Toward a Prosody of Living Latin

Great Debates
1

I’ve been working on this Living Latin, not as part of the movement that is apparently going on out there, but taking advantage of their efforts in any case. As interesting as Latin is as a language, very few of the people who study it can really do more than what amounts to decrypting the text. They can’t have a conversation in the language. I sure as hell can’t. But with the help of the Latinum podcast and various other study aids, I hope to learn.

The problem is that it’s kind of hard to pin down what the language is actually supposed to sound like. Most of the actual phonetics seems pretty straightforward, though with complications such as differing views of the pronunciation of short-a which are given in different sources with equal surety. I tend to figure that what I know about English applies – that differing pronunciation is generally mutually intelligible.

Accent and quantity are another matter altogether. The placement of stress varies a lot less among dialects than other matters of pronunciation, and knowing which syllables to accent and how that accent is manifest is vital if what you want to be able to do is develop the kind of visceral experience of Latin rhythms that you would have with the rhythms of your native tongue. Of course, in terms of poetic form, quantity is the chief concern, but my English ear certainly sees these issues as related, and I have a strong suspicion that they would be even independent of my native English prejudices.

English has a stress-based accent. Alright, but it’s more complicated than that. There are three main ways in which the stress of a syllable is manifest in speech – greater loudness, higher pitch and greater length. Broadly speaking, these all apply at once, but studies have shown that each of these elements can be isolated and English-speaking listeners can nonetheless perceive the stress. In fact, stress can even be perceived when expressed as a dip in pitch or volume from whatever the baseline is of the sentence.

I know that in English, syllables that do not take the stress tend to lose quality over time – that is, the vowel is enunciated with less tension (and I couldn’t tell you for certain what linguists mean by ‘tension’ here, but that’s the word for it) with the tongue more toward the middle of the mouth. This is why students frequently confuse ‘affect’ with ‘effect’ – because since the first syllables of both are unstressed, the vowel quality has diminished over time to the point where the difference between ‘a’ and ‘e’ is not heard (although I find that if I try to stress the first syllable I instinctively restore the vowel quality, and that when I do so people seem to know what I’m up to).

What is becoming increasingly clear in my studies is that what is observable with an English speaker’s ear also seems to be at work in the Latin language. Quantity in Latin seems to map onto the very same vowel sounds that retain their quality in English when stressed – around the edges of the articulatory envelope. Also, unaccented syllables have been observed to lose their quantity over time in Latin.

Allen, in Vox Latina, suggests that pre-historic Latin was stress-based. Well, we also know that post-classical Latin quickly lost quantity. Furthermore Allen calls into question evidence from Latin grammarians themselves, because they seemed to have mostly asserted for Latin the prosodic principles that the Greeks observed of their own language. I don’t want to run out and peel fifty ducats on Allen’s much bigger book on Latin and Greek accents without any idea whether the light ahead is an incoming train.

Is Latin actually a stress-based language that adopted quantity artifically? I can imagine a certain level of educated individuals being persuaded to imitate the Greek model under the influence of a network of rhetoric tutors, though even that seems unlikely. Did the Romans actually speak with quantity when you asked them the time of day, or was this something grammarians just said. Did they universally adopt a Greek-like antepenult rule for accent over what was apparently previously the pre-historic principle that the first syllable recieved the stress? And even if the patricians did, what about the guy mucking the stable?

So, was quantity in the 2-to-1 morae sense a real part of Latin? If accent wasn’t really tonal as it was for the Greeks, how did it mesh with quantity anyhow? And if these are scholarly fictions, does it even make sense to carry them into an attempt to revive Latin as a living language? And who gets to decide?

2

Latin is all Greek to me (you asked for it!), but you are trying to tie down specifics of a language that was commonly spoken for over 1000 years, by people for whom it was often a second language, and who also spoke MANY other languages, in a period without mass audio media to encourage a common pronunciation and usage. In academia, and that’s where any pressure for a Living Latin resides, this is a recipe for centuries of debates and no proper solution.

