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To: Dr. Sivana

Not really — Polish, Marathi and Latin are pronounced how they are spelt.


46 posted on 09/22/2016 1:10:33 PM PDT by Cronos (Obama's dislike of Assad is not based on his brutality but that he isn't a jihadi Moslem)
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To: Cronos
Not really — Polish, Marathi and Latin are pronounced how they are spelt.

I cannot speak for Polish or Marathi, but Latin is a bit messier. Many exceptions have been weeded out over the years (as they have in French by the Academié, which had the pretension to go back to "correct" Balzac, cf. "The Story of French"), but Virgil was well known for using an archaic vocabulary, which broke a number of conventions. I'll have to check my Allen and Greenough for specific examples.

Modern Ecclesiastical Latin is quite regularized, in large part because the Catholic Church standardized pronunciations not so very long ago (18th - 19th century?) before that time, English, French, Italian and other priests had different ways of pronouncing many words, until Rome stanmdardized on an Italianate pronunciation. English-speaking countries' "Legal" Latin of course has an entirely different pronunciation, tossing diphthongs in where they do not belong (Legal Latin "Venire" pronounced "Vehn-eye-ree" rather than "Vehn-eer-ay", for instance ... awful to the ear). Granted, each of these systems in modern times may have been consistent within themselves, so that might not be applicable to your argument. We do not know with certainty how the language was pronounced in ancient times, at best we have some good ideas as to how some prominent writers pronounced certain things, and we get some help from poetry. Even in modern Latin textbooks, macrons are often placed over the long e as a hint (to determine between ablative and other cases) which would be unnecessary if it were always pronounced as it is spelled.

I do understand that some of the Scandinavian countries or thereabouts were forcing a strict standardization. That probably works better with smaller, homogenized populations.
47 posted on 09/22/2016 1:53:55 PM PDT by Dr. Sivana (There is no salvation in politics.)
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