That, you’re right and I should have researched.It is “laus” and not “lauda.” So apologies.
BUT.
As far as pronunciation goes, unless one is a NATIVE speaker of ANY Romantic language one should refrain from estimating correct pronunciation from dictionaries, books and phonetic alphabet tables.
Latin is Latin and of course not Italian, but that doesn’t make it pronounceable in different ways just because some books say so. I do not remember ever having heard of different ways of speaking Latin, but just twisting it by different speakers of other languages.
Back to pronunciation matters, there’s a big load of things English speakers pronounce differently from Romantic speakers. And unless one dedicates his or her life to properly pronouncing Latin, there will always be a difference in pronouncing “laudae” with a sharp “e” (as in thEre) at the end, like a Romantic speaker, versus “lau-DUH” like an English speaker.
For instance, English speakers will pronounce “ce” at first sight just like “see” whereas Romantic speakers will pronounce “ce” as in “tsch-AY”. “R” will never be pronounced the same in Italian vs. English (just watch an Italian movie that’s not been dubbed.) A simple matter of wiring the brain when language and symbol associations are learned in early childhood and primary school. And a VERY hard thing to undo or re-wire differently.
Sorry for being unable to make more sense than this. My thinking is better in Romanian (my native language) rather than English, and we’re already in the realm of ‘finesses’ here.
Latin was a living language for a thousand years, and indeed remains alive in Romanian, Italian, etc. It didn’t suddenly shift, but changed gradually. We know about many of these changes (see the example of novum caelum above). A modern person speaking Latin may choose to emulate a speaker from Julius Caesar’s time, or Saint Augustine’s, or Erasmus’s. Each of those men was a native speaker of Latin,* so you can’t say they pronounced it wrong. And yet they pronounced it differently.
Being a native speaker of a Romance language doesn’t make your Classical Latin pronunciations any more authentic. It may give you a leg up on vocabulary and grammar, but it’s still a language to be learned. If you learned Old English, your pronunciation could easily be better than mine, and I’m a native speaker of English.
[*It probably wasn’t Erasmus’s first language, but he probably learned it young enough and with enough fluency that you can count him.]
The former. *Laudae would be the nominative plural or genitive or dative singular of a noun *lauda – which is an Italian word, not a Latin one (paceAndix). As Dr Drake notes, the forms used in degrees derive from the ablative of laus.
Here’s what I remember from my high school Latin (four years of it):
Cum is not pronounced like “come” nor to rhyme with “broom.” The u is pronounced like the u in “put.”
The au in laude is pronounced essentially like the ow in “down.” The e at the end is halfway between the e in “get” and the half-long e in the stereotypical Canadian “eh?”.
I agree with you that “cum” rhymes with “broom” (or “room” or “doom” or “boom”).
But if you think that’s the same vowel as “put”, you must be speaking a different dialect of English than me. “Put” rhymes with “foot” or “soot”. If it had the same vowel sound as “broom”, then it would rhyme with “boot”, “toot”, “moot”, “root”, etc.
I’d pronounce the string “ce” as [tʃe] if I perceive it as being part of an Italian (or, I suppose, Romanian) word. But “ce” is also a French word (meaning “this” in the adjectival sense, e.g. “ce livre” = “this book”), pronounced [sə]. And in Spanish it’d be pronounced yet again differently, probably something like [se].
There isn’t one spelling convention for all Romance languages (yes, by the way, it’s “Romance”, not “Romantic”). From what I can see Romanian spelling is similar to Italian, but that’s probably because when Romania adopted the Latin alphabet in the 19th century, linguists consciously based the new spelling on Italian. Other Romance languages have developed in different ways.
I, too, learned to pronounce “cum” like “foot” or “soot,” but it is not strictly correct for Classical Latin. The trouble is, the Classical system of distinguishing vowel length purely by length is hard for English speakers. None of the English options (/ə, ʌ, ʊ/) really would have sounded right for Caesar. He probably would have distinguished only /u/ and /uː/. In other words, “cum” and “vacuum” would have had exactly the same sound, just held longer in the latter word. Think about the following sentence:
“Hand me the broom, Hortense. No, not the rake, the broom.” The first broom is probably more like “cum,” the second like Latin long u. (Only without getting louder and using nice pure Continental vowels.)
Looking into it now, it seems that I’m repeating a view that hasn’t been widely held for 100 years.
From Lewis & Short’s Latin dictionary under “N”; “Before the guttural letters a medial n receives the sound of Greek γ before gutturals, wherefore, in early times, viz., by Attius, we have also g written for n: Agchises, agceps, aggulus, aggens, agguilla, iggerunt, etc.” Also called the n adulterinum.
So we know N + G = NG + G (as in English “finger”). Some people also used to think G+N was NG + N (“Sing now”), including my Latin teacher, but the evidence is really only hypothetical. So mahg-na it is.
I have come to the provisional conclusion that the advice that “gn” is pronounced “ngn” was just a way of talking about getting to that phoneme – the nasalized voiced velar – that English speakers use but aren’t generally aware of. I also wonder whether this can be tied to the notion, now less fashionable as it seems, that the vowel is always long before gn, because both voicing and nasalization on a following consonant will tend to effectively lengthen the vowel by assimilation. In practice, I find that I am almost forced to elevate the vowel quality as well, from an uh to an ah. It’s more natural to say uh before a mere g.
The thing is, even with the things we know to a fair degree of accuracy, there is a lot of wiggle room, and you get disparate descriptions of how the same sounds are to be reproduced, even adjusting for whether or not the person doing the describing is British, or what the fashion was in philology the year the book was written. Except for known diphthongs, you have to dig deep to see anything said about how the order in which the letters fall affect the sounds they make – no beginner’s guide says a damned thing about how to handle these Greek words. There also seems to be little acknowledgement of inherent ambiguities, such as when exactly i is a vowel, a consonant, a hidden double-consonant or a single consonant that adds a hidden vowel to create a diphthong in the previous syllable.
But of course this is fussing about degrees of variance in enunciation that we might not even notice in English.