Flectere si nequeo superos Acheronta movebo
['If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions']
—Line 312, Book 7 of Virgil's Aeneid.
Can anyone take a shot at transliterating the pronunciation of this line?
Flectere si nequeo superos Acheronta movebo.
There are many different pronunciations of Latin, but I'll take a stab at it in the one which I learned (the reconstructed classical). Since the new board software does not seem to like Unicode much, I'll use something like
SAMPA for the transliteration:
/'flEktErE si 'nEkwEo 'supEros a'kEronta mo'webo/
' indicates stress on syllable which follows
E is liek the e in set
Hmm--interesting. When singing the Requiem, we were told to sing
miserere, for ex., as mee-zay-ray-ray; so I somehow thought pretty much all* es in Latin were pronounced with the long a sound. Perhaps what we were told was just for singing, where pronunciation in English can also differ from the spoken word.
*Well, so much for that: I just remembered we sang both es in Requiem as ehs!
Are there any silent letters in Latin?
Are there any silent letters in Latin?
Well, according to some historical phonologists, W S Allen is perhaps the most accessible, the final s in most words had ceased to be pronounced in the late Republic. Final m was probably just a hint of nasalization on the vowel it followed amd finally disappeared some time before Silver Latin (say the Fall of Rome).
Latin distinguished the quality of vowels, i.e., between long and short vowels. For instance, all those metrical terms we learn in poetry class, anapest et al., were based on vowel quantity and not on stress (as they are in English today). The stress of a Latin word was dependent on these vowel qualities, too. Stress is usually on the ante-penultimate unless the penultimate is long. In the early version of the Classical pronunciation which I learned, long e was pronounced /e/ and short e was pronounced /E/; same with long and short i, /i/ and /I/. This is what happened later in the Romance languages that are descended from Latin. Though some of the long vowels became diphthongs when stressed: e.g., Italian buono, Spanish bueno from Latin bonus. What many speakers (and some singers) of English do that is right out no matter whether pronouncing classically or ecclesiastically is to use the modern-day English diphthongs (our so-called long vowels), e.g., /ej/ for e, /ow/ for o.
That's Moe like in Larry, Moe, and Curly.
Well, it was college choir, but no prob.
Classical Latin, ecclesiastical Latin, Italinate ecclesiastical Latin, and Silver Latin. Holy cow--I never realized there were so many different Latins! Oh yes...vulgate, too, or was it vulgar.
Few people know that young kangaroos have been joining offshoot religious groups, to such an extent that there is now a scholarly tome about the subject:
The Sects of Joeys.