How to pronounce Principia?

Factual Questions
21

In classical Latin, as has been pointed out, ‘c’ always had a ‘k’ sound. Later on, though, that sound softened to a “ch” sound when ‘c’ came before an ‘i’ or an ‘e’, and this was standard by the time Latin was adopted by the western church. It’s also the pronunciation which was inherited by Italian, and is still retained.

The sound softened still further to “s”, and this is reflected in the modern French of <i>principe</i>.

English, of course, absorbed a good deal of French orthographical values through the Norman influence, hence the English pronunciation of “principle” with an s-sound. However, English speakers who learned Latin learned it through the church, and hence used church Latin pronunciation, with a “ch” sound in words like <i>principia</i>. This survived until the nineteenth century, when those rationalising Victorial reformers decided that classical Latin pronunciation was to be preferred.

Using an s-sound would essentially be importing (French-influenced) English orthographic conventions into a Latin word. My guess is that this pronunciation would be more commonly found in the US, where there is a well established tradition of dealing with pronouncing foreign names by applying English orthographical conventions - the long ‘a’ in names like Mulcahy and (before the name, ahem, fell out of fashion, Adolph), the stress on the second syllable in Costello, etc. And this, in turn, I suspect, is the result of the great influx of foreign names, etc, as a result of immigration; they were absorbed into American speech, and the beares of them were absorbed into American culture, by Anglicising the pronounciation in this way.

So, oversimplifying, “PrinSIPia” might be a natural pronunciation for speakers of US English, while speakers of other varieties of English are more likely to acknowledge the Latin-ness of the word by pronouncing it “PrinKIPia” or (now considered old-fashioned) “PrinCHIPia”. But possibly a Latino speaker of US English might favour the “PrinCHIPia” pronunciation, applying Latino rather than Anglo conventions to the pronunciation of the word.

22

We now know that classical Latin always pronounced c like a “k”, but there was a period when grammarians of Latin writing in English recommended that c be pronounced like “s” before e, i and certain other vowels and diphthongs but like “k” before a, o, or u. Pronunciation of Latin terms in English is mostly stuck in this mode. Hence Caesar and circus are pronounced with an “s” sound in English but Cato and coda with a “k”. See this book from 1829.

23

I can’t not hear Sean Connery when pronouncing it “prin-CHIP-ea.”

24

C is ‘ch’ if followed by i or e, pronounced as ‘k’ before other vowels, no? (and if a consonant it also can depend on what the following few letters are). I think Ecclesiastical Latin would always be ‘ch’?

I think Classical Latin might be a hypercorrection, it depends on what was used at the time. Remember, we all know how to say “Veni, vidi, vici” in church Latin, but it was originally something like “wenny, weedee, wiki.”

I only hear that if prin-SHHHIP-ea. With a breathy ‘sh.’

25

Nope. “Ch” before i or e, “k” before a, o, u or I think pretty well any consonant. If that were not so it would be practically impossible to pronounce “ecclesia”.

26

So if I’m following correctly, the word would have been pronounced prinkipia in classical Latin, princhipea in Italianized Latin (which is probably what Newton would have spoken), and prinsipia in English. So I’m going to assume any of these pronunciations are fair game.

27

Well it isn’t a word at all in English, and the book was written in Latin.

I have spent much of my life hanging around historians of science, and some of them say Prinkipia and some Princhipia (probably more commonly the latter), but I have never heard anyone, certainly not anyone whom I would expect to know, say Prinsipia.

28

In all of my undergraduate science history and science philosophy classes (University of Washington, early '90s) I don’t think I ever heard one professor pronounce it any other way than “prinkipia.”

Therefore I’ll never be able to say it any other way (and until this thread I didn’t realize there were other ways in common use).

29

There is such a thing as patterns. Every other word in the English language that starts with the letters princ - prince, princess, principle, principal - is pronounced prins. Similar words like process, proceed, precinct, precision, and precious follow the same rule. If English speakers of the 17th century can adopt Italian rules for pronouncing Latin words, English speakers of the 21st century can adopt English rules.

