Don’t forget to whack yourself in the head with a plank after saying it.
English long E, giving you “dee-oh” was not in question. But Deus did, IIRC, take a Latin long E, giving a “day” sound to the first syllable. “Deh-us,” with a glottal stop intervening, doesn’t sound like it would fit Latin speaking style, and “deh-oh” for the dative and ablative is even worse.
According to John F. Collins’ A Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin:
When spoken, it’s supposed to be pronounced thusly…
Gloria – GLOW rih ah. {The i is short, however, it sounds like long ee when gliding dipthonically into the ah. The o is long and shouldn’t be turned into an ‘r-controlled’ vowel.}
in – ihn {definitely a short i}
excelsis - ehk SHELL sees. {The ‘cel’ should be pronounced ‘chell’ but the ‘s’ in the ‘x’ (ks) turns it into ‘shell’ as Jomo Mojo said. All the e’s are short, but the i is long (ablative plural).}
Deo – DEH owe {Short e, long o. However, the diphthonic glide between the vowels makes the eh sound like ay.}
Now, Mr. Collins notes that when ecclesiastical Latin is sung, there is the habit of turning short vowels into long, especially if stressed or held. That’s why the sung version is most often sung as:
GLOW ree ah een ehk SHELL sees DAY owe.
While there may be choir directors who insist on the k sound in x be pronounced like a g, I’ve never experienced that. My experience is that people sing a g sound out of the difficulty of spitting out a hard k before a sh. It’s just lazy vocalization.
Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.
egg SHELL sis??? WOW, that’s awful.
I’ve always heard it (or at least, this is how I’ve learned it) as:
Ex-cell-seas day-oh
or
Ex-cell-sis day-oh
The truth is… no-one knows how to pronounce Latin. No human language can survive 3000 (+/-) years of mispronunciation, dialects, speech impediments, pedants, social stratification, immigration, education, contact with new cultures, empire building, invasion and all the other stuff that happened to the Romans.
What you can do is make an educated guess, and this is what happened with Latin. Unfortunately, not all the educated guessers happen to agree and most people end up bending it to match their own first language dialect (comfort zone).
My advise is to pick the version you like best and stick to it.
But what did the shepherds think when angels FINALLY spoke to them, but did so in the language of their conquerors?
“One true God, my ass! This Jupiter guy’s even got the angels on his side.”
When we sang the John Rutter “Gloria”, my choir director coached “GLOW-r’ya Een Egg-shell-seas Deh-oh, et een Tare-ah Pox Ho-mean-ee-boos BONE-ay VO-loon-tot-teas” for aesthetic reasons. One of the tenors tried to correct him on his Latin and was told “you can pronounce it however you like in class, but you’ll sing it as I tell you, or it will sound like crap.”
The “g” sound in “excelsis” is identical to a vocalized “k” sound, which means the note can be carried through the consonant. Forgoing the sharper “DAY-oh” for “Deh-O” keeps overzealous high soprani from ‘pinching’ the vowel sound into “Dayeee-Oh” and turning a pleasant note into a screech.
We were so aggressively drilled on these pronunciations that I still sing them reflexively in that form.
My choirmaster (who also happened to be my Latin teacher) made us sing it “ecks-chell-sis”.
In fact I got detention once for singing “Gonorrhea is expensive, hell no”…
I’ve sung under many fine directors over the last 35 years or so and studied singing for 20 years. Every few years I have to revise how I sing ‘In Excelsis Deo’ because everybody says the ‘right’ way is something different. Day-O has always been the same, but this year it was EEN eggshellsees Deo. First time in 35 years anyone has said to say ‘EEN’. I took classical Latin in HS and college but am aware that this has NOTHING to do with liturgical Latin. I would consider some old time, hard core, Catholics to be in the know on this but I’ve never heard an authoritative pronunciation that stayed the same for any length of time. I think I’ll write the Pope.
After years of IPA, that just looks really funny!
Zombie glee club. How odd.
I don’t know but “Gloria” is pronounced:
Glooooo–o-o-o-o-ooo-o-o-o-o-ooo-o-o-o-o-ooo-ri-a
Perhaps my very favourite Christmas song, especially if the mountains reply in bass to the angel’s soprano.
It is my experience that every director has their own take on how liturgical Latin should be pronounced. I had one director who insisted on trying to figure out exactly how it was pronounced when it was written. I asked him why we didn’t pronounce songs written in English with their original accent, and he didn’t get back to me.
As for EEN vs IN, I’d actually assume that’s something different. There seems to be an insistence by certain sources (including the Wikipedia article ) to use the same IPA symbol for both long and short vowels, even though they all agree that they sounded different. When the word in is transcribed as /in/, people get the idea that it is pronounced EEN [in], when it is actually pronounced IN [ɪn].*
I, for one, am a big proponent of making the phonemic notation (indicated with slashes) and the phonetic notation (indicated with brackets) match. It’s much less confusing.
[sub]cited from Vox Latina (p. 47): "There appears to have been no great difference in the quality between long and short a, but in the case of the close and mid* vowels (i and u, e and o) the long appear to have been appreciably closer than the short."[/sub]
So banana boats sail across the Eggshell Seas, pursued by zombies? Now ther’s a nightmare image for Christmas!
I saw three ships come sailing in, with zombies close behind…
The “BONE-ay” from post #30 should be pronounced “BRAINNNNNNNNS!”
The Scriptural account of zombies coming out of the graves is associated with Good Friday and Easter, not with Christmas:
That’s just not true. The difficulty lies in getting 21st-century English speakers to (1) agree on which Latin (time and place) to pronounce and (2) to agree to go through the effort of rendering it “correctly” when both Excel Sis and Eggshell Sis work pretty well for performance purposes.