Next is a young teacher who is getting his doctorate, if I'm not mistaken astronomy however he's a polyglot he speaks French, English, Japanese Latin, etc. I would like to invite to the stage Luke Amadeus Ranieri Hello, everyone! How are y'all doing? I didn't hear you; again please! One more time, I want to hear the music of the words! This sound... being an American and a big fan of Italy itself this sound the music of the vowels that you use every day a thing that I envy you for I can't do that like you can I have to practice and study a great deal because we have something like 20 vowels in English so it's hard for us sound like you and we don't have these sounds that you have because each of you Italians is much more capable than I am to speak Latin perfectly in a way that is even colloquial my name is Luke of course Ranieri, with origins in Abruzzo from my grandparents and "Lucius Ranierius" is how I call myself in Italian and this is my website I need a volunteer an Italian please read this aloud for us out loud for everyone thank you, and I need another thank you! I wanted to show to a hypothetical American who is very interested in Italian literature the true sound of Italian, which you all, naturally, pronounce perfectly but this hypothetical American has never heard a real Italian before he studied Italian exclusively by means of books and he has learned to pronounce the language even these very phrases but only with the English sound system because the books use English phonemes analogously "a" is pronounced like "a" in "father" etc. so how does he pronounce it? This hypothetical American has never heard the sound of Italian he doesn't know! he loves it, and he understands everything this hypothetical American however an important part of the language is absent obviously a thing that for you all comes naturally now what does de do after a lot of practice this American finds videos of YouTube of Italian and even learns from Italians in Italy the real sound, even the proper phonetics and he can pronounce it like this after a while even doing shall we say an "elision" a mix of two vowels in the same syllable a thing that you all do every day without thinking about it much as the ancient Romans speaking Latin and syntactic doubling (a phenomenon in Italian caused by long syllables inherited from Latin) because in your opinion, and perhaps this is a rhetorical question in your opinion, which is the more Italian? naturally I am American I'm foreign, I have an accent not too strong, but I hear it, unfortunately and I work every day to improve this sound, to imitate you all the thing that I do is that I place my vowels too far inside my mouth you of course pronounce these vowels perfectly it's your nature little by little I find my way in pronouncing Italian better today we'll talk a little about — first I wanted to ask who has never heard of the restored pronuncation of Latin so you have all heard of it before? good, because I don't want to talk too much about these sounds and phonemes if you are already familiar we'll talk a little about these sounds and then about something very important that we don't do in Italian Italian is absolutely the closest language to Latin but there are some things that we can do this living language and I mean Latin it lives now for the past day I've been speaking in Latin with these friends and colleagues down here much more than Italian so if I say something more Latin than Italian please excuse me in advance all right, let's see; so having studies various languages among the most important things is the phonetics it's something we can master and not with a huge amount of time; it's possible to do I'll give you this example how would it sound and this is always just my opinion what would the sound of Classical Latin actually be? that is, having this rhythm we don't have to do the traditional stress pattern way done normally in Italy I remember the first time I learned this in Italy "what the heck...?" I thought all of you have already become familiar with this pronunciation which we'll call "Classical" show of hands and maybe you don't all use it no problem, I would simply like to show why I use it we have a variety of sources for this pronunciation but I don't want to get into them today so the phonemes of course as Lorenzo used in his presentation a short time ago the letter H is pronounced more or less as in English but not always; in this example should we force ourselves to enunciate this second H? no, I believe here "hanc" sounds more like "anc" because a consonant precedes the H the H is practically absent the S however is always unvoiced let's practice a bit together; this is the interactive part the way we say "rosa" in Italian with the open 'o' it's also open in Latin, but short repeat, please! "rosa" oh nice! this short-short sound is great except for some Greek words sigma + mu in Greek words is voiced but this voiced sound for the S wasn't comfortable for the Romans so they often said it unvoiced thanks! you said that perfectly so let's do another example the V is basically an English W let me hear "vērō" beautiful! so then the Z though isn't pronounced as in Italian but as in English because in Attic Greek it was S + D but in Koine the Greek of Cicero, Caesar, etc. it was a double Z sound massa comes from mazza it's usually written like thin with the long vowel because the syllable is long, not the vowel but it was a geminated consonant these are mostly superficialities these aspirated consonants P + H which sounds like P + H let's try it! "Philippus" great! let's do you do this so much better than I! I have an Italian student and I'm teaching him Latin he pronounces Latin so much better than I can due to your phonetic nature as Italians but this aspirated sound is rather alien to the ancient Roman it would have been foreign to an ancient Roman so they often wrote and pronounced it without the H sound so in my opinion it's fine to pronounce it like this witouth the aspiration but the important thing is not to pronounce it like an F since the