New Latin - Pronunciation

Pronunciation

New Latin had no single pronunciation, but a host of local variants or dialects, all distinct both from each other and from the historical pronunciation of Latin at the time of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire. As a rule, the local pronunciation of Latin used sounds identical to those of the dominant local language; the result of a concurrently evolving pronunciation in the living languages and the corresponding spoken dialects of Latin. Despite this variation, there are some common characteristics to nearly all of the dialects of New Latin, for instance:

• The use of a sibilant fricative or affricate in place of a stop for the letters c and sometimes g, when preceding a front vowel.
• The use of a sibilant fricative or affricate for the letter t when not in the onset of the first syllable and preceding unstressed i followed by a vowel.
• The use of a labiodental fricative for most instances of the letter v (or consonantal u), instead of the classical labiovelar approximant /w/.
• A tendency for medial s to be voiced to, especially between vowels.
• The merger of æ and œ with e, and of y with i.
• The loss of the distinction between short and long vowels, with such vowel distinctions as remain being dependent upon word-stress.

The regional dialects of New Latin can be grouped into families, according to the extent to which they share common traits of pronunciation. The major division is between Western and Eastern family of New Latin. The Western family includes most Romance-speaking regions (France, Spain, Portugal, Italy) and the British Isles; the Eastern includes Scandinavia, Central Europe, and Eastern Europe.

The Western family is characterized, inter alia, by having a front variant of the letter g before the vowels æ, e, i, œ, y and also pronouncing j in the same way (except in Italy). In the Eastern family, j is always pronounced, and g had the same sound (usually ) in front of both front and back vowels; exceptions developed later in some Scandinavian countries.

The following table illustrates some of the variation of New Latin consonants found in various countries of Western Europe, compared to the Classical Latin pronunciation of the 1st centuries BCE-CE. In Eastern Europe, the pronunciation of Latin was generally similar to that used in Germany, but usually with for z instead of German .