0.3 Consonants English Gets Wrong — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read c and g as always hard, in every word and before every vowel. Say consonantal v as English w . Keep s hissed everywhere, and never let it become z . Name the difference between the restored classical pronunciation this course teaches and the church pronunciation you have heard in music. Read sentences like Quis hic? [30] — Who's this? — without looking anything up. Prerequisites : 0.2 — vowel length and the macron. Vowels were a matter of length. Consonants are a matter of unlearning. You have been reading Latin words inside English all your life — circus , Caesar , genius , vice versa — and in every one of them the consonants have been softened by a thousand years of French. This lesson puts four of them back. How it sounds There are four rules, and they are all of the form "always". That is unusual and it is good news: Latin spelling is far more regular than English, and once these four are in place you can pronounce a word you have never seen. Letter Always Test word c hard k — before e and i too Cicerō = KEE-keh-roh g hard g as in get — never j gēns = gayns , never jens v English w vīvō = WEE-woh s hissed, as in sing — never buzzed rosa = ROH-sa , never ROH-za Two more, smaller but worth having now. r is tapped or trilled with the tip of the tongue, as in Spanish or Italian, not the English r made with a bunched tongue. And a doubled consonant is genuinely held twice as long: terra (earth) has a long r , and the difference from a single r is audible and sometimes meaningful. Caesar, and what happened to him Take the single most famous Latin word. Caesar was said KAI-sar : hard c , the diphthong ae as in English eye , hissed s . You can check this without trusting anyone, because the word was borrowed into other languages while Romans were still saying it: Language The word German Kaiser — KAI-zer Greek Kaisar — the Greeks wrote the first letter with kappa, their k Russian, via Old Church Slavonic tsar — the same stop, hardened differently Modern English SEE-zer — the form French handed us Three of those four keep a stop at the front. Only the English one has an s , and it got there through medieval French, where c before e had gone soft. The same history explains circus and Cicero : Latin circus was KIR-koos and Cicerō was KEE-keh-roh . If you have ever wondered why the Germans call him Kikero , that is why. The same thing happened to g . Latin genus (kind, birth) was GEH-noos with the g of get ; English genus and gender both show the French softening. And Latin vīnum was WEE-noom , which is why English has both wine (borrowed early, while the w was still there) and vine (borrowed later, through French, after it became a v ). Two pronunciations, and which one this course uses You have heard Latin sung. Agnus Deī , Kyrie , Gloria in excelsīs Deō . In that tradition — the ecclesiastical or church pronunciation, essentially Latin read with Italian habits — the rules above do not hold: c before e and i is ch , g is j , v is v , and excelsīs comes out with a sh . Word Classical (this course) Church caelum — sky, heaven KAI-loom CHAY-loom Cicerō KEE-keh-roh CHEE-cheh-roh gēns — clan, people gayns jayns vīvō — I live WEE-woh VEE-voh excelsīs — in the highest eks-KEL-sees ek-SHEL-sees Neither is wrong. The church pronunciation is a real, continuous tradition, and if you sing you will need it. But it is the Latin of about the year 1200, not of Cicero, and this course is about reading Roman and scholarly texts. So we use the restored classical pronunciation throughout, and when a lesson touches liturgical Latin — the Vulgate reading in the fifth lesson of the Reading volume — it will say so. There is a third tradition you may run into, and it is worth naming so that you can recognise it and put it aside. Until the nineteenth century, English schools read Latin with English vowels and English stress — vēnī, vīdī, vīcī came out as VEE-nigh VIE-die VIE-sigh , and that pronunciation survives in legal and academic tags: sub judice , a priori , alumni , vice versa . It is the reason English speakers say SIGH-nus for a curve and SEE-zher for a general. Nobody defends it as a reconstruction of anything, but it is deeply set in professional English, so you will go on using it in English sentences while reading Latin differently. Keeping the two apart is easier than it sounds: the moment you are reading Latin, the four rules of this lesson apply. One honest limitation. This course does not yet have recorded audio for Latin, so everything above has to be carried by your own voice and by the spellings on the page. That is why the descriptions are written as instructions rather than as things to listen for, and why every lesson in this volume ends by asking you to read out loud. Read it aloud Real sentences with the four consonants in them. Read each aloud twice, and on the second pass name the consonant you had to correct. Latin English What to fight Nihil de te scio. [1] I know nothing about you. sciō = SKEE-oh , not SHEE-oh Ego te volo. [2] I want you. volō = WOH-loh ; hard g in ego Cur hic non es? [3] Why aren't you here? cūr = koor , with a tapped r Hoc mihi non placet. [4] I don't like this. placet = PLA-ket , not PLA-set Iam scio quid sit. [5] I already know what it is. iam = yam ; two hissed s letters Mea mea sunt; tua tua sunt. [6] What's mine is mine, and what's yours is yours. sunt hissed both times The fourth one is the useful test. placet is the root of English placid and placate , both of which have an s -less spelling, and yet English speakers reliably read the Latin with a soft c because the e that follows it triggers the habit. Say it as PLA-ket five times and the habit starts to loosen. New words Eight words chosen for their consonants. Read each aloud as you meet it. Word (dictionary form) Meaning Note vīvō la I live, I am alive Part of speech verb, 3rd conjugation ( vīvere , vīxī , vīctum ) How it differs from English behind vivid , survive ; said WEE-wo