Here's a
guide to
Classical Latin pronunciation (
Ecclesiastical is all weird and wrong), just in case you are ever forced to read something in
Latin:
(letter) - (example) (type) (possibly note)
Consonants
B - "b" as in "bed" (
voiced bilabial plosive)
C - "k" as in "kitten" (
unvoiced velar plosive)
D - "d" as in "dog" (
voiced dental plosive)
F - "f" as in "funny" (
labialdental fricative)
G - "g" as in "gun" (
voiced velar plosive) (origanally written C, until about 300
BCE, since they are both velar plosives and sound similar. Example: in the Roman first name
abbreviation C. for
Gaius)
H - "h" as in "hand" (
glottal fricative)
I - "y" as in "yummie" (
palatal lateral approximant) (later written as "J" by some stupid
monks in the middle second
millenium, which is why you will often see consonant I's written as J's in a lot of modern
etymology)
K - "k" as in "kitten" (
velar plosive)*
L - "l" as in "lamb" (
latteral approximant alveolar)
M - "m" as in "mommy" (
bilabial nasal)
N - "n" as in "ninny" (
dental nasal)
P - "p" as in "poke" (
unvoiced bilabial plosive)
Q - "qu" as in "quake" (It's actually two sounds. The first is "k" and the second is the Latin "v")
R - "r" as in "sinorita" (
dental trill)
S - "s" as in "sock" (
unvoiced alveolar fricative)
T - "t" as in "tick" (
unvoiced alveolar plosive)
V - "w" as in "wash" (
voiced labial-
velarapproximant) (
Ecclesiastically, it is pronounced as an english "v", but not in classical. So, unless you're at church, remember this! The V was turned to a U around 1000
C.E. by the same
monks that would change I to J 500
years later)
X - "ks" as in "licks" (It's actually two sounds. The first is "k" and the second is "s")
Double Consonants
BS - "ps" as in "cups"
BT - "pt" as in "apt"
CH -
aspirated "c" *
PH -
aspirated "p" *
TH -
aspirated "t" *
Vowels
Each vowel has a long and short version. The long version is sometimes shown with a
macron over the vowel.
Bold: long, Underlined: short
A - M
arth
a
E -
A.O.H
ell
I - S
eas
ick
O - L
og
o
U - Tw
o-f
oot (origanally written "V", but you can always tell whether "V" needs to be a consonant or vowel by place in the word.)
Y - ü, as in
über (
German) or
French u.
Diphthongs
AE - "igh" as in "might"
AU - "ow" as in "cow"
OE - "oy" as in "boy"
*Found only in words directly taken from Greek.
Stress
There are a couple main rules of Latin stress:
1) On the first
syllable if the word has two syllables. e.g. ROma, fIdes.
2) On the second syllable (called
Penult) from the end of a
polysyllabic word, if that is long.
e.g.: amIcus, moneAtur.
3) On the third syllable (called
Antepenult) if the second from end (Penult) is short. e.g. dOminus, sociAbilis.
(Note that Penult and Antepenult are plain Latin words: ante-paene-ultima "before-the-almost-last" and only become recondite and impressive in the mouths of the professional grammarians.)
A few further details:
1) If an
enclitic such as -que -ne -ve is used, the accent falls on the syllable directly before that enclitic.
2) But certain words like itAque are not encliticized, and
compounds like bene-fIcio are not really compounds, hence keep the accent of the verb.
3)
Second declension nouns like VergIlius keep accent on original place in
genitive and
vocative, e.g. VergIli, probably in the interest of
clarity.
Information on stress taken from http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/LatinBackground/Stress.Pronunciation.html
How do we know how these letters are pronounced?! Nobody speaks them anymore!
Well, there are many ways
linguists have figured out how they are pronounced. First off is the close
relation between
Italian and
Latin, many of the things Latin does, Italian does too. But most importantly, Linguists can tell what the consonants and vowels sound like from
Roman poetry. Nearly all the
poetry was written in
meter. From these many meters, linguists eventually were able to
determine how Latin was
accented,
stressed and generally
pronounced. Another important way that we figured out the pronunciation is through translatorations to other languages.