Salve!

Let’s start the first post in Latin with a greeting. In Latin salve means hello. Today’s post will be about pronouncing Latin letters. I’ll reserve another post for Latin greetings some other time, but for today let’s just focus on Latin pronunciation.

Before I start, I want to talk about the dicey issue of Latin pronunciation. Latin is a centuries old language. When the ancient Romans spoke it, they left no recordings of the language. We can only guess what “real” Latin sounds like. That being said, we do have some idea about how Latin might have sounded like, thanks to some recovered writings by ancient Latin writers. The debate over how Latin is to be pronounced can be controvercial. Some linguists have argued that Latin pronunciation is close to modern Italian. Makes sense, being that modern day Italy used to contain the most concentrated area for Latin speakers. Others however, dismiss this idea. They argue that modern Italian has changed significantly over centuries and that there is no way to ensure that the pronunciation is anywhere close to Latin. The debate over Latin pronunciation is further complicated by the fact that speakers of Latin will pronounce Latin in the style of their native language. For example, French speakers may pronounce Latin in one way while English speakers may pronounce it in a different way. Anyways, this may not be a big issue for most people because I suspect most people are learning Latin for grammatical purposes.

Another topic I want to tackle is punctuation. The ancient Romans did no use regular spacing between words. Sometimes they used a dot in between words for clarification purposes, but for the most part spacing between words are rare. For those of you who are freaked about this, I’m going to utilize spacing between my words. I think this is appropriate because most modern texts on Latin use spacing and I’m only just following the tradition of these writers.

One other note on Latin punctuation is that the ancient Romans used apices to denote long vowels. An apex is a type of accent mark to indicate that a vowel is long. In some modern Latin textbooks, you’ll see a macron or a symbol that looks like this: ¯. You’ll commonly see this over a vowel like this: ā. Some textbooks do not include any punctuation at all. I’ll try my best to remember to add the appropriate punctuation, but don’t be surprised if you open up a Latin textbook and you don’t see any punctuation marks. Whether to include macrons depends upon the preferences of the author. It’s not “wrong” or “bad” include macrons, but remember the ancient Romans didn’t use macrons. So if you want to write “authentic” Latin, you might not want to add the macrons.