De Lingva Latina Recte Pronuntianda

De Lingva Latina Recte Pronuntianda



I found Mr. Whalen's public criticism of Evan Millner's pronunciation of Latin on the latter's website "Latinum" curious to say the least, all the more so because I am by profession a simultaneous interpreter (as well as a translator) practicing this vocation in a number of modern languages, including a few of Latin's granddaughters. Like other interpreters, I am obliged to improve continuously my language skills I have lived eight years in different foreign countries, working on one or another foreign language to gain the required vocabulary, fluency, and pronunciation. In this office I am compelled to pay due attention to the niceties of stress and intonation, especially in my non-native Spanish, French, Italian, German, Romanian, all of which I have interpreted in trials and court proceedings, lest my listeners be left scratching their heads in partial or total incomprehension.

In all this time I have not come upon one human language that does not exhibit both stress and tonality. Some languages, like English and its Germanic cousins, feature more stress than tonality, but the tones are still there and are easily heard in almost any utterance one can imagine, except perhaps from those emanating from an actor or comedian speaking in a monotone for comic or dramatic or anti-dramatic effect. Even our modern English speech, in its most atonal form, i.e., that heard from the relatively immobile mouths of U.S. Midwesterners and farmers and ranchers living on the Great Plains shows some small variation of pitch.



I cannot imagine the Latin of any period having been spoken in a monotone, especially in the Classical period. I speak to a greater or a lesser degree the five major Romance languages, and none of these offspring of Latin wants for tonal variations. Indeed, Italian, Romanian, and French have a very marked tonality in educated speech.



There may have been some backwaters in the Roman Republic or Empire where where farmers, dung-spreaders, and other locals spoke Latin with lock-jaw monotony. But I cannot believe that the philhellene optimates and litterati of Rome and other urban centers eschewed musical pitch in speaking a Latin which, of course, also featured stress. But both the abundance evidence cited by the great American linguist E. H. Sturtevant in his "The Pronunciation of Latin and Greek " and the marked musicality of Latin's children, esp. French, Italian, and Romanian convince me that Virgil did not compose his hexameters with a monotone buzzing in his ear.



If, however it is the monotonous backwater speech that Mr. Whalen wishes to impart to his pedagogical charges, he is welcome to do so, clamping his jaw shut with surgical wire and avoiding arpeggios up and down the musical scale in favor of atonality.



I am not a Latin teacher, hence do not know with what ancient Roman professions today's students of Latin might identify. But I would wager that those of "cantor" and "musicus" at the court of Augustus would win hands-down over those of "agricola" or "stercorator" on the eastern edge of Dacia (Qvid diceret Ovidius?).



As for Latin's modern avatars, it is impossible to hear a native speaker of Italian uttering that at once ancient and modern Italic word "cantare" without noting the delightfully falling interval of a musical fifth, a characteristic of the Italian language that Verdi and Donizetti exploited to such great advantage and which did not simply appear out of nothing. It is also eerily similar to the Greek circumflex accent as described by Dionysius Halicarnassus and deftly reproduced by Mr. Millner on Latinum).



And "cantare" is what I would suggest that Mr. Whalen do a little more of, especially in his classes of Latin, lest whatever acoustic appreciation of Latin that his pedagogic charges have retained be completely obliterated by a stress-heavy or atonal pronunciation of Latin.
.
John Doublier