Frances E. Lord

“ In the pronunciation of Latin the observance of quantity and of pitch are the two most difficult points of attainment; and they are the crucial test of good reading.
The observance of quantity is no less important in prose than in verse. A little reflection will convince the dullest mind that the Romans did not pronounce a word one way in prose and another in verse; that we have not in poetry and prose two languages. Cicero and Quintilian both enjoin a due admixture of long and short syllables in prose as well as verse ”

“ If the quantitative pronunciation be adopted, no one will be fit to become a classical teacher who cannot read a simple Latin sentence decently, with a strict observance of that 58 quantity by which alone the greatest of Latin orators regulated his own rhythms.”
“All pronunciation is acquired by imitation, and it is not till after hearing a sound many times that we are able to grasp it sufficiently well to imitate. It is a mistake constantly made by teachers of language to suppose that a pupil knows by once hearing unfamiliar sounds, or even unfamiliar combinations of familiar sounds. ”

“ There can be no approximation to a satisfactory pronunciation of Latin until this r is acquired; but the satisfaction in the result when accomplished is well worth all the pains taken.
Another point to be observed is that the dentals t, d, n, l, require that the tongue touch the teeth, rather than the palate. Munro says: “d and t we treat with our usual slovenliness, and force them up to the roof of our mouth: we should make them real dentals, as no doubt the Romans made them, and then we shall see how readily ad at, apud aput, illud illut and the like interchange.” ”

“ Europeans have not the same necessity to urge them to the ‘Roman pronunciation.’ Their own languages represent the Latin more or less adequately, in vowel sounds, in accent, and even, to some extent, in quantity; so that with them, all is not lost iv if they translate the sounds into their own tongues; while with us, nothing is left—sound, accent, quantity, all is gone ”

“ Therefore until one feels at home with the quantities, let him observe the rule of beating time in reading, to make sure that the long syllables get twice the time of the short ones. In this way he will soon have the pronunciation of each word correctly fixed in mind, and will not be obliged to think of his quantities in verse more than in prose. A long step has been taken in the enjoyment of Latin poetry when the reader does not have to be thinking of the ‘feet.’
Young students particularly should be especially careful in the final syllable of the verse. ”

“ One cannot but feel in reading the numerous passages in the grammarians that treat of the sound of u consonant, that if its sound had been no other than the natural sound of u with consonantal force, they never would have spent so much time and labor in explaining and elucidating it. ”

“ This peculiarity of our language makes it more difficult for us than for other peoples to get the Latin accent, which is one of pitch.
In Latin the acute accent means that on the syllable thus accented you raise the pitch; the grave indicates merely the lower tone; the circumflex, that the voice is first raised, then depressed, on the same syllable. To quote again the passage from Priscian:
[Keil. v. III. p. 519.] Acutus namque accentus ideo inventus est quod acuat sive elevet syllabam; gravis vero eo quod deprimat aut deponet; circumflexus ideo quod deprimat et acuat. ”

“ When pupils are made to imitate too soon, they acquire an erroneous pronunciation, which they afterward hear constantly from themselves actually or mentally, and believe that they hear from the teacher during the small fraction of a second that each sound lasts, and hence the habits of these organs become fixed. ”

“ We believe a great part of our difficulty, in this country, lies in the fact that so few of those who study and teach Latin really know what the ‘Roman pronunciation’ is, or how to use it. Inquiries are constantly being made by teachers, Why is this so? ”

“ No one will disagree with Professor Ellis when he “assumes,” in his Quantitative Pronunciation of Latin, “that the Augustan Romans had no force accent, that is, that they did not, as we do, distinguish one syllable in every word invariably by pronouncing it with greater force, that is, with greater loudness, than the others, but that the force varied according to the feeling of the moment, or the beat of the timekeeper in singing, and was used for purposes of expression ”

“ Now it is contended by some that this digamma, or vau, was merely taken as a symbol, somewhat arbitrarily perhaps, and that it did not indicate a particular sound, but might stand for anything which the Romans chose to represent by it; and that therefore it gives us no certain indication of what the Latin u consonant was.
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But we are expressly told that it had the force and sound of the Greek digamma.
In Marius Victorinus we find:
[Keil. v. VI. p. 23.] F autem apud Aeolis dumtaxat idem valere quod apud nos vau cum pro consonante scribitur, vocarique βαυ et digamma. ”

