Terence Tunberg, "Cum Desiderio Erasmo in scholis Latinis loquamur!" - LLiNYC 2018
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 มี.ค. 2018
- Preme 'CC' ut verba orationis conspiciantur.
Press 'CC' to see subtitles in Latin.
Terence Tunberg's talk, given entirely in Latin, at the 2018 Living Latin in New York City conference, sponsored by The Paideia Institute for Humanistic Study, Inc. and Fordham University Department of Classics.
Terence Turnberg is the most understandable of all Latin speakers. His sentences and choice of words are of the highest quality.
Magister Tunberg magnum speculum eruditionis pro omnibus est, fons inspirationis pro me ac pluribus.
Hi Paideia Institute! What was the theme of that year's conference?
J
In this conference Terence Tunberg used the classical pronunciation, right? A thing I never understood is the sound of the letter V. In some words, it sounds like a U, in others, like a V. Why?
In classical Latin one letter (u/v) was used both for the vowel u, as in uva, filius etc. and for the semivowel as in quo, uinum/vinum, silua etc. It is thought that in early times the latter sound was very much like an Englsh w as in wine and that this sound gradually evolved into the v as in Romance languages (Italian vino, or English vine).
When someone recites ancient Latin and pronounces it like a v, they're mispronouncing it. But some mistakes like this have become so widespread that it can be hard to unlearn them. Another example is that the ancient Latin c always sounds like the English k. We're so used to completely wrong pronunciations of Caesar and Cicero. The Germans pronounce Caesar much better, but they usually spell it Kaiser. That's right: the German term Kaiser means Caesar.
its u for why not :)
@@stevenbollinger9776 and Tsar as well eh
He is not using the classical pronunciation. This is clearly an American speaking some sounds, definitely not classical Latin, producing a comical result. Unfortunately all Americans I have hear speaking Latin, with the exception of Luke Ranieri, make 0 effort to escape the proclivities of their tongue.
Expeditissime ac Latinissime loquens Terentius ille Tunberg nobis scripta Erasmi commendat. Sed valde doleo, quod inter opera Erasmi scitu dignissima illa apophthegmata non habet. Quibus nihil facetius - mea quidem sententia - inveniri potest. Propter brevitatem et a discipulis legi et intelligi possunt.
Ioannes Pataviensis
Tractat autem Terentius Tunberg Adagia sive Apophthegmata ab 17:34.
That's the Latin pronunciation to strive for! No Italian or English accent. Bravo!
Really? His accent sounds a little Anglo to me. No complaints, it is impressive to speak Latin regardless and it is not as egregious (not by a long shot) as many Germanic language speakers.
It sounds especially like he is aspirating his "c" and "t" when it should be unaspirated like in Spanish or Italian. These sounds are unaspirated when written with an h which is common in Greek loan words which Romans precisely wrote with different sounds.
We can say some things about correct ‘pronunciation’ that were canonized by grammarians for centuries. In the vast majority of cases we know what syllables are long and short, and we know where the accent of a word should be placed. This knowledge has more or less been preserved from antiquity to the present. But many of the finer points of phonetics and intonation and even some of the sound of consonants, if the goal is “to sound like an ancient Roman”, is elusive and even totally obscure. I won’t enumerate details here, but any diligent reader can find them by going through the more recent research on ancient sounds.
Here is the classic study that attempts reconstruction of Roman pronunciation mostly of the first century BC.
W. Sidney Allen, Vox Latina: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin (Cambridge, 1965)
There are good and solid facts in this book, but it tends to offer a picture that is too uniform - a picture that is deeply undermined by more recent studies. Moreover, Allen’s study too easily applies evidence from authors of differing geographical origin who lived in different centuries to the practice of one period and one geographic location. A better understanding of the complexity of the ancient evidence, and many of its ambiguities will arise from the study of works such as these:
J.N. Adams, The Regional Diversification of Latin 200 BC - AD 600 (Cambridge, 2007)
A. Sihler, New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (Oxford, 2008)
Leaving aside the broad outlines of syllable prounciation, in terms of phonetics and intonation the goal of sounding “like an ancient Roman” is meaningless from the start, until we ask “which ancient Roman?” It is clear that Cicero who came from Arpinum, a town removed about 100 km. from Rome, sounded different from Caesar (one of only a few classical authors who were actually ‘Roman’ - see Adams on regional varieties even near Rome). For comparison’s sake, consider the difference in English between someone raised in Devon and someone raised in London (and we should specifiy what part of London!). But even if we should decide which of these two Latin sounds we wanted to imitate, there remains a problem - we cannot now reproduce without ambiguity absolutely all the nuances of the intonation of either Cicero or Caesar. The evidence just isn’t complete enough for that. And how differently from these two sounded Quintilian a century later? And how much did the fine points of Tacitus’ phonetics differ from those of Quintilian? And let’s not even consider Gellius, or Apuleius or Augustine.
There are indeed people out there who think they can teach an “ancient Roman pronunciation” that includes all the fine points we need to know of phonetics and intonation. They are deceiving themselves - and the gullible people who follow them.
So, leaving out the areas where no one can lay down an absolute law, the current speaker doesn’t do too badly. In terms of where the accent is placed on syllables, I couldn’t detect a single mistake in his presentation. And there are other styles out there which are (in my view) just as legitimate. Someone can pronounce Latin with Italianate intonation and consonantal sound, while placing the accent correctly on each word, treating long syllables as long, and short syllables as short. Such a person can sound good, and can read Latin poetry well. I think of Luigi Miraglia for example.
There seems to be an almost general belief today that the pronunciation of Latin among the educated in the late republic and early empire was somehow uniform. This notion has perhaps been encouraged by W. Sidney Allen’s ‘Vox Latina’, the classic English-language study of Latin pronunciation first published about 60 years ago. But the newest phonetical research seriously undermines the idea of a uniform ‘classical’ pronunciation. For those interested in this topic, I highly recommend the monumental study by J. N. Adams (author of ‘The Latin Sexual Vocabulary’) entitled ‘The Regional Diversification of Latin 200 BC - AD 600’, and published by Cambridge in 2007. The results of this study and other recent work make sense, when we reflect on the size and diversity of the Roman world even in the first century BC, and the utter lack of the means of rapid communication that we now take for granted. Clearly there were many regional pronunciations in Italy, even near Rome. Apparently Cicero himself (a ‘novus homo’) did not sound exactly like patricians born in Rome. Grammarians indeed did help in codifying the placement of accent in Latin words and conventions of long and short syllables (necessary for versification), and we can follow these well-established norms in pronouncing Latin today. But we should be realistic - we cannot recover all the fine points of intonation even for one restricted time period and one restricted region. A person who speaks Latin today, whether following the conventions of the so-called ‘restored’ pronunciation, or those of the Italic ‘Ecclesiastical’ method, will almost inevitably retain subtle traces of their native sound (and this need not be a bad thing, since Latin is now everyone’s language) - unless one attempts to invent a tonal substratum (which can only be hypothetical).
The way he speaks reeks of Anglophonism. Its actually quite evident where he is from.