Latin phonology and orthography
This article largely deals with what features can be deduced for Classical Latin as it was spoken by the educated from the late Roman Republic to the early Empire.
During most of the time written Latin was in widespread use, authors variously complained about language change or attempted to "restore" an earlier standard.
Those placed in brackets have a debated phonemic status, and those preceded by a dagger (†) are found mainly or only in Greek loanwords.
Classical Latin had ten native phonemic monophthongs: the five short vowels /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/ and /u/, and their long counterparts /iː/, /eː/, /aː/, /oː/ and /uː/.
[c] That the short /i/ and /u/ were, as this implies, similar in quality to the long /eː/ and /oː/ is suggested by attested misspellings such as:[37] /e/ most likely had a more open allophone before /r/.
[41] Such a vowel is found in documentum, optimus, lacrima (also spelled docimentum, optumus, lacruma) and other words.
In the vicinity of labial consonants, this sound was not as fronted and may have retained some rounding, thus being more similar if not identical to the unreduced short /u/ [ʊ].
In Old Latin, ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ were written as ⟨ai⟩, ⟨oi⟩ and probably pronounced as [äi̯] and [oi̯], with a fully closed second element, similar to the final syllable in French travailⓘ.
They were then monophthongized to [ɛː] and [eː] respectively, starting in rural areas at the end of the Republican period.
Long consonants were usually indicated through doubling, but ancient Latin orthography did not distinguish between the vocalic and consonantal uses of ⟨i⟩ and ⟨v⟩.
[53] Among other arguments are the loss of vowels before or after the accent in words such as discip(u)līna and sinist(e)ra; and the shortening of post or pre-accentual syllables in Plautus and Terence by brevis brevians, for example, scansions such as senex and voluptātem with the second syllable short.
[55] During this period, the word-initial stress triggered changes in the vowels of non-initial syllables, the effects of which are still visible in classical Latin.
Study of this vowel reduction, as well as syncopation (dropping of short unaccented syllables) in Greek loan words, indicates that the stress remained word-initial until around the time of Plautus, in the 3rd century BC.
In Latin a syllable that is heavy because it ends in a long vowel or diphthong is traditionally called syllaba nātūrā longa (lit. transl.
These terms are translations of Greek συλλαβὴ μακρά φύσει (syllabḕ makrá phýsei) and μακρὰ θέσει (makrà thései), respectively; therefore positiōne should not be mistaken for implying a syllable "is long because of its position/place in a word" but rather "is treated as 'long' by convention".
This type of shortening is found in early Latin, for example in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, but not in poetry of the classical period.
Occasionally, mainly in early printed texts up to the 18th century, one may see a circumflex used to indicate a long vowel where this makes a difference to the sense, for instance, Româ /ˈroːmaː/ ('from Rome' ablative) compared to Roma /ˈroːma/ ('Rome' nominative).
[65] Sometimes, for instance in Roman Catholic service books, an acute accent over a vowel is used to indicate the stressed syllable.
It would be redundant for one who knew the classical rules of accentuation and made the correct distinction between long and short vowels, but most Latin speakers since the 3rd century have not made any distinction between long and short vowels, but they have kept the accents in the same places; thus, the use of accent marks allows speakers to read a word aloud correctly even if they have never heard it spoken aloud.
Other words have a stronger Latin feel to them, usually because of spelling features such as the digraphs ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ (occasionally written with the ligatures: ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩, respectively), which both denote /iː/ in English.
However, using loanwords in the context of the language borrowing them is a markedly different situation from the study of Latin itself.
What is taught to native anglophones is suggested by the sounds of today's Romance languages,[citation needed] the direct descendants of Latin.
But English, Romance, or other teachers do not always point out that the particular accent their students learn is not actually the way ancient Romans spoke.
Since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an Italianate pronunciation of Latin has grown to be accepted as a universal standard in the Catholic Church.
Outside of Austria, Germany, Hungary, Czechia and Slovakia, it is the most widely used standard in choral singing which, with a few exceptions like Stravinsky's Oedipus rex, is concerned with liturgical texts.
[citation needed] Anglican choirs adopted it when classicists abandoned traditional English pronunciation after World War II.
The rise of historically informed performance and the availability of guides such as Copeman's Singing in Latin has led to the recent revival of regional pronunciations.
Notable changes include the following (the precise order of which is uncertain): The following examples are both in verse, which demonstrates several features more clearly than prose.
Translation: "I sing of arms and the man, who, driven by fate, came first from the borders of Troy to Italy and the Lavinian shores; he [was] much afflicted both on lands and on the deep by the power of the gods, because of fierce Juno's vindictive wrath."
Translation: "Extol, [my] tongue, the mystery of the glorious body and the precious blood, which the fruit of a noble womb, the king of nations, poured out as the price of the world."