Greek letter phi didn't have this sound until the Byzantine period but if the T + H doesn't work for you it's fine like that since the Romans didn't have this sound being foreign, Greek, and weren't always capable of making it I use my diaphragm we can also make this sound without aspiration GN according to certain philologists and me too though I'm no philologist sounds like the English word "hangnail" like the Italian word "anche" like the word "sing" or "king" in English you probably never have attempting this sound but let's try how lovely! it's so great to hear "ignis" it's also possible than some Romans said this also works fine for me T + vowel let's move forward my favorite! and my colleagues often make fun of me for it because I like the sound of the nasal vowel because the final -M is not a consonant but a vowel! a nasal vowel for example not "Jūliam" but "Jūliã" to our ear, that is speaking Italian and English we don't have this sound; but it exists in Portuguese and Japanese; exactly the same as as the Latin sound, I believe it's a vowel we know for certain that this sound is in fact a vowel because we see it elided in the meter of poetry as in a line of Virgil we don't make "liaison" as it's said in French ẽ seems a strange sound to us I admit it's odd but the most important thing is not to close the lips on the final -M because if they close, it's no longer a vowel sound I make it super nasal but that's not as important as simply preventing the lips from closing all the way smiling with teeth visible naturally these nasal vowels don't exist in Italian, right? ah! but they do please, say the Italian word "insegno" we don't say "insegno" with a hard N sound with a much weaker N and in isolation this sound is ĩ you do this naturally! we don't say "infatti" with a strong N either we can say it that way for emphasis, but it's not natural for us if I may count myself among you Italians though I'm not Italian "Infatti" or "in Francia" or if not, let me know later when we have N + S or F in Italian try it! sẽsĩ we do this naturally speaking Italian the final nasal sound I recognise is really odd but try it! maybe you'll like it let's hear it louder! I love it but in the environment of other consonants we have these transformations it doesn't have to be so nasal in front of another consonant this is the reason why we write "M" because in situations like these we actually hear the "M" and then, this one with a dental consonant the in front of an "N" in front of an S we have the same thing as in sẽsĩ, infatti, in Francia this one is fairly natural for both Anglophones and Italians an N or M in front of a C is not labial or dental next we have something that we recognise as being an Italian accent immediately in English when you say something like that is, adding an extra vowel after a final consonant Italian is so rich in vowels! so, you add another vowel at the end, why not! we don't have this phenomenon in English, French, German, etc. so we can say lovely! naturally, these consonants disappear in Italian geminated consonants are exactly like in Italian but, I don't know if you've ever heard — we have these amazing colleagues of mine here who are foreigners like me we don't speak Latin like "regular" American Latinists that is, they say "ānus" instead of "annus" have you ever met an American who asked you "Quanti anni hai?" [which without the double consonant sounds like "how many anuses do you have?"] and you rightly laugh, but imagine an ancient Roman laughing at us when we say "iduh" instead of "id" or another like if I say "cānŏ" instead of "cănō" it's similar, I believe let's go to the vowels the qualities are exactly like Italian also the Italian system of open and closed E and O existed in Latin you have the exact same system in Italian so I won't go into that so! however the length of the vowel! is the most important part of Latin, I feel more than the other stuff we talked about are superficial; *this* is important! I feel; for example not "cārŏ" which is basically the ablative of "cārus" but this is "cărō" meaning "meat" short then long; it's hard but let's hear it again and then we have "amāre" identical to the Italian word and then another; we often say in the Italian school pronunciation īter instead of ĭter short then long and then lītus, which is easy it's important even if we are speaking quickly in Latin not say "lĭtus" but "lītus" this difference is so important! we can even exaggerate it as we practice our spoken language these differences are as in standard Italian so I won't talk about them who knows French or German? or even Swedish? who can do Y? oh that's great! it's hard to do this is how I teach my students we start with 'i' and then close to 'u' with the lips but holding on to the sound of 'i' inside the mouth give it a shot! this always makes me laugh when we pronounce it correctly Greek is so cute! you do this so much better than I do! because you have the right vowel qualitities the O is still open but short; you all just did it perfectly we don't say Cīcerŏ but Cicerō and by doing this, we learn the sound because memorizing the location of these little lines is annoying but learning the *sound* of the language is the important thing I feel let's go on the diphthongs we have au and eu in Italian so we will skip those this sound though AE those Italians who intend to make this sound as in Classical Latin I believe that they think it's like "maestro" which doesn't have a diphthong but two separate vowels in different syllables but it's not we say "dai!" in Italian and American would say "die"; and we also say "eye" we say "I" in English it's a slightly lighter sound in Latin I say "AE" thus not A-E but AE it's very similar to "ai" in Italian my advice therefore is not to say "la-eta" but that it's better to say if this AE is too hard, say it like AI in Italian in fact pre-Classical Latin had this sound here "foedus" OE sounds like "boy" in English but if OE doesn't work for you, just say OI the most important thing is to make just one syllable how do you