“ But if it is true that the task of practical acquisition is, if not impossible, extremely difficult, ‘the work of a lifetime,’ as the objectors say, do the results justify the expenditure of time and labor? ”

“ But on the contrary they expressly declare it to have a sound distinct and peculiar. Quintilian says that even if the form of the Aeolic digamma is rejected by the Romans, yet its force pursues them:
[Quint. XII. x. 29.] Aeolicae quoque litterae qua servum cervumque dicimus, etiamsi forma a nobis repudiata est, vis tamen nos ipsa persequitur.
He gives it as his opinion that it would have been well to have adopted the vau, and says that neither by the old way of writing (by uo) , nor by the modern way (by uu) , is at all produced the sound which we perceive:
[Quint. I. vii. 26.] ”

“ Let i in vĭ before d, t, m, r or x, in the first syllable of a word, be pronounced quite obscurely, somewhat as first i in virgin.
In the matter of diphthongs, be sure to take always the correct spelling, to begin with, and thus avoid what Munro 48 justly terms “hateful barbarisms like coelum, coena, moestus.” Much time is wasted by students and bad habits are acquired in not finding, at the outset, the right spelling of each word and holding to it. This each student must do for himself, consulting a good dictionary, as editors and editions are not always to be depended on. ”

“ The directions now to be given may be fittingly introduced by a few paragraphs from Professor Munro’s pamphlet on the pronunciation of Latin, already more than once quoted from. He says—and part of this has been cited before:
“We know exactly how Cicero or Quintilian did or could spell; we know the syllable on which they placed the accent of almost every word; and in almost every case we already follow them in this. I have the conviction that in their best days philological people took vast pains to make the writing exactly reproduce the sounding ”

“ Vocales sunt quando aut singulae positae syllabam 18 faciunt aut aliis consonantibus sociantur, ut Iris et unus et Isis et urna. Consonantes autem sunt, cum aliis vocalibus in una syllaba praeponuntur, aut cum ipsae inter se in una syllaba conjunguntur. Nisi enim et prior sit et in una syllaba secum habeat conjunctam vocalem, non erit consonans i vel u. Nam Iulius et Iarbas cum dicis, i consonans non est, licet praecedat, quia in una syllaba secum non habet conjunctam vocalem, sed in altera consequentem.
The grammarians speak of i consonant as different in sound and effect from the vowel i ”

“ And here it may be said that due attention to the quantity will of itself often regulate the accent in doubtful cases; as when we say doce, if we duly shorten the o and lengthen the e the effect will be correct, whether the ear of the grammarian detect accent on the final syllable, or not. For as Quintilian well says:
Nam ut color oculorum indicio, sapor palati, odor narium dinoscitur, ita sonus aurium arbitrio subjectus est. ”

“ It is true that the instances in which we find β taking the place of ου in the first century, and earlier, are decidedly in the minority, but when we recollect that ου was the original and natural representative of the Latin u, the fact that a 37 change was made at all is of great weight, and one instance of β for u would outweigh a dozen instances of the old form, ou. ”

“ Similiter vitium mutat sonum, quia corripitur; vita autem non mutat, quia producitur. Similiter vim mutat quia corripitur, vimen autem non mutat quia producitur. Similiter vir et virgo mutant, quia corripiuntur: virus autem et vires non mutant, quia producuntur. Vix mutant, quia corripitur: vixi non mutant, quia producitur. 6 Hoc idem plerique solent etiam in illis dictionibus facere, in quibus a fi brevi incipiunt syllabae sequentibus supra dictis consonantibus, ut fides, perfidus, confiteor, infimus, firmus. Sunt autem qui non adeo hoc observant, cum de vi nemo fere dubitat. ”

