That’s how the professors pronounced it in Canadian Constitutional Law here in Winnipeg.
Would that be an English W or a German W? Because I don’t think it’s the first…
The English W. As in water. Classical Latin doesn’t have a V sound.
It would be a shame to tarnish Latin’s reputation for being a worthwhile and slip-shod pursuit.
But, really, the broad outlines of classical pronunciation are pretty well known. You might as well learn to apply at least that much consistently, unless you have a particular reason to stick with the Ecclesiastical system, in which case learn that and apply it consistently. At greater levels of detail, you kind of pick your comfort level and you have to be aware that other people are comfortable with how far down the rabbit hole they’re at right now.
As to the extent to which we can really know how the Romans pronounced their language, it’s like having nearly a thousand dollars in loose change. You can prove how close you got to a thousand, but who’s going to watch you count? The level of pretty good certainty is beyond the threshold of pedantry for most people. I’m far from an expert, but I can talk about it until your eyes water and your fists itch.
Might as well instead approach it from the other end. Here’s an example of the kind of thing we can’t and won’t ever know. Henry Beard gave the following as a Latin equivalent to an English meme you may remember from several years ago:
WHAAAAAAZZZZAAAAP? (What’s up?) = QUAAAAAAAAAAAAGIS? (Quid agis?)
Having not been living on Mars for the past decade, you know something about the sound of WHAAAAAAZZZZAAAAP? that you could never learn from seeing it written down. A particular way of saying it is key to the meme, and the prosody of that effect cannot be encoded in our system of writing. If it had been an ancient Roman meme instead, known to us only by someone having written QUAAAAAAAAAAAAGIS, I think you can see why we would never really understand why they would have found it so annoying.
Seeing as he mentions singing Latin, and most sung latin is suppsoed to be ecclesiastical, I’d say he has a good reason.
And, anyways, I did the research earlier, and the [w] actually did become a [v], first in Vulgar Latin, then in the proper form.
I can confirm this, as this is how I learned to pronounce it also.
I well remember a first-year class at law school where a classmate, who had obviously studied Classical Latin at some point, tried to correct the pronunciation of the professor. Unfortunately, he picked the wrong professor to correct. “Tirade” doesn’t begin to describe the raking over the coals my classmate got over the importance of using the traditional Law Latin pronunciations. It managed to be both educational and entertaining for the rest of us.
I suppose I’m meant to take away the moral that a smartass was taken down a peg. Of course, legal Latin established tradition, and there is a need for consistency to maintain communication. But given that legal Latin is often charged with being a kind of shibboleth and way of befuddling other people, I can’t help but read this reaction as defensive. God forbid anybody should use Latin to do to lawyers what lawyers use Latin to do to other people.