S.P.E. TRACT No. IV

THE PRONUNCIATION OF ENGLISH WORDS DERIVED FROM THE LATIN

By John Sargeaunt

With Preface and Notes by H. Bradley

CORRESPONDENCE & MISCELLANEOUS NOTES
BY H.B., R.B., W.H.F., AND EDITORIAL

At the Clarendon Press
MDCCCCXX

ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF ENGLISH WORDS DERIVED FROM LATIN

[This paper may perhaps need a few words of introduction concerning the history of the pronunciation of Latin in England.

The Latin taught by Pope Gregory's missionaries to their English converts at the beginning of the seventh century was a living language. Its pronunciation, in the mouths of educated people when they spoke carefully, was still practically what it had been in the first century, with the following important exceptions. 1. The consonantal u was sounded like the v of modern English, 2. The c before front vowels (e, i, o, æ, œ), and the combinations tĭ, cĭ before vowels, were pronounced ts. 3. The g before front vowels had a sound closely resembling that of the Latin consonantal i. 4. The s between vowels was pronounced like our s. 5. The combinations æ, œ were no longer pronounced as diphthongs, but like the simple e. 6. The ancient vowel-quantities were preserved only in the penultima of polysyllables (where they determined the stress); in all other positions the original system of quantities had given place to a new system based mainly on rhythm. Of this system in detail we have little certain knowledge; but one of its features was that the vowel which ended the first syllable of a disyllabic was always long: pāter, pātrem, Dēus, pīus, īter, ōvis, hūmus.

Even so early as the beginning of the fifth century, St. Augustine tells us that the vowel-quantities, which it was necessary to learn in order to write verse correctly, were not observed in speech. The Latin-speaking schoolboy had to learn them in much the same fashion as did the English schoolboy of the nineteenth century.

It is interesting to observe that, while the English scholars of the tenth century pronounced their Latin in the manner which their ancestors had learned from the continental missionaries, the tradition of the ancient vowel-quantities still survived (to some extent at least) among their British neighbours, whose knowledge of Latin was an inheritance from the days of Roman rule. On this point the following passage from the preface to Ælfric's Latin Grammar (written for English schoolboys about A.D. 1000) is instructive:—

Miror ualde quare multi corripiunt sillabas in prosa quae in metro breues sunt, cum prosa absoluta sit a lege metri; sicut pronuntiant pater brittonice et malus et similia, quae in metro habentur breues. Mihi tamen uidetur melius inuocare Deum Patrem honorifice producta sillaba quam brittonice corripere, quia nec Deus arti grammaticae subiciendus est.

The British contagion of which Ælfric here complains had no permanent effect. For after the Norman Conquest English boys learned their Latin from teachers whose ordinary language was French. For a time, they were not usually taught to write or read English, but only French and Latin; so that the Englishmen who attempted to write their native language did so in a phonetic orthography on a French basis. The higher classes in England, all through the thirteenth century, had two native languages, English and French.

In the grammar schools, the Latin lessons were given in French; it was not till the middle of the fourteenth century that a bold educational reformer, John Cornwall, could venture to make English the vehicle of instruction. In reading Latin, the rhythmically-determined vowel-quantities of post-classical times were used; and the Roman letters were pronounced, first as they were in French, and afterwards as in English, but in the fourteenth century this made little difference.

In Chaucer's time, the other nations of Europe, no less than England, pronounced Latin after the fashion of their own vernaculars. When, subsequently, the phonetic values of the letters in the vernacular gradually changed, the Latin pronunciation altered likewise. Hence, in the end, the pronunciation of Latin has become different in different countries. A scholar born in Italy has great difficulty in following a Frenchman speaking Latin. He has greater difficulty in understanding an Englishman's Latin, because in English the changes in the sounds of the letters have been greater than in any other language. Every vowel-letter has several sounds, and the normal long sound of every vowel-letter has no resemblance whatever to its normal short sound. As in England the pronunciation of Latin developed insensibly along with that of the native tongue, it eventually became so peculiar that by comparison the 'continental pronunciation' may be regarded as uniform.

It is sometimes imagined that the modern English way of pronouncing Latin was a deliberate invention of the Protestant reformers. For this view there is no foundation in fact. It may be conceded that English ecclesiastics and scholars who had frequent occasion to converse in Latin with Italians would learn to pronounce it in the Italian way; and no doubt the Reformation must have operated to arrest the growing tendency to the Italianization of English Latin. But there is no evidence that before the Reformation the un-English pronunciation was taught in the schools. The grammar-school pronunciation of the early nineteenth century was the lineal descendant of the grammar-school pronunciation of the fourteenth century.

This traditional system of pronunciation is now rapidly becoming obsolete, and for very good reasons. But it is the basis of the pronunciation of the many classical derivatives in English; and therefore it is highly important that we should understand precisely what it was before it began to be sophisticated (as in our own early days) by sporadic and inconsistent attempts to restore the classical quantities. In the following paper Mr. Sargeaunt describes, with a minuteness not before attempted, the genuine English tradition of Latin pronunciation, and points out its significance as a factor in the development of modern English.

H.B.]

It seems not to be generally known that there is a real principle in the English pronunciation of words borrowed from Latin and Greek, whether directly or through French. In this matter the very knowledge of classical Latin, of its stresses and its quantities, still more perhaps an acquaintance with Greek, is apt to mislead. Some speakers seem to think that their scholarship will be doubted unless they say 'doctrínal' and 'scriptúral' and 'cinéma'. The object of this paper is to show by setting forth the principles consciously or unconsciously followed by our ancestors that such pronunciations are as erroneous as in the case of the ordinary man they are unnatural and pedantic. An exception for which there is a reason must of course be accepted, but an exception for which reason is unsound is on every ground to be deprecated. Among other motives for preserving the traditional pronunciation must be reckoned the claim of poetry. Mark Pattison notes how a passage of Pope which deals with the Barrier Treaty loses much of its effect because we no longer stress the second syllable of 'barrier'. Pope's word is gone beyond recovery, but others which are threatened by false theories may yet be preserved.

The New English Dictionary,