If you're familiar with the wide variety of pronunciations of English words, it probably won't surprise you to know that Latin — which has arguably been spoken for longer and in more countries — should also suffer the same fate.
Nobody knows how Latin was originally spoken.
There is no firm basis, therefore, for any particular way of speaking. Latin has been kept alive more by the Church (in her many denominations) than any other body, in which an end of i is pronounced with the long e, possibly best known from Enigma's "Sadeness":
In nomine Christi, Amen.
Long e works better when sung (a long i having more than one part to it, sounding more like aahyee when sung slowly*).
However, I blame just one thing in particular for spreading the i sound, and it's this:
Q: What do you call a mushroom who buys all the drinks?
A: A fungi [fun guy] to be with.
We all get to learn this joke at six years old in our Christmas crackers. Any other pronunciation is therefore doomed, or at least turned into an exotic curiosity, in our childhood.
*Please feel free to introduce me to the art of phonetics. I'm curious.
No comments:
Post a Comment