Talk:Traditional English pronunciation of Latin

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Your treatment of vowels before "r" in RP in the sample text seems to me peculiar. (Is it even necessary to show the three different accents? this seems beyond the scope of your purpose.) In particular, I think we should have:

vɛərɪ̩ʼæbɪlɪs 'kjʊəræt and ɒb'djʊəræt

Also, I think lots of the schwas in RP should be /ɪ/

--Gheuf 07:05, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

I appreciate your comment that the diphthongization before "r" is not a distinction which needs to be shown in the transcription, but it is for that very reason that I think having 3 separate transcriptions is unnecessary in the first place. For your purposes, you should be able to construct fairly easily a "pan-English" transcription that will relate to traditional accent-specific transcriptions by simple rule.

If you are going to present 3 separate transcriptions, though, I think you should use the transcriptions considerd "standard" for those accents. In the case of "curat", it's not that I personally hear a schwa there; but the presence of the centering diphthong (as opposed to a monophthong) is considered to be one of the clues that differentiate RP from other English accents (see J. C. Well's "Accents of English").

In my transcription of "variabilis", the vowel "i" was supposed to be a small capital "i". The little subscript dot was put in by accident. But yes this is the vowel of "KIT" and not of "FLEECE": RP differs (I believe) from English in its treatment of prevocalic "i". I am an American and pronounce "ee", but standard RP transcriptions (like the OED) generally have "ih" in this position.

For the quality of unstressed vowels I was again going off J. C. Well's book; he develops some time to explaining how, in RP, "abbot" and "rabbit" don't rhyme, because unstressed "ih" and schwa haven't merged.--Gheuf 21:32, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

This is the case of a historical sound change that has left centering diphthongs before "r"; not a low-level phonetic detail.--Gheuf 22:34, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

My remarks on "abbot" v. "rabbit" were meant to apply to your transcription of "variabilis": the last and penultimate "i"s of this word should, I think be transcribed as "ih" not as schwa. The last one is also "final" so that whatever remarks apply to final vowels in general, or to "rabbit" in particular, should also apply to "variabilis".--Gheuf 00:41, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

The difference between episolon-r and epsilon-schwa-r is precisely the same as the differene between "Merry" and "Mary." Your transcription of RP "variabilis" is more appropriate to "verriabilis". That is all I meant by my initial complaint.--Gheuf 00:47, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Hi, RandomCritic, I saw your message on my talk page, and have had a (very) quick look through your essay - it's quite some work. It does fall somewhat out of my area of expertise, so I won't be able to give an informed critique of your analysis, I'm afraid. Neither will I have time to look at it in depth over the coming long weekend (it's Queen's Birthday here), but hope to be able to do so after that some time (it should be rather educational, I imagine, even though my preferred method of pronouncing Latin leans more toward the classical rather than the fully anglicised version - as an example, having "Ave" pronounced as [æɪ.vi] rather than [aː.væɪ] strikes my ears as very odd). Just one thing in the Australian transcription that struck me right away is that the vowel corresponding to AmE ɑɹ and BrE ɑː is more front in AusE - it is conventionally shown as aː, but ɐː would also be acceptable. Also, I know it would be time-consuming, but could you perhaps put in more IPA templates - there are a great many places where I see just boxes, and while I can probably reliably pick the intended symbol, I'd prefer not to have to guess. Cheers, Thylacoleo 04:48, 8 June 2007 (UTC)