🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <01GSF2YTY5Q8I7IMKE@kiera.ericsson.se>, LMEBGO@kiera (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.

There are a number of "correct" pronunciations of Latin.

The one taught in non-Catholic-Church-operated schools is called "classical":
<v> is pronounced as English [w] (a back round semivowel); <c> and <g> are
*always* velar stops ([k] & [g]), never affricates or sibilants; the digraphs
<ae> and <oe> represent diphthongs [ai] and [oi]; and there are length
distinctions in the vowels.

The "ecclesiastical" pronunciation, taught in Catholic schools in this country,
among other places, follows the rules for Italian.  The digraphs <ae> and <oe>
are pronounced as [e], rhyming with <e>.

The German church pronunciation uses a velar [g] for <g>, but <ci> and <ce> are
pronounced with a dental affricate [ts].  The digraph <eu> is pronounced as the
German digraph, a diphthong [oi].  (By the way, this is the pronunication used
by the Catholic Church in Poland, and is the usual one used by John Paul II.)

The French pronunication is like French.

The English pronunication scheme, used before the shift to the "classical"
scheme in English-speaking countries, pronounced Latin as if it were English,
paying attention to Latin length as English tense/height/diphthong pairs, and
pronouncing <ci> and <ce> with [s], <gi> and <ge> with [dZ] (English "j").

Finally, there is the system used in many (most?) church choirs in this
country, in which the Italianate pronunciation is used, with the additional
caveat that <exce-> is to be pronounced [egSe-], with a *voiced* velar stop.
Thus, the word above, transcribed into English words, would be

	egg shell sis

I hope that this has confused the issue sufficiently that you stop arguing with
your wife.  :-)
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_