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Traditional vs. classical pronunciation of Latin words in English


Has the traditional pronunciation of Latin fallen completely out of favor in English, or do any prescriptivists still recommend it? Is it any more common in British English than in American?


A quick look through dictionaries reveals that Merriam-Webster is inconsistent, sometimes, but not always, omitting the traditional pronunciation altogether, whereas Oxford tends to list both.


I'm not asking about the position of classicists on this matter, but rather the position of Englishists.



Answer



It depends on what you mean, but for most interpretations of your question I think "fallen completely out of favor" would be an overstatement. I don't think there is a clear systematic difference between American English and British English; in fact, when I researched the pronunciation of the word algae, I found that British speakers seemed more likely than Americans to use "non-traditional" /g/, the opposite of the trend that you suggested.


I think almost nobody treats consistency as the highest priority for determining "correct" pronunciation, so whether a word is pronounced according to the "traditional" English pronunciation, "restored" pronunciation, a mix of both, or neither depends a lot on the identity of the word itself.


For example, the prescriptivist Charles Harrington Elster, author of the "Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations", recommends using the pronunciation "DAY-tuh" for data "because it comes from Latin and follows the rules for the so-called English pronunciation of Latin" (p. 125), but he also gives the pronunciation of rationale as "RASH-uh-NAL" (p. 409) and quotes Bryan Garner, another author of usage advice, as saying that the pronunciation of rationale with non-silent final e "would sound terribly pedantic in most company".


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