🚀 go-pugleaf

LMEBGO@kiera.ericsson.se (Bengt G{llmo, L M Ericsson, Stockholm, Sweden) writes:
> phrase "Gloria in excelsis Deo".  Our 
> disagreement concerns the "c".  The choir pronounces it as an 
> Englishman pronounces "ch" in "china".  I have told them that 
> they sing Latin in Italian; that is how an Italian would
> pronounce "excelsis".  It is also awkward to sing.  In Latin, 
> I claim, the "c" should simply be pronounced "s".  A counter-
> claim from somebody in the choir is that the "ch" pronounciation 
> is correct if you are singing Latin from a certain century (the 
> 17th?), to which I reply that the phrase must have been used in 
> church at least a thousand years before that.   

Yes, they're singing it in Italian - there's something called the "Italian
pronunciation of Latin" or so, which must be the one this choir is using
(I heard it's used fairly often by church choirs!). There "c" before "e" and
"i" is pronounced "ch".

As an Indo-European linguist I've learned that at some time (looooong ago) the
Romans pronounced it "k". Later it became a fricative or affricate before "e"
and "i" (as it still is in the modern Romance languages - "s" in French, "ch"
in Italian and (I think) Rhaeto-Romanic, "th" in Spanish, ...).

But now everybody pronounces Latin words (and words from other "dead"
languages, like Greek, Sanskrit etc., as well) as they please, i.e. as if
these words came from their mother tongue. So for me there's nothing to
quarrel about, since for us linguists all those "s" and "ch" and so on are
wrong, wrong, wrong!

That is, they're wrong if you want to speak Classical Latin. If you want to
speak a more colloquial variant of Latin (you know, the Romance languages come
from colloquial Latin, not from Classical Latin! If they had developed from
Classical Latin maybe Caesar wouldn't be pronounced "Seesar" but "Keesar" :)
or what we call "Kirchenlatein" in German (Church Latin!? - it's some sort of
mediaeval Latin) then it's perfectly correct!

			Julia 8-)

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				Julia Simon

 Fachschaftsrat Computerlinguistik	DIaLOGIKa GmbH
 Fachbereich 8.7, Bau 17, Zi. 201
 Universit"at des Saarlandes		Albertstr., Pascalschacht
 D-W-6600 Saarbr"ucken, Germany		D-W-6602 Dudweiler, Germany

			email: simon@fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de
			       sileas@coli.uni-sb.de
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