12th Century Latin pronunciation

You know this is like asking about contemporary English pronunciation.

English WHERE? New Hampshire? Charlestown, S.C. ? Maltby, Yorkshire? Somerset?

In your question, there's an additional issue: from someone working as clergy in the Catholic church?

Pick a version that sounds good to you.

Don't know if this will be of any help, but here's Enya's version of the song.

Also, many choir masters invent odd ways to say things because it sounds better.

Some, for instance, tell singers to sing eggshell sees dayo for excelsis deo.

I've been in choirs where it was egg sell sees and ex chel sees as well as eggshell sees.
After all, it's not as if there are any 12th century choir masters around to complain.

Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

The main difference between church Latin and classical Latin (not as Romans spoke it, but as academics do) is that the "v" is pronounced "v" in church Latin and "w" in academic/classical Latin.

Christians started with congregational singing only and no instruments. By the 12th C, though, singing in choirs was more common than congregational singing (which came back with the Reformation). Choirs might be filled with people in dedicated religious orders, but there were also choirboys. Only men sang in church, except in convents.

That's from memory, so I hope it's accurate.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal, who sang egg-shell cease day-oh throughout her adolescence

Siri Kirpal said:

Christians started with congregational singing only and no instruments. By the 12th C, though, singing in choirs was more common than congregational singing (which came back with the Reformation). Choirs might be filled with people in dedicated religious orders, but there were also choirboys. Only men sang in church, except in convents.

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If anyone's interested in hearing an example, Google 'Robert Carver.' He was a Scottish pre-Reformation (James IV) composer. I have a CD of his that I bought from Historic Scotland (you may be able to buy it from their online shop.)

Edit:
It's available from Amazon, if you scroll down the page you can hear previews.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Carver-O-bone-Jesu-Sixteen/dp/B000URDDXE/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1387529897&sr=1-1&keywords=Robert+Carver

I studied classical Latin for four years in high school, which makes me a bit unhelpful in this regard, as we studied very little ecclesiastical pronunciation. However, from my understanding of it, I cobbled together a possible pronunciation.

N.B. that I could be very very wrong. Also, you'll probably end up tweaking a lot of these vowels to make them sound prettier when sung.

Vehn-ee, vehn-ee Eh-mahn-oo-el*
Cap-tee-voom sohl-vey Ees-reel**
Kwee gehm-it een ex-ee-lee-oh
Pree-vah-toos Dey-ee fi-lee-oh
Gow-debt, gow-debt Eh-mahn-oo-el
Nah-sheh-tour (with a slightly rolled R) proh-tay Ees-reel

*I wouldn't support singing Emmanuel it this way, though. I tried and it sounds really funny.

**Or Israel, for that matter.

Taylor Kowalski said:

I studied classical Latin for four years in high school, which makes me a bit unhelpful in this regard, as we studied very little ecclesiastical pronunciation. However, from my understanding of it, I cobbled together a possible pronunciation.

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When I studied Latin in middle school, we started with half a year of exclusively oral drill & recitation, and we learned the Church Latin pronunciation. So the "Classical" Latin that's ordinarily taught in Anglophone schools has always sounded rather bizarre & foreign to me.

Given the limitations of trying to spell phonetically without using a phonetic alphabet -- I pretty much agree with what Taylor Kowalski has given as a good approximation of how to say those lines in Church Latin.

How close it might be to how Latin was actually spoken in the 12c is another question entirely, and one I 'm not remotely qualified to answer.

BardSkye said:

Thank you for continuing on with this discussion; I'm finding it quite interesting. Do you think ecclesiastical Latin would have been as subject to regional differences as most spoken languages were? Or would it have been slower to differ, given the smaller number of speakers?

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Sat Nam! (Literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

Ecclesiastical Latin had regional variations. My mother's master's thesis was on how the Renaissance was not a quick thing, that classical learning maintained through the Middle Ages. For her thesis, she had me translate a passage in Latin. It was clear from that passage (and a bunch of others) that written and spoken Latin varied quite a bit. Thing is, although there weren't a great many speakers, there were great distances between some groups of them, and that's what causes speech differences.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

I started to write a rather long-winded post about historical linguistics and reconstruction, and it was getting way the heck out of hand. Deleted. I'll try again for brevity.

My view is that the Medieval Latin used in churches across Europe varied regionally by adopting characteristic pronounciation of the local language, especially where the local language evolved from a regional dialect of the Vulgar Latin. There is even evidence for such variation in modernity: the "Ecclesiastical" Latin spoken in German and Slavic countries today still differs from the Italianate in the pronounciation of certain letters. So it's very difficult to say what a 12th Century monk would have sounded like without identifying a region and then doing some serious research and a fair bit of guess-work. The Italianate (modern "Ecclesiastical" Latin is essentially Italian pronounciations of Latin words) might be a decent guide for a 12th Century Italian monk, but not necessarily any other nationality.

To illustrate the problems facing such a reconstruction, consider gaudet in line 5. The dipthong 'au' monophthongized very differently as Latin evolved. In central Italy it became 'o' very early, while it remained 'au' in Romania even to the present day, but remained as 'au' on the Iberian peninsula before monophthongizing into 'o' sometime in the early history of Spanish. So do you sing 'gow-det' or 'go-det'? I suppose it depends if you want to sound like a Spanish monk or a Romanian one.

That's not even remotely helpful, but I hope it's a bit interesting... And if it were my project, I would start with a basic handle on the Latin alphabet and then simply sing what sounds best in my ear within the metre. Enjoy.

We absolutely know for certain that there were both regional and historical variations, even within the same region, because we have Latin texts for newly converted people (and texts from people attempting to learn Latin) with attempts to cover pronunciation and restrict syntax variation, and we have bitter complaints from monks, priests and church clerical staff about how dreadful the Latin of someone else was . . . we have similar complaints from Roman officials, too.

Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

Bard, you're forgetting that communication wasn't anything like what it is now. Two towns 60 miles apart would be three days travel apart, except under extreme conditions with a series of top horses. With rare exceptions, people didn't learn in top echelon places.

Think about the abbess in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales. She spoke the French of Stratford at Bow for French of Paris was to her unknown. (Slightly translated, but pretty close.) Same thing for Latin, only more so.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal