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, five short /i e a o u/ and five long /iː eː aː oː uː/.
[c] That the short /i u/ were, as this implies, similar in quality to the long /eː oː/ is suggested by attested misspellings such as:[36] /e/ most likely had a more open allophone before /r/.
Short /i/ before another vowel is often written with the so-called i longa, as in ⟨dꟾes⟩ for diēs, indicating that its quality was similar to that of long /iː/; it was almost never confused with e in this position.
[40] 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, oe were written as ai, oi and probably pronounced as [äi̯, 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.
In the modern spelling of Latin, especially in dictionaries and academic work, macrons are frequently used to mark long vowels: ⟨ā ē ī ō ū ȳ⟩, while the breve is sometimes used to indicate that a vowel is short: ⟨ă ĕ ĭ ŏ ŭ y̆⟩.
[54] 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 ('syllable long by nature'), and a syllable that is heavy because it ends in a consonant is called positiōne longa ('long by position').
These terms are translations of Greek συλλαβὴ μακρά φύσει (syllabḕ makrá phýsei = 'syllable long by nature') and μακρὰ θέσει (makrà thései = 'long by proposition'), 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).
[64] 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 as ligatures: æ and œ, respectively), which both denote /iː/ in English.
The digraph ae or ligature æ in some words tend to be given an /aɪ/ pronunciation, for example, curriculum vitae.
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."
