I got a gig making a promo video for a band. Since this is very low budget i’m also doing the voice over.
They have a song entitled “Natalis Invictus Mors”
How is this pronounced? My guess is:
Nat-E-lie Invictus More
Any latin dopers?
Nat-AH-liss Invictus Morz would be how I’d say it.
I assume you’re asking how modern speakers of Latin would pronounce it, rather than the authentic Roman pronunciation!
Long first three syllables, I think, to match the other two words.
Naah - taah - lees
Natalis: Makes a difference whether the second syllable has a Latin long A or a Latin short A. If the former, then nah-TAHH-liss. If the latter, then NAH-tah-liss. The A is like the A in “father,” drawn out and accented if it’s long.
Invictus: in-WIK-tuss, though some would say in-VIK-tuss. The U is like the U in “put.”
Mors: morss, like the surname “Morse.”
Just out of curiosity, how do you get E out of “a,” lie out of “lis,” and more out of “mors?”
^french influences maybe?
gary, you beat me to the v/w edit. i’ve got nothing else to add…
Guys, note that this comes from an album called “Opus Diaboli,” so I think we’re dealing with ecclesiastic Latin. So I think he should use [v] instead of [w], as the latter was only used in classical Latin. (PDF cite.)
Also, since you are asking about the vowel length, I found an online Latin dictionary that uses macrons, and it gives nātālis invīctus mors. My knowledge of Latin only comes from singing, but I believe that means the accent in natalis is on the first syllable.
So I’d go with: /ˈnaːtaːlis inˈviːctʊs mors/. Or, using the method used so far: NAAH-taah-liss in-VIK-tuss mors. (Again, u is as in put. aah is a longer version of ah)
And, I agree with pankakes3: the OP is mixing in a little bit of French pronunciation. Latin pronounces every letter.
Natalis Invictus Mors
The ‘i’ in invictus is not long.
A classical pronunciation would be:
naaaah-TAAAAH-lis In-VICT-us MORES
Why are you guys dragging it out so much? naaaah-TAAAAH-lis? Seriously? The short a sounds like the o in lot. The long a with the macron is only slightly longer, like the a in “call”.
Fair enough.
The macron indicates a long vowel. Since the penult (next to last syllable, here “na”) has a long vowel, it gets the primary stress.
I’m surprised to see the macron on the I in “invictus.” Cetainly that syllable is long (because of the sequential consonants C and T) and gets the primary stress, but a long I? That would normally be pronounced as English long E (like the I in “machine”), which I would not expect before the sequential consonants.
Is this phrase anywhere in the lyrics of the song? If so, then the correct pronunciation is the same way it’s pronounced by the singer. This may or may not correspond with any standard way of pronouncing Latin, but they write the song, they set the rules.
I’d like to know how you would accent bēstiola. Strictly speaking, the accent should be on the ‘i’, except that this seems awkward, perhaps because the ‘i’ seems to be consonantal here.
I thought of that, too, but both videos I found of it didn’t seem to have lyrics. And looking up the lyrics on Google showed me nothing.
But, you’re right. If you can find anything where the artist themselves say the title, they beat anything we can tell you.
[del]Bon chance[/del] Bonna futura, TNWPsycho.
‘natalis’ is indeed accented on the second syllable.
And ‘bestiola’ does indeed have the accent on the ‘i’, which is not consonantal in this situation. The syllables are bes-TI-o-la.
When I write naaah-TAAAAL-lis I only mean to represent the vowels as long, taking roughly twice as long to say as a short vowel.
Well, if you listen to the recordings that accompany Oerberg’s Lingua Latina, he pronounces fīliolum as fee-LEE-oh-lum, but Iūliola as YOO-lee-OH-la. Nobody ever seems to quite record spoken Latin the way the pronunciation rules seem to require, but there generally seems to be reasons not being discussed.
Nobody says mihi as MIH-hih, and this makes sense because it seems awkward, as if there’s a hitch in the middle that you don’t get if you say MEE-hee.
It also seems to break the flow to attempt to say modo with a short o at the end. And indeed, there don’t seem to be a lot of words that end in the short-o. And indeed, people don’t seem to pronounce it ending with the o in often.
