🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <01GSF2YTY5Q8I7IMKE@kiera.ericsson.se> LMEBGO@kiera.ericsson.se (Bengt G{llmo, L M Ericsson, Stockholm, Sweden) writes:

>  My wife and I have an annual disagreement on the pronounciation 
>  of a Latin word.  She sings in a choir.  At this time of the  
>  year, they sing Christmas carols, mostly English.  Several of 
>  them include the Latin 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.   

>  Comments, anyone?

As I understand it, if we leave aside the murdering of the pronunciation
that generally happens when speaking a foreign language, there are two
"standard" ways of pronouncing Latin: classical and church.  Classical is
the pronunciation of Latin that linguistic research has come up with based
on analysis of contemporary poetry and the like; this has a hard C.  Church
Latin is that used by the Catholic church (and so as far as singing carols
goes is probably the "correct" one) and in it C is pronounced as english CH.

Other variations are in the pronunciation of V (as english V in church but W
in classical) and the various vowels (can't remember the distinctions
without looking them up I'm afraid).



Matthew
--
---* Amnesiac the Wizard *------------------* matthew@uk.tele.nokia.fi *---
 Opinions expressed here are not those of my company.    | NB. ntl02 is EN
 They're not even my own; I plagiarised the lot of them! | TEE EL ZERO TWO
---* matthew@ntl02.decnet.nokia.fi *------------------* Matthew Faupel *---