30

related anecdote: I pronounced Jefferson’s home as monti-sell-o as a kid. I was a young adult before I heard the correct pronunciation.

31

I’ll admit I did the same.

32

I suppose they could, but as I said, I have never met anyone, certainly no-one who is professionally well informed about the work in question and commonly speaks of it (and I have met many such people), who does. It is not the current convention amongst (relevantly) educated English speakers. It is an error (and not a common one) of over-regularization, of forcing a Latin word (not a Latin loan-word in English, but an actual Latin word) to conform to an English template. It seems to me to be about as clear an example as one could find of incorrect pronunciation. Anyway, I thought we were looking for some degree of historical correctness here, not an justification for one’s idiosyncratic preferences.

In any case, although I do not know it for sure, I am inclined to think that it is not really correct to say that Princhipia pronunciation that Newton himself probably used was borrowed from Italian. Much more likely, to my mind, is that it was the pronunciation that had evolved in the international scholarly Latin that (like Italian) had, by Newton’s time, evolved, in numerous ways, away from classical Latin in the many centuries that had passed since classical times.* Newton wrote the book in scholarly Latin because he was still following the centuries-old scholarly tradition of doing so. Princhipia, for him, was not a matter of aping contemporary Italian speech patterns, it was how the word was pronounced in the language in which he was writing (and in which he probably sometimes conversed with university colleagues). The Italian language, of course, had also evolved away from Classical Latin over those same centuries, by that time had departed from the common original language much more, but the two evolutions were fairly independent of one another, and the fact that this particular consonant was (apparently) the same in 17th-century Italian and 17th-century scholarly Latin is probably more of a coincidence than anything else.

Thus, to my mind, Princhipia should be the preferred pronunciation (and I think it actually is preferred by most present-day scholars of the history of science), Prinkipia is acceptable (a case can be made for it, and is sometimes used by scholars), but Prinsipia (if anyone should actually use it) is an error born of ignorance and uneducated guesswork.

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*Not just through the middle ages, but also the Roman centuries following Cicero, since Cieronic Latin is traditionally taken to be the classical standard.

33

You do realize that the Princhipia pronunciation was derived using the same process as the Prinsipia pronunciation? The only difference is that it’s an Italian mispronunciation of a Latin word rather than an English mispronunciation of a Latin word. If you’re not going to use the original Latin pronunciation, I don’t see how one mispronunciation can be ruled more correct than another just because it’s more hallowed by tradition.

34

What about the 16th century? 'Cause I remember reading in Frances Yates’s book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition that when Bruno lectured at Oxford, a contemporary English writer mentioned Bruno pronouncing c-words funny because he was Italian, specifically “telling us much of chentrum & *chirculus *& *circumferenchia *(after the pronunciation of his Country language).” Obviously that stood out as odd to the English.

35

Did you read anything I said in my post, most of which was devoted to explaining that this is not the case?

36

Yes, I did. But I’m not completely sold on the idea that the evolution of Latin was as unrelated to the evolution of Italian as you say. What exactly was the process that cause the pronunciation of Latin to change by the 17th century? It obviously wasn’t the way native Latin speakers were talking. So you’re suggesting that the people who spoke Latin as a second language happened to adopt the exact same pronunciation as native Italian speakers were adopting at the same time - but it was just a coincidence.

37

It makes no sense to insist on the correct pronunciation of the letter C, while at the same time ignoring the letter R. The R has to be rolled. Anyone who says “Prinkeepia” without rolling their tongue is a half-arsed hypocrite. :smiley:
You can’t speak correct Latin with a lazy tongue. :stuck_out_tongue:

38

I don’t know where some people are getting the notion that the pronunciation prin-sip-ia is wrong. Would they insist on pronouncing the Roman author Cicero as Kikero or Chichero? They’d get very odd reactions if they did.

There’s the old Roman way of pronunciation, the Church way (Italian) and the English-speaking way. Nothing wrong with any of them, they just differ.

39

What’s pronounced “ch-like-CHocolate” in Italian is not the letter “c” but the digraph “ci”.

40

Actually, in high school we did pronounce it “Kikero.” The street we pronounced Sisseroh, though.