It seems to me that there are other rules being applied here that I’m not aware of. Is it that different languages bring their own difficulties to the pronunciation of Latin, and so the inconsistent handling of the accent on ‘i’ in two different diminutives comes from a rule that is consistent within Oerberg’s own native Dutch? Is he just making a mistake to have promoted a short-o to the vowel quality of a long-o in both case, or is there some obscure rule I’m missing?
The promotion of the short-i’s to the ‘ee’ sound I sort of understand. I find there’s a kind of hitch in the voice if I insist on making the second i in Italia sound like a short-i. Rather than it-UH-lih-uh, it seems more fluent to make it it-UH-lee-yuh. Indeed that seems to be what most people do without actually acknowledging that this is not really the sound of the short-i.
So, is the vowel quality being promoted, but the quantity normally associated with that vowel sound being truncated? What’s going on here?
I think it is the habits of the native language creeping in to screw up pronunciation.
Short o at end of modo is very tough for English speakers. Perhaps it is because we are so attuned to frequently hearing words that end in long ‘o’ sounds (e.g., the -ow words like ‘below’)?
I think the example of ‘quīnquāgintā’ that you (=Johnny Angel) brought up in another thread is a perfect illustration. English speakers tend to accent long syllables. Heck, just putting an accent on a syllable tends to increase the amount of time we say said syllable. So we go nuts when we have to try to accent the short i of quīnquāgintā and avoid putting any extra stress on the long vowels. Come at it from a different native language though, and quīnquāgintā’s pronunciation might be a piece of cake.
At the same time, I’m sure ancient Latin speakers had lots of quirks in pronunciation that are forever lost. If you look at Allen’s Vox Latina it is striking how many things that we do know would be lost to us but for one or two pieces of randomly preserved evidence.
Regarding filiolum vs. Iuliola Oerberg is doing something strange. Some people speculate about Latin words getting more than one stress in the manner of
YOU - lee - OH- la, but the fact is we have no idea whether Romans spoke that way.
All we really know about Latin pronunciation is the basics, so it is not as if there are a bunch of esoteric rules that will make someone’s pronunciation better than another’s. Within the broad outline the basics provide, there is ample room for one to color his/her pronunciation with speculation as well as unconscious influences from one’s native tongue. In fact, doing so is necessary to fill in the gaps in our knowledge.
As a result, I notice that among professional Classicists everyone draws on a wide variety of theories/traditions/experience to form their own personal style of pronunciation. The range between these is not so great, however, that we have trouble understanding one another.
Well, Latin doesn’t seem to have a lot of such words either (ego comes to mind), and with the way it’s so awkward to say I wondered if there wasn’t an unspoken tendency to uptick the vowel quality when a consonant wasn’t going to follow that sound, but not actually increase the quantity. Martial wrote “Nōn amo tē…” where we are supposed to understand that it’s normal not to treat the ‘o’ in amō as long for the purposes of poetry. Does that mean the vowel quality also gets demoted, or just the quantity?
The recorded voice on the Official Wheelock’s Site spells out a bunch of rules, but there turn out to be multiple exceptions in actual use. Some of it can be accounted for by the instinct for co-articulation with following vowels or consonants (though the book doesn’t give any advice on this score), but there are some things that are just inconsistent with the given principles. Ubi and ibi are spoken with long-i’s. Ubi is even given a long u. Are these:
- Right for Latin-native reasons left unexplained?
- A carefully-considered interpolation into features of the speaker’s language that are shared by the listeners?
- Wrong, and unfortunately so since it’s given as a model for students to follow?
- Wrong, but my worries about consistency are wrong-headed?
It certainly jibes with English, and Tunberg’s own translations of Dr. Seuss work on this basis. English words tend to alternate stress – within a word, wherever the ictus hits, it makes waves. According to the preface in Mater Anserina, which Tunberg co-wrote, a stress-based prosody did in fact get picked up by medieval Latinists which was similar to English in how the secondary stresses were distributed through the word. I have read elsewhere that it is suspected it was already underlying vulgar Latin in the classical period, given the way it became marked in Italian eventually.
Clearly, we must. But the differences that are worrying me don’t even seem to be a matter of mapping Latin onto our own language to fill in the gaps. It seems that there are things we positively do know that are nonetheless not being followed. We mark ubi as all-short for a reason, but then pronounce it as though all vowels were long.