all say "huic" that's perfect this is what really interests me because when we really learn the sound of a foreign language for example the French who are very proud of their language they try to teach us foreigners the sound of an entire phrase it's a method we can apply to all foreign languages even this foreign language, our Latin so what do we do? here we have long and short syllable markings for example we don't want to say "Salvĕ" but "salvĕ" is vocative it's not imperative as it should be we usually say "dōmine" in Italy but it should be "dŏmine" with my students I always start from the end and build towards the beginning not hard at all for you Italians it's basically pure Italian this phrase phonetically speaking instead of saying it with a heavy Italian accent stretching out the syllables we break the rhythm if we say it like that why did I recite that passage of Ovid if we apply this practice every time we speak Latin, we don't need to learn meter! an ancient Roman was able to read aloud Ovid or Virgil and enjoy the sound of the rhythm, because he would pronounce the lines with these lengths naturally this is hard for us in Italian because we say "bēne" with a long vowel my advice on this point is any piece of literature you like conversational even who among you speaks in Latin with your students? when you do, I recommend writing the phrase on a piece of paper and annotate the long and short syllables and so I practice I also record myself that's how I know I have an accent when I speak Italian or Latin I have the exact same accent in Latin when I speak that is, my American vowels another example; let's go on who can do the nasal M smiling even, the lips don't touch we also have an elision that is to say, a mix of vowel sounds in one syllable this is actually the origin of "raddoppiamento sintattico" in Italian [a phenomenon in Italian where words which ended in a long syllable cause a following consonant to become geminate] "dacquando" is the sound of "da quando" it's natural for you all thus if we say "dacquando" in Italian we need also to make this ā into a long syllable another example "intrā paucōs" there are some languages in the world that do this not just Latin and Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, but Japanese Finnish, Hungarian, Czech these moraic languages have these differences at one time I wasn't completed convinced about this before learning Japanese now it's much more natural for me always making a "discrimen" between long and short syllables let's go on to to something we all teach our students let's try this together this is an elision a simplification of the vowel merger the rhythm is the important thing we have an elision here another thing is how "Gallia" or "Gallia'st" which is long-short-long it's also possible to about 20% of the time an -ia like in "I-ta-li-a" becomes "I-ta-lja" which is how we pronounce the word in Italian and Spanish today so we can say "Gal-lja" instead of "Gal-li-a" with three syllables or two either is possible in Latin thus they would all be long syllables here which is odd because we have seen that short syllables are normally quite common, but not here I don't know Caesar knew anything about poetic meter or rhythm but it makes me think of — since I'm also a soldier in the Army a military rhythm like "Ecco la marcia, andiamo!" this opens up a new dimension for me the first time I did this exercise with the text here I realized that he's not a poet with this technique we can appreciate the sound as in before [bad American accent in Italian] [or a near-native Italian accent] one is more Italian, the other less I like this one a lot with his fists he fights against Catiline in front of everyone this sound — he is attacking him! with the sound of the very rhythm he was trying to do exactly that! but we can also use a sound or a pronunciation that is that of traditional Italian schools but we have to conserve the syllables the longs and the shorts — the important thing [in traditional Italian pronunciation] that's not ugly sure we can do that and it's also important for being able to teach our students the true sound of Latin this one again, because it's the first bit of poetry I ever learned we'll start from the end [Ranieri Reverse Recall ™] oh, this is an error; it should be "sĕdĕō" it's hard for us to avoid saying "sēdeŏ" the important thing in this example it's hexameter, but who cares it's not important that it be either hexameter or pentameter if we start from the beginning with the simplest phrases always recognising this rhythm we can like an ancient Roman the poetry and the literature without having to consciously think about this rhythm like hexameter, or Horace, which is hard! Horace is difficult if we have to really think about the meter but if from day one we pronounce it with this sound we can arrive here and now this famous piece you try it! it won't be a pretty chorus or harmony but let's do it anyway What I really like, Giampiero, is is the sound of this voice that comes from Italy after just a bit of practice we can arrive etc., and say it like that without having to think about it my advice is to start with the simplest lines practice and record our voices I *hate* to hear my own voice! because I think, "oh, I made a mistake..." but if we do we can get better we are our harshest judges who speaks at least a little Latin with other people? you guys of course so try it with easy material I want to add that we can't be perfect; we are all foreigners in this language until we have children who only speak Latin again and not English or Italian maybe they're out there; no idea! the little things if it's too hard to use those phonemes if it's not in your heart to do those but the long and short syllables are the most important so, this is an invitation that Virgil extends in the First Eclogue which I actually learned here in Italy, in Florence where I was studying Latin literature Tityrus says to Meliboeus "you can rest the night here with us" so to invite you to join me thank you for your kind attention
