Monday's Latin word(s) is de novo. The only pronunciation given for de is day. My dictionary gives the only pronunication as dee. In reality both are in wide use and ought to be acknowledged. This is an illustration of general disorder in pronunication of Latin words used in English. For an amusing discussion of the point, see the occasional remarks about it by the fictional character Stephen Maturin in Patrick O'Brian's sea novels.

welcome, scherzo!

I am absolutely no Latin-head, but I have sung a lot of it, and have never heard de pronounced dee. that would be di. we have used deh, instead of day, but there's the whole church latin/sung latin/etc., thing.

there are Latin scholars here on AWAD, so they'll pipe in, I'm sure!

In the law, de novo is a standard of review used by a higher court to consider a case previously decided. De novo means that a court deciding a question of law (not fact) will review the law as if the case had first been brought before the court which is making the review. It is sort of a judicial "do over".

I believe (since we don't know for sure--I also teach philosophy, so what do we REALLY know anyway?;-) that the classical Latin pronunciation would be rendered "deh NOwo," with a slight buzzing sound on the 'w.' What we do know about pronunciation is based on poetry (thanks to rhyme and meter) and the tradition of the language having been taught continuously for thousands of years. BTW, I have always asserted to my students that Latin is not a dead language--it is, rather, immortal! For a host of good reasons to study the language, you may peruse the following website:

http://emp.byui.edu/HUNTM/Latin%20evidence.htm

Ah, yes, the pronunciation of Latin. There are almost as many ways as there are speakers [sic] of Latin. Each of the European nations have ways of pronouncing Latin that are more in line with the phonemic inventories of their standard languages than how Classical Latin may or may not have been pronounced. (Latin changed between the early kingdom, through the Republic, and into the Empire.) Your best bet, if you really, really, want to know is to buy W S Allen's Vox Latina and read it. It's still in print or can be found used on Abebooks or some such site. (There's an older book by Sturtevant that's available, too, but Allen is more up to date.) Take Gibson's Passion of the Christ, for example, the pronuciation they used there was mainly ecclesiastical, because a lot of the actors who played Romans were Italian. (Some Italians even insist, more from political grounds than philological ones that the ecclesiastical/Italian pronunciation is the one that Cicero and his boys used.) The Roman legionaries in Judaea at the time were mainly recruited in Syria, and judging by their names (muster rolls still exist) they were mainly Aramaic speaking. In the Eastern part of the Roman empire official business was conducted in Koine Greek. (Caveat: I have taught and tutored Latin, and studied linguistics.)

i don't know about Latin but i surely have read Spanish a bit as it was written in the first mail this week that Spanish, French and many others languages have being derived from Latin, may be learning this word will become easy for me.

'de' in Spanish is 'of'
and 'novo' would be something new

so 'de novo' means 'of new'

i think it makes sense

I agree with Latinteacher. There are societies in Europe who have get-togethers and speak Latin, and a few places like U of Kentucky have spoken Latin courses. Check Wikipedia for "spoken Latin" and "living Latin". Also in general, since I was a university student way back I've carefully explained why Latin is NOT DEAD. It lives on vigourously in all Romance languages and infects a large degree of other Western languages. In fact, a lady I tutored in English was taking a course at a local college on Latin roots, because it helps explain what words mean. Since I had 6 years of Latin in school, that has been one of the most valuable resources I ever learned and it gets a daily workout.

if you want a daily dose of classical languages, check out rogueclassicism

I did not say that Latin was a dead language. In the US, the pronunciation that gets taught most is what's called the (reconstructed) classical pronuciation. Other countries have traditionally used different pronunciations, but may be adopting the US system. Neither did I say that teaching Latin is useless or invaluable. I, personaly, don't think that anybody needs a reason to learn another language. The learning is its own reward, but, yes, learning Latin rather than say Chechnyan will be more useful to an anglophone student in that it will help enormously with English vocabulary and etymology. And as for Latin living on in the Romance languages, one can also say that Proto-Indo-European lives on in all its daughter languages some of which are dead [sic].

I was not replying to you. In the Mar 4th word of the day Anu stated:
Latin is a dead language. No people speak it as their everyday language. The area south of the US is called Latin America because most of the people down there speak Spanish or Portuguese, both derived from Latin.

I take exception to this, for in truth no one can dispute that Latin is an "evolved" language, directly the predecessor of Italian, and both mother and father to all Romance languages, and still the main expression of science and medicine in naming species and body parts etc. Also, I'm not sure, but I thought they still spoke latin in the Vatican. As for your original post I completely agree with you.

Best regards

I was not replying to you.

Ah, sorry for the misunderstanding.

I thought they still spoke Latin in the Vatican

Yes, I've been meaning to pick up the latest edition of the Vatican Latin dictionary with words for nuclear device etc. It came out near the end of the last millenneum. There's a news broadcast in Latin from Finland (Nuntii L:atini) and a newspaper ("Diarium Latinum") from the Vatican. Of course, the Vicipaedia is available in Latin, too.