It’s true that English speakers understand eachother transparently through a lot of different dialects, but of course we get lots and lots of practice hearing English. Latinists don’t have nearly such ability to immerse themselves in the language. I imagine they either adapt, or keep getting thrown off.
Well, after some investigation I may have some answers to my own befuddlement. Well, a couple of my befuddlements.
The problem was that I could not feature putting stress in the short-i in such diminutives as bēstiola or fīliola. My first guess was that this i would necessarily be resolved by expressing the short-i as a consonant. This left the quandry of what happens to the stress accent by the ante-penult-unless-short rule.
Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar seems to have an answer for me.
[quote]
[li] Note.–Two vowels of different syllables may be run together without full contraction ( synizēsis , § 642): as, deinde (for deinde ), meōs (for meōs ); and often two syllables are united by Synæresis (§ 642) without contraction: as when părĭĕtĭbŭs is pronounced paryĕtĭbus. [/li][/quote]
They define synæresis thusly:
That doesn’t quite tell you exactly when synaeresis occurs, but my guess would be that if it makes a difference between the word being fluid or your tongue tying in a knot, then probably synaeresis is allowed. There is a rule by which what is written as bēstiola would be pronounced bayst-yo-la.
So, where does the accent go? Ecce:
Since length-by-position counts for determining where the stress accent falls, which is the reason why vīgintī puts the stress on the short-i, this means that bēstiola may be rendered as BAYST-yol-uh (where the o here is as in ‘dos’). Likewise FEEL-yol-uh, because the short-i is functioning as a consonant.
As to my other quandry about certain words ending in what seem like they ought to be long vowels, but are marked short, Allen in Vox Latina confirms my suspicion that something funny is going on there. Apparently such words evolved away from earlier tendency to end in long vowels because there was an aversion to following an accented short syllable with a long syllable. Apparently it wasn’t strong enough that you just wouldn’t do it, but enough to depress the vowel quality over time. And enough, I take it, to explain why in verse you can get away with suppressing the long-o in amō. There’s no antepenult to shift the accent back to, so the ultima gets suppressed.
Something similar happens in English. We don’t generally have a secondary stress right next to the primary stress, but if we form a compound from monosyllabic words, both tend to keep their stress – airplane, haircut, baseball, ect. In the fullness of time, we can expect the words to evolve into trochees. But now we can leave these as spondees, or anytime we need the sound to bounce we instinctively know we can suppress the stress on the second syllable.
This understanding of the phenomenon jibes with Allen & Greenbrough’s description of certain final vowels as “common”.
This term “common” gets thrown about in some texts without definition. Here it gets only a drive-by explication:
So, common = may be either long or short.
It seems that the o’s and i’s at the ends of words were long, but the i’s went to common and the o’s went all the way to short. As for profectō, my dictionary lists it as having a final long-o. So, I don’t know. Unless I’m trying to be specific about decade I’m from in ancient Rome, maybe I should treat the o’s as common, too.
You may want to know about the “Iambic Law”, an exception used to explain some quantities in the verse of the comic playwrights Plautus and Terence. In general, a long syllable may be shortened when it is (1) preceded by a short, and (2) either preceded or followed by the accent of a word or word-group, or by the verse ictus.
Amo seems to fit this pattern–though I’m not aware of a specific case where Plautus or Terence applied the rule to that particular word. At the very least it shows that the spoken tendency to reduce some final vowel quantities was present even at the beginning of the literary language (i.e. Plautus probably didn’t just make this up, he was using an established pronunciation trend).
The reduction of final o in verbs is–I think–first observed in Catullus (the nescio in the famous Odi et Amo couplet is the most obvious). I believe it became more common in the Silver Age, but this may have reflected the tendency of these poets to sound archaic rather than a true growth in usage.
Well, this is helpful, except that I am now confused again. First of all, by ictus do you mean stress? Because my Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is inconsistent on whether stress determines the ictus in Latin. And would this mean that stress in one word influences quantity in nearby words? I mean, I would say that stress in english modulates according to the stress in nearby words, but such forces are not as strong as other influences within the word. Also, is vowel quantity always yoked to quality – the actual place of articulation. Could or would they say ī but hold it for only one mora?