“ This change, however, is both so slight and so natural that attention need scarcely be called to it. Indeed if quantity is properly observed, one can hardly go wrong. If, for instance, you attempt, in saying obtinuit, to give its normal sound to b, you can scarcely avoid making a false quantity (the first syllable too long) , while if you observe the quantity (first syllable short) your b will change itself to p.
C appears to have but one sound, the hard, as in sceptic:
[Mar. Vict. Keil. v. VI. p. 32.] C etiam et . . . G sono proximae, oris molimine nisuque dissentiunt. ”

“ The grammarians also state that this consonant u was represented by the Greek digamma, which the Romans called vau also.
Marius Victorinus says:
[I. iii. 44.] Nam littera u vocalis est, sicut a, e, i, o, sed eadem vicem obtinet consonantis: cujus potestatis notam Graeci habent ϝ, nostri vau vocant, et alii digamma; ea per se scripta non facit syllabam, anteposita autem vocali facit, ut ϝάμαξα, ϝεκήβολος et ϝελήνη. Nos vero, qui non habemus hujus vocis nomen aut notam, in ejus locum quotiens una vocalis pluresve junctae unam syllabam faciunt, substituimus u litteram. ”

“ The syllable having the grave accent is, as we should say, unaccented.
[Diom. Keil. v. I. p. 430.] Sunt vero tres, acutus, gravis, et qui ex duobus constat circumflexus. Ex his, acutus in correptis semper, interdum productis syllabis versatur; inflexus (or ‘circumflexus’) , in his quae producuntur; gravis autem per se nunquam consistere in ullo verbo potest, sed in his in quibus inflexus est, aut acutus ceteras syllabas obtinet.
The same writer thus gives the place of each accent:
[Keil. v. I. p. 431.] (Acutus) apud Latinos duo tantum loca tenent, paenultimum et antepaenultimum ”

“ Quantum autem suspenditur vox per arsin tantum deprimitur per thesin. Sed ipsa vox quae per dictiones formatur donec accentus perficiatur in arsin deputatur, quae autem post accentum sequitur in thesin.
In the matter of exceptions to the rule that accent does not fall on the ultimate, we find a somewhat wide divergence of opinion among the grammarians. Some of them give numerous exceptions, particularly in the distinguishing of parts of speech, as, for instance, between the same word used as adverb or preposition, as ánte and anté ”

“ Nam cum summos atque imos conjunctim dentes suprema sui parte pulsaverit d litteram exprimit. Quotiens autem sublimata partem, qua superis dentibus est origo, contigerit t sonare vocis explicabit.
But when certain words in common use ending in d were followed by words beginning with a consonant, the sound of the d was sharpened to t; and indeed the word was often, especially by the earlier writers, written with t, as, for instance, set, haut, aput:
[Mar. Vict. I. iii. 50.] D tamen litteram conservat si sequens verbum incipiat a vocali; ut haud aliter muros; et haud equidem. ”

“ Omnis vox dissyllaba priorem syllabam aut acuit aut flectit. Acuit, vel cum brevis est utraque, ut deus, citus, datur, arat; vel cum positione longa est utraque, ut sollers; vel alterutra positione longa dum ne natura longa sit, prior, ut pontus; posterior, ut cohors. Si vero prior syllaba natura longa et sequens brevis fuerit, flectitur prior, ut luna, Roma.
In trisyllabis autem et tetrasyllabis et deinceps, secunda ab ultima semper observanda est. Haec, si natura longa fuerit, inflectitur, ut Romanus, Cethegus, marinus, Crispinus, amicus, Sabinus, Quirinus, lectica. ”

“ Priscian says:
[Keil. v. II. p. 29.] L triplicem, ut Plinius videtur, sonum habet: exilem, quando geminatur secundo loco posita, ut ille, Metellus; plenum, quando finit nomina vel syllabas, et quando aliquam habet ante se in eadem syllaba consonantem, ut sol, silva, flavus, clarus; medium in aliis, ut lectum, lectus.
21 Pompeius, in his commentaries on Donatus, makes nearly the same statement, when treating of ‘labdacism’:
[Keil. v. V. p. 394.] Labdacismum vitium in eo esse dicunt quod eadem littera vel subtilius, a quibusdam, vel pinguius, ecfertur. ”