Roman inscriptions, descriptions of Latin in contemporaneous Greek writings, and the way Latin has morphed into the modern Romance languages. The resulting pronunciation scheme is often called the "restored" pronunciation.

Here is a fluent modern speaker Daniel Pettersson using the restored pronunciation to discuss the legend of Atlantis. Sometimes there are slight variations in details of pronunciation. Here is another fluent speaker Luke Ranieri giving a glowing review of a Latin textbook. There are many other fluent speakers for whom links could be given, if you're interested. Regional variations in pronunciation are evident even among those who attempt the restored pronunciation.

Central and Eastern Europe and Russia had their own pronunciation methods, which are still sometimes in evidence. The Roman Catholic church generally uses a Latin pronunciation that developed in Italy over the centuries. Ask if you would like some links to audio examples. Speakers with different varieties of pronunciation can understand each other with seemingly not much difficulty. Wikipedia would be a good place to look for more information, following up the articles with the references listed.

For instance, Latin phonology and orthography , Latin regional pronunciation , Ecclesiastical Latin. Of course Latin and its daughter languages went through their own sound changes over time. By comparing the pronunciation of cognate words in the many modern Latin-descended languages to deduce rules for how they changed and diverged, and comparing that with how the Romans spelled their own words and what they wrote about pronunciation, modern linguists have reconstructed classical phonology with a high degree of confidence.

Of course, we will never speak with a live Roman to be certain. Every country's "experts" pronounce Latin differently, and they all say that their's is the correct way to speak. Ask them how the Romans pronounced Cicero and you will get everything from Kee Ker o to tsitz e ro.

You could probably look up Latin sermons on Youtube, some Roman Catholic priests still do them in Latin. Well, I'm an every Sunday go-to-meeting Catholic. Born and raised. I have never heard nor heard of a Catholic priest preaching in Latin.

And it's just not part of our tradition--at least that I know of. The sermon would be preached in the vernacular. Everything else may have been in Latin, but the sermon would have been in the vernacular. You're right, they don't preach in Latin. I actually really like the Latin Mass, but the homilies are in English where I live. Just about everything else in the Mass is Latin, though. Centuries later, Latin was no longer a living language, and the Bible was understood only by scholars and clerics.

Think of the multitudes with English as second language. Nevertheless very intersting! Waldo Sweet produced an oral-aural Program over 60 years ago. The same for Greek!

For vocabulary building I taught Word Power for 5. Church pronunciation I usedr for classroom Pronunciation. Church pronunciation went On longer than Classical. Church pronunciation has remained more consistent in 2, years.

I disagree. It is not mostly relgious practices that caused the change og Latin pronunciation. I see it as a linguistic process. It goes beyond just dividing the indo-european languages into Centem and Satem languages.

But it is definitely linguistic change. Name required. Email required. Click here to cancel reply. Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time. Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. Comments 6 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. This is a very basic guide to Latin pronunciation. You will get plenty of help in the lessons with audio files.

The good news is that Latin is pronounced quite consistently. The sounds are quite easy to reproduce. As a general guide, Latin would have sounded more like modern Spanish or Italian than English.

Latin is however spoken with two rather different systems, widely called "Classical" and "Ecclesiastical".