Great thread,
Thanks Ninong. (BTW, is that pronounced NEE-nong or Neh-NONG?)
NEE-nong (it's means godfather in the Filipino language).
Always wondered why my recollection of classical Latin did not necessarily match how Linnaean terms were pronounced by those in the know.
The pronunciation of Latin in the scientific community is not at all the same as the pronunciation taught in school in Latin classes. It's more anglicized. The same goes for the pronunciation of Latin in the legal community except that they make no pretense at getting it correct; they anglicize virtually everything.
And, as I previously mentioned, the pronunciation of scientific names varies depending on the country.
Also appreciated your exegesis of the difference between church Latin and classical Latin. The pronunciations I learned as an altar boy did not always help me when I studied classical Latin. Boy, am I old or what?
I took four years of high-school Latin but that was 60 years ago, before the invention of so-called 'reconstructed' classical Latin pronunciation.
Even in the new reconstructed classical Latin, they use letters of the alphabet that did not even exist back during the classical Latin period and they use both upper and lower case letters. Lower case letters, as well as most punctuation symbols, were not invented until hundreds of years later.
In Julius Caesar's time, his name was spelled IVLIVS CAESAR. He was a member of the IVLII (Julii). However, in most Latin text books you will see his first name spelled either Julius or Iulius, but not IVLIVS. Actually it was C. IVLIVS CAESAR. The letter C. is the abbreviation for Gaius. I'm not sure why that is except that maybe it was a carryover from the period before the introduction of the letter 'G' in the Roman alphabet. I think 'G' was put into the Roman alphabet one or two hundred years before Caesar's birth. Before that, 'C' took the place of both 'G' and 'K'. In fact, even during the classical Latin period, K,X,Y and Z were used almost exclusively for Greek words. Those letters did not exist in the Latin alphabet until they were imported from the Greek sometime around the beginning of the classical period. 'V' took the place of both 'U' and 'W'. You just stuck two V's together to make what we now know as 'W'.
'U' was introduced to represent the vowel sound and 'V' was then used exclusively as we use it today. 'J' was later invented to represent the consonantal 'I'. During the classical period, 'I' was used for both the vowel and consonant sounds.
The Romans borrowed heavily from the Greeks in virtually every facet of their culture. Most educated Romans spoke Greek as well as Latin, just as the Russian aristocracy favored French over Russian prior to the revolution.
