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THe pronunciation of text in ancient choir
Topic Started: Jul 13 2015, 05:33 PM (175 Views)
Kobayashi
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Can I ask a question, please?

My understanding is that the pronunciation of text in Old Hispanic chants is not perfectly clear.
Is this right?
I guess that it may be possible to deduce the pronunciation from verse though.
Given that the pronunciation is still unclear, is that not clear at all? Or are almost all pronunciations reasonably confirmed?

Best,
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Emma Hornby
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We don't know for sure how Latin was pronounced in Iberia in this period.

There is some very interesting scholarly writing by Roger Wright, who uses the spellings that Iberian scribes chose to make various arguments about how the pronunciation worked. One really obvious thing is that "b" and "v" are almost interchangeable in the writing. I just went to look for an example, and on the very first page I looked at, I saw "et sicut pastor segregat obes ab hedis". We would expect to see "oves" there "and as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats". That sort of thing happens all over the place, and might well indicate that, in their spoken Latin, "b" and "v" were very very similar in their sound.

The place we all still go to as performers for medieval Latin pronunciation is H. Copeman, Singing in Latin or Pronunciation Explor'd . I am sure that a lot more has been done in linguistics since he wrote it, but that is certainly what performers tend to use as their go-to guide.

We get some other interesting things, like "meae" would usually be 2 syllables, with a dipthong "me-ae" but quite often in our manuscripts, it is written "mee" with a single note - so just a simple syllable not a dipthong. That sort of thing does give hints about the pronunciation.
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Kobayashi
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Dear Emma,

Thank you so much for the answer. I was thinking of your answer.
It is understandable that "b" and "v" are interchangeable. "r" and "l" might be, also.
But it is really surprising that a combination of a syllable and diphthong is written with a single note. It would mean that "me-ae"" and "mee" were perceptually similar for people who lived at that time, similarly to the case of "b" and "v". Not only perceptual similarity, but also the manner of articulation might be another reason for them.

These findings are very intriguing because music and literature can help each other to understand ancient pronunciation. Also I found that sutra was used to detect the prosody of old language.

I am glad that my understanding was not wrong.
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Emma Hornby
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Yes - it's not in all the manuscripts that we get "meae" and "mee" interchangeably, but certainly in some of them.

There are probably other peculiarities of spelling that help us guess at pronunciation, but I'm so used to reading the Visigothic versions of the texts now that I have stopped noticing that it is weird Latin... that's not very helpful I know!
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