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(That subject-line reference to a once much-known Ezra Pound poem troubles my sleep.)
I am fascinated by the accident that my summary of the never-made-public post of March 11 more or less coincided with John Crowley's discussion of the impossibly awkward sound of supposedly classical Latin, which turns out to be the pronunciation being taught to his daughter just as it was taught to me long, long ago. (No, not by a native speaker.)
The purported original pronunciation was, if I recall correctly, derived from some deviant version of liturgical pronunciation, and I bet that if I did a Google search I could now find the whole story in some Wikipedia entry or other. The pronunciation sounds ludicrous to our ears, and may have as little to do with the original pronunciation as the present-day performance of ancient music has to do with the way it actually sounded. Much depends on the music of rhythm and intonation in daily speech, though Catullus' translation of Sappho sounds lovely anyway you parse it, to my ear anyway, and even makes me believe in the pronunciation I was taught in high school. "Ille mi par esse deo videtur, ille, si fas est, superare divos, qui sedens adversus identitem te, spectat et audit dulce ridentem...nam que te aspexi...." but I see, on looking it up, that I have gone astray after "dulce ridentem," which is as far as I was ever able to recollect reliably.
Anyway, reconstructing the actual sound of something spoken is a tricky business, as anyway can tell you who has ever tried to learn another language from a textbook. One realizes, eventually, that the reason that, say, stereotypical accents of foreign speakers in one's own language are stereotypical because the foreign speakers are speaking grammatically correct sentences in one's own language but speaking them in the rhythms and intonations of theirs.
I am fascinated by the accident that my summary of the never-made-public post of March 11 more or less coincided with John Crowley's discussion of the impossibly awkward sound of supposedly classical Latin, which turns out to be the pronunciation being taught to his daughter just as it was taught to me long, long ago. (No, not by a native speaker.)
The purported original pronunciation was, if I recall correctly, derived from some deviant version of liturgical pronunciation, and I bet that if I did a Google search I could now find the whole story in some Wikipedia entry or other. The pronunciation sounds ludicrous to our ears, and may have as little to do with the original pronunciation as the present-day performance of ancient music has to do with the way it actually sounded. Much depends on the music of rhythm and intonation in daily speech, though Catullus' translation of Sappho sounds lovely anyway you parse it, to my ear anyway, and even makes me believe in the pronunciation I was taught in high school. "Ille mi par esse deo videtur, ille, si fas est, superare divos, qui sedens adversus identitem te, spectat et audit dulce ridentem...nam que te aspexi...." but I see, on looking it up, that I have gone astray after "dulce ridentem," which is as far as I was ever able to recollect reliably.
Anyway, reconstructing the actual sound of something spoken is a tricky business, as anyway can tell you who has ever tried to learn another language from a textbook. One realizes, eventually, that the reason that, say, stereotypical accents of foreign speakers in one's own language are stereotypical because the foreign speakers are speaking grammatically correct sentences in one's own language but speaking them in the rhythms and intonations of theirs.
