In English, adding a Latin phrase to a sentence sounds obviously foreign. How does it sound in the various Romance languages, some of which probably have very similar sounding phrases? Is it clearly Latin?
I have a feeling it is similar to the adding of an Aramaic phrase in modern Hebrew. The two languages sort of mesh. Am I right?
http://www.mclink.it/n/citrag/roma/doc/civil/ecv_026.htm
For the Phrase “Bread and circus” many roman languages do sound and look a lot like the original Latin:
In Latin: Panem et circenses
In Italian: Pane e circo
In French: pain et cirque
In Spanish: Pan y circo
As I know Spanish, Latin does look familiar, but I would not be able to repeat it or write it. And it does take a while to figure out if the phrase is not famous. As for spoken Latin, in my case, I understand even less.
It is clearly Latin only if one knows the source, or one knows Latin, otherwise Spanish speaking people do confuse it with Italian or even French.
Latin. How do I pronounce thee? Let me count the ways.
The way the actual ancient Romans themselves pronounced it. So far no one has turned up any audio recordings made in ancient Rome. So scholars have worked on reconstructing the way it must have sounded, based on contemporary evidence and principles of historical linguistics.
Similar to Italian pronunciation. The way the Catholic Church pronounced it in the Tridentine Liturgy. This goes back to at least the Counter-Reformation, probably earlier. No doubt it had much to do with the Vatican’s being situated
in Italy.
Outside of Italy, similar to the vernaculars of various European countries. Different for each one. In England, they used English values for the Latin letters, in France French, in Germany German, etc. Approach 3 is the one taught in English schools for centuries. They made fun
of Giordano Bruno when he visited England in the 16th century and lectured in Latin: they said he pronounced “chentrum”, “chirculum” as in Italian (i.e. with
the palatal affricate before front vowels instead of [s]). The English thought Latin pronunciation 2 was fit only for Papists.
Pronunciation 1 is the only one that uses [w] for v; also velar stops c, g before front vowels. It takes some getting used to. More American Latin classes are using it these days. Do the British, French, Germans, etc. still
use approach 3? I was not taught Latin in Britain, so to use English pronunciation for Latin sounds weird and deformed to my ears. As an American who has learned Italian, it seems perfectly natural and easier to me to use
pronunciation 2, since I view Latin as essentially “Old Italian.” But I admit this is just my own personal bias. As a linguist, objectively, I recognize the value of the historical reconstruction.
In “Ecclesiastical” (Italianoid) pronunciation, ti (before a vowel) = /ts/. Which is the value of Italian “z” in “salvazione”, etc. In reconstructed Ancient Latin, isn’t it /ti/ or /tj/? In Angloid Latin, isn’t it a sh /$/ as in English “-tion”? In Francoid Latin, I guess it would be /sj/.
ae = /aj/ and oe = /oj/ in Classical.
In Italianoid pronunciation, they’re both /e/, making palatalized affricates of preceding c and g. In Angloid, they’ve become /i:/ — and I could never get used to that!
Italianoid pronunciation has otherwise kept the vocalic system of Classical Latin relatively intact — except for losing the distinction between long & short vowels. Italian now makes a distinction between “close” and “open” /e/
and /o/ — but I don’t suppose there’s any correspondence between the long & short of those vowels in Latin.
I read (in a book on the transformation of Latin into Spanish) a theory that Latin final -m was not really consonantal, but showed the nasalization of the
preceding vowel. Well, at least in Vulgar Latin.