3

Yet, if they push the resurrection of Latin forward without establishing some kind of standards, then it’s going to end up just sorting itself out, to the dissatisfaction of probably everybody. On the one hand, so be it – lovers of English are continually outraged by the way that the language has sorted itself out and, worse, continues to do so. On the other hand, if the prosody that the Roman poets labored at was a real feature of the language and not some kind of word game, then it would be a shame to revive the language and yet leave all that behind, which is what I suspect will happen if they just let it find the path of least resistance.

4

We already have Latin that was let to sort itself out without established standards: It’s called Italian and Spanish and Romanian and Catalan and French and Portuguese, and probably a dozen others that I don’t know of specifically. What would be added by having another one officially called “Latin”?

5

Something to lord over speakers of Italian and Spanish and Romanian and Catalan and French and Portuguese, and probably a dozen others? As if academic Latin speakers haven’t done it for centuries?

As for Conversational Latin, the nuns told me it’s the official language of Vatican City, like Israel uses some form of Conversational Hebrew. Both were nearly-dead languages–is this accurate?

6

Studying any of the languages that evolved from Latin won’t get you closer to understanding Horace. But the traditional study of Latin as a kind of elaborate word game or code system will tend to enforce some distance from the subject matter. The fact that for the most part people willing to put in the effort to learn a dead language aren’t even asked to try to use it as a natural language.

But of course, once you’ve got the beast resurrected, it’ll start evolving again. Standardization will help with that – not, one would hope, to attempt to halt all change and block all foreign influence, as the French seem to be trying to do with their language, but to guide its evolution and maintain a consistency that will keep the Roman authors readable. In establishing such standards, we have to have some answer to the question of whether or not to insist on classical prosody, or let the language be the stress-based tongue that it seems to have naturally been.

As for the Vatican, my understanding is that there are actually rather few people there who actually speak Latin, and theirs is not a classical Latin with quantity – it’s a stress-based language with evolved (but not really incompatible) phonology. Do they get kicked out of the Living Latin clubhouse? I suspect not. You know how nerds can be, yet there is a standing detente between the Kirk and Picard zealots. But certainly the Living Latin crowd favors the reconstructed classical form, and by extension probably doesn’t take the Vatican as authoritative on the language.

7

As in all matters pertaining to Latin & Greek pronounciation, this is basically a theological question. The historical answer is less than satisfying: we were not there, so we have no idea. Some classicists get very passionate about Vox Latina, Vox Graeca, Erasmian pronounciation, etc, but scholars are essentially dug in and cling to relatively flimsy arguments to support their aesthetic choices.

I have always admired the attitude of my favorite Latin prof in college. He told us to be aware of the debate, understand the arguments on both sides, and pronounce the language phonetically in a way that is most euphonious to the individual. Whether Cicero actually pronounced his v or not is kind of a subordinate concern to understanding his use of language, so as such, we should not feel constrained when we read him aloud.

Put even more simply, Western Europe managed to carry Latin forward as a living language for over a thousand years past the fall of the western empire without getting too bent out of shape about deviations in pronounciation from an artificially chosen period of Roman history. I strongly believe that reviving Latin is a thing well worth doing, and that we should take precisely the same liberties that our medieval and renaissance forebears did.

8

Most of the issues that deal with phonics themselves seem to be matters of taste and tradition. But in real life, we negotiate these with no trouble. If I’m in Boston, I can ask where to park my car without anybody misunderstanding me. Even the apparently keystone dispute between the labio-dental ‘v’ and the liquid ‘v’ is just a matter of style. I myself favor the conjecture that the ‘v’ was actually on a bilabial spectrum between the vowel ‘u’ and the stop ‘b’ if for no other reason than that would be really nifty.

Prosody, on the other hand, seems much more fundamental an issue. It seems much more persistent, for one thing. Drastic things have happened to English vowels, but the accent seems to fall on the same syllables in Chaucer that they do in my newspaper. And yet I can’t dismiss the evidence that aggregate rhythms of English have been irrevocably changed by the influence of the Gullah dialect of west Africa. Much has been gained, but can I even perceive what has been lost?

