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this post has been editted to use macrons, using html eg ā is & amacr ; without the spaces as html, similarly the other vowels. But this trick cannot be used in comments. I suppose what you can do is to write a temporary post using this trick, cut and paste the macronised text, and then cancel the temporary post.

the main pronunciation question is how the uum of domuum is pronounced, versus say the ū of domūs, but I am interested in the entire pronunciation.

poring over the manuals, I crafted the sentence "hodiē iānuae domuum sunt ātrae", which maybe is wrong, but is supposed to mean "today the doors of the houses are black".

The first answer below by Unbrutal_Russian gives an audio recording which seems plausible as to how it should be pronounced. He says the m nasalises the preceding u of domuum, so in fact the uu is not 2 consecutive identical vowels, but the um is an indivisible code, and the consecutive vowels would be u then um.

Caeser is to specify which era of latin, first century BC.

I think confusion can occur with less often used things, and genitive plural of houses would be less often used. The 1425 words book, gives 29 nouns of the 4th declension where the genitive plural ending is uum, I dont see -uum in any other noun declension tables. The course book I am using so far has only mentioned 3 declensions, but the 1425 words book gives 5 declensions and a 6th, the indeclinables, of which it gives 3: fās, nefās, nihil = nīl.

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  • Q0: We have instructions on our meta for typing a macron and a breve. There are HTML entities and other solutions. You can also just go to those pages and copy and paste the letters in.
    – Joonas Ilmavirta
    Commented Jan 19, 2022 at 10:14
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    Does your textbook not have a section on pronunciation? They're usually at the front (and usually very rudimentary, but almost always present, in my experience). You may be interested in picking up a copy of Sidney Allen's Vox Latina regardless.
    – Cairnarvon
    Commented Jan 19, 2022 at 11:19
  • @Cairnarvon I will try and get the vox latina book.
    – Commenter
    Commented Jan 19, 2022 at 17:41
  • By the way, why not come to chat? That is a good place for discussions like this: chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/36130/conloqvivm
    – Cerberus
    Commented Jan 19, 2022 at 18:51
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    And I have another suggestion: people prefer reading one question at a time, not several about a similar theme put together into one 'question'. That's not what the format of Stack Exchange is built for. Next time, you might want to split a question like this up into three separate ones.
    – Cerberus
    Commented Jan 19, 2022 at 18:55

1 Answer 1

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Hear me pronounce [ˈhɔd̪iʲeːˈjaːnuʷae̯ˈd̪omuʷõˑs̠ʊ̃nˈt̪äːt̪ɾae̯].

  • I transcribe [õˑ] as half-long because nasal vowels are inherently longer than oral ones and nobody transcribes the French/Portuguese ones as long. It counts as a heavy, two-moraic syllable. It might have been an [ʊ̃], the difference is more theoretical than practical. I assume that [ʊ] after [w~u] was blocked from occurring and remained/dissimilated to [o].
  • whether it was [iʲ] or [ɪʲ], [uʷ] or [ʊʷ] would be hard to decide even if we had recordings (the former soon merged with [eʲ] to boot). Similarly, the English meed, mood actually have diphthongs starting in a lax vowel in most varieties, phonemically analysed as /iy/, /uw/.
  • I've managed to get a direct line to the Underworld, and Caesar's feedback was positive. I quote: ACCÉPÍ AVSCVLTÁVÍ APPROBÁVÍ
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  • it sounds plausible, and goes seamlessly from hodie to ianuae. playing it at 50% speed, the very end sounds like the ey of grey, whereas with ianuae, the ae sounds like the y of dry, ie an ai sound. what is your reason for these 2 ae's to be pronounced differently? how do you personally define a diphthong? the um of uum seems to have become om, are you saying the m is nasalising the preceding u? ie that the m doesnt occur after but is a modifier of the previous u?
    – Commenter
    Commented Jan 19, 2022 at 21:53
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    @Commenter Any difference between the two ae's is due to one being absolute-final and the other not (the final one is smoother), but none of them sounds like the ey of grey to me. Could be that you're expecting the final /ay/ to sound closer to /ah/ as in English.—A diphthong is two vocalic segments inside one syllable nucleus.—Yes, final M in Latin isn't pronounced as [m] unless p/b/m follows - it spells a nasal without a definite place of articulation, realised as nasalisation when final. There should be a few discussions of this here ("final m"), and there's decent info on Wikipedia Commented Jan 20, 2022 at 0:12
  • regarding whether it sounds like ey could be the accent you learnt, the ending sounds like tray to me, but with a rolled r, where "tray" with standard british english rhymes with "grey". a british accent transliteration of your audio would be "hod ee yay yanoo why dom oo om soon tar tray", where hod rhymes with rod, ee rhymes with he, yay rhymes with may, the vowels of yanoo are the same as those of salute, dom rhymes with tom, oo rhymes with zoo, om like with tom. it may depend on how your ears are tuned. your brain rejigs your perceptions eg hypnosis can totally change perception.
    – Commenter
    Commented Jan 20, 2022 at 20:24
  • if you looked at some chinese text, 附近的盒子里有免费的钱 you wouldnt perceive much, but a chinese person would perceive some information, and say open a nearby box, because the text said in chinese some money is available in the box for anyone to have. when you listen to a foreign language, you will perceive it relative to the languages you currently know.
    – Commenter
    Commented Jan 20, 2022 at 20:29
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    @Commenter Yes, it's well-known that GenAmE makes relatively less contrasts, although it's distinguished by plenty of older and even new distinctions as well. I agree with and appreciate your remarks on human perception. But I think this is the right time to repeat something I repeat quite often: it's not very productive to try talking about Latin phonetics using American English equivalents, because GAE has at most one vowel that is exactly the same as in Latin, which is the vowel of seed, but even that isn't true on the /iy/ analysis (in AmE unlike BE it's not often audibly diphthongised). Commented Jan 20, 2022 at 21:37

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