9

One can make much of the differences between prosody and pronounciation, but it is still a matter of taste and tradition. There will be no single arbiter of a new living Latin save what its revivers arrogate to themselves and the extent to which their whims are adopted.

We do not know with any real certainty whether quantity was a part of spoken or “vulgar” Latin. This shouldn’t even be a binary question: when you read Cicero out loud, anyone with any sensitivity simply cannot help but ariticulate his cadences, both with respect to stress and quantity. Horace shows us more variety: it is easier to imagine a place for measured quantity in the lyric odes than in the conversational satires.

It makes sense to carry the principles of quantity forward if they satisfy the traditions and the taste of those who want to speak Latin in the street again.

10

I don’t know if this is even a matter of sensitivity. Long vowels are going to take longer to say, short vowels preceding voiced consonants will take longer to say on account of nothing more than the way the hole in your face works when it’s trying to make noise. But if Cicero was timing it at 2 to 1, then we’re probably missing something. Cadence also pretty much takes care of itself – a ball will bounce, but less and less – but what if you’re not really sure when it’s hitting the floor?

Of course, even for native speakers poetry is a matter of convention. But it’s not a fundamentally artificial convention. Iambic pentameter plays well with the english ear, but we can appreciate it all the better if we know we’re hearing it. Suppose, however, you had conventions, but they weren’t built out of the inherent properties of the language, or you had no way to know if they were because the native speakers are silent? Without more information, it will be impossible for me not to bring the rhythms of English into Latin, and I don’t think I’m alone.

11

I am struggling to understand what this debate is about. Whether or not quantity was a real, organic part of the language or not is unknowable with any certainty. Are you looking for a rehearsal of the most fashionable current scholarly opinion on the subject? The rest sounds like handwringing for the library of Alexandria. We simply do not know the answer to this question any more than we know why most of Cicero’s jokes were funny.

If not, then the secondary question you pose bears more possible fruit for discussion.

You pose the problem of importing English rhythms into Latin. I fail to see why this is a problem. Latinity was an acquired language and culture for the majority of its stylists in the golden and silver (I loathe that term) ages of Roman literature, let alone the thousand years that followed it. The degree of its regional variation and its position as a language acquired by choice have deeply informed its literature. If Latin were revived today, I would not want to see it become a reanimated corpse, but a living language subject to the same kinds of external influences and internal churn that affected it during the first century BC.

Furthermore, it is not obvious to me why we should want to resurrect the Latin of Horace as opposed to the Latin of, say, Venantius Fortunatus or better yet, the Latin of Bernard of Clairvaulx. For our medieval friends, stress was far more important than quantity. We only make quantity an issue because we are coming to grips with centuries of accumulated “wisdom” about literary taste, none of which should be beyond question. If the Goliardic poets didn’t care much about quantity, why should we?

12

See, when they come for my head after I’ve re-destroyed the language by introducing Hip-hop Antiquae Scholae, I’m ratting you out. Otherwise you’re not, you know, wrong exactly. English will soon reach a state where native speakers are no longer the majority of speakers worldwide, yet I still suspect that with a little practice we’ll all still be able to hear the beat in Shakespeare.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that resurrecting a dead language requires a critical mass of obsessive cranks. But the same driving pre-occupations could smother it in its cradle. So, as soon as we have satisfactory answers to my concerns, it’ll be time to call a moratorium on all hobby-horsing and just let the language find its own way.

13

Yeah, but what will we call a marriage between two men in Latin?

14

Conubium viri viro?

15

That’s fair. Perhaps the Hip-Hop Antiquae will do for you what the Annales Volusi did for Catullus. I cannot imagine the sorts of monstrous crap the ancients had to put up with. It may not survive into posterity, but it makes for a more interesting world.

Funny you should mention that. I read an article recently in goddamn i cannot remember where about this. It had a few texts in “English” as spoken in Singapore, Thailand, and perhaps Hong Kong. It was a fascinating read.

Or a friendly government, viz. Israel.

I am not certain why the concerns even need satisfactory answers. People are working to revive the language already. The Vatican has regular news bulletins in Latin and you can tune into a Finnish Latin-only radio program. I do not see achieving universal consensus as even being particularly healthy. If you want quantity in your Latin, use it. Others can disagree and take the bold step of pronouncing all a’s long or short. I like the idea of letting the language find its own way without standardization.

16

I don’t know what we’d call a marriage, but the poets give us some wonderful vocabulary to describe male gay sex. Catullus 16

17

But… what you’re probably really asking is what is what to do about words we need in the modern world that the Romans didn’t have a need for or leave a record of if they did? Actually, I’m prepared to bite the bullet on that and say that new coinages, or new uses of old coinages are required. The attempt by some to create awkward circumlocutions (like instrumentum embolis extrahendis for ‘corkscrew’) is not acceptable, and John C. Trapman in his Conversational Latin has done much to help steer people away from this sort of thing (his word for ‘corkscrew’ is ‘extraculum’).

The real priority in making it a living language is mutual intelligibility, which is not broadly speaking in peril whatever happens with the prosody that may or may not have originally pertained during the classical period. Since there is nothing to really replace the principles given by the Roman grammarians except skepticism, those principles might as well be applied. Still, it doesn’t quite sit well with me, but your infusion of common sense is not being lost on me.

18

I love extraculum. I have not read this book, and now I feel I need to.

Well that’s the thing. I don’t think it is common sense. Common sense, at least from the classicist’s perspective, would be to follow the advice of the Roman grammarians because that is the best way to approximate the best Latin. I am taking what I think is a more uncommon perspective: we do not need to inherit their post facto rules and more importantly, we do not need to inherit their taste. I admit that my own Latin interests are somewhat polemical: I’d never knock Vergil or Horace, but I would never try to write an article about them either.

19

You can preview it on Google books. As much as I have enjoyed the cryptographic approach to Latin, and banging my head against its prosody for what light it shed on English prosody, I was exhilarated at the thought of actually trying to speak it as a living language.

I used to joke that when studying a living language you cut your teeth on phrases like “Do you have any paper?” (which is in fact one of the sentences I can still recite from mucking about with a Berlitz german record in high school). Students of dead languages study sentences like “He certainly denied himself ever to have oppressed free men.”

And ironically, “Do you have any paper?” was one of the first sentences in the Adler text used by the Latinum podcast. It teaches the language through repetition of phrases such as you might use in conversation. The podcast recites the lessons of the text, and I listen until I am understanding more often than I’m translating. A nice public service, but Adler introduces awkward constructions sometimes for modern concepts. He wants to modernize without really innovating, which I just don’t think is going to work. Here’s how Adler renders ‘button’: Orbiculus fibulatorius. On the one hand, there’s nothing stopping us from saying in English “the little circle used to fasten clothing.” On the other hand, no. Forget it. Traupman, on the other hand, renders ‘button’ as ‘globus.’

Even Traupman seems to shy away from abbreviations. Litterae electronicae, my ass. You know what the Itallians call e-mail? Well, they call it ‘posta electronica’ when they’re not busy. Mostly they call it ‘e-mail’, and that’s probably what living Latin speakers will call it as well. Mostly, though, Traupman sticks to words that someone might actually want to use, which I consider vital, without straying too far from Latin roots, though I don’t necessarily consider those sine qua non. Still, why not check there first?

20

I agree with pretty much everything Maeglin has said. As a Latinist, of course I think the attempt to re-vivify Latin is great. But the no. 1 thing that will kill it is too many (pretty much) pointless and arcane rules. The basic rules of Latin are more well known than for just about any language, we don’t even need to think about it. It has its own natural rhythms (clausulae &c) which will become more familiar if critical mass is reached. Imposing from the top down is not the way forward.

New coinages are certainly necessary, though coining things in Latin is probably easier than in most languages. ‘New’ Latin would/should/could be no more difficult to speak than German, and probably much easier to learn as a second language than, say, Russian.