I’d say mistranslations proper. There are ressources available to describe a modern world in good Latin, such as the LRL. Yes, one really needs to look for them, but they are there. Then, there are ways to make new words and expression in Latin that just work different from those of English or even French, and these must be studied carefully. How do I make an adjective from a noun, or should I rather use this noun’s genitive case?
Then, the same word in English does not cover the same ideas as the Latin translation. A table is more than a mensa, which is just for eating, if not otherwise stated.
Oh, and
catena. A vinculum can be anything that ties together, but a catena has links.
My issue with the no-change option is that Latin y does not sound like English y.
y in Latin is a vowel. It is either:
a Greek y, since the letter was adopted for spelling Greek loanwords
a u, in pre-classical speech
an i, in classical and later times
The English y sound exists in Latin but is represented either as j (explicitly consonantal) or i (ambiguous), with the latter being the currently more dominant style.
So by retaining the kyu spelling, is the author saying that romaji is a “subsystem” in Latin, with its own orthographic rules, like pinyin is in English?
I was thinking about it some more. I think kju or kiu would work too. The important thing is to keep it unambiguously monosyllabic. Kiu could be confused with ki-u. Ciu and cju just look very weird and one might just as well keep the k which is exotic enough within Latin. With the c’s, some people might want to pronounce it in a traditional/ecclesiastical way, which is not good. But the combination of [k] and consonantical j does not occur at all in Latin, so everything will look exotic some way or another.
kiu, ĉiu, and ĉu are common Esperanto words, and everything besides “kyu” and “cyu” (English texting abbreviation) looks enough like one of them to me that I can’t see them as anything else.
E) only at the start of the sentence, in isolation, or in a stressed word
F) C) but only if E)
G) D) but only if E)
H) It depends on the time that the text was written
0voters
Like most Latin learners, I began with A). Later, I moved on to C) and then D) or G).
My feeling that D), G) are pretty good models, and B) is ofc the ecclesiastical pronunciation.
C) and F) are also OK, but we know that A) was already considered a little pedantic even by Cicero.
I usually pronounce it, because I’m accustomed to do so from school, but I don’t pronounce aspirated consonants different from non-aspirated, except maybe in Greek loanwords.
I think (in the other direction) I remember seeing it argued that Lucretius wrote nihil but that from versification we know that it would be pronounced nil (with long i; I don’t know how to type macrons in my browser).
Any Spanish enthusiasts here? QQ about the subjunctive:
Does using it “correctly” provide socioeconomic signals? I know in English, using the subjunctive is an indicator of education background (The Power of the Subjunctive Mood to Reveal Socioeconomic Status -). Does this exist in Spanish too? Or does everyone kind of use it in the same way?
I meant that nīl is the pronunciation, nihil the spelling in this case. I think the argument is that the spelling nil is very rare in republican sources (i.e. early inscriptions) even though some poetry demands it (and I think it’s the only form needed in Lucretius). Of course there are writers who definitely sometimes write a bisyllabic nihil and mihi, e. g. Ovid, amores 3, 8, 4 At nunc barbariast grandis, habere nihil, Ovid, amores 1, 4, 16 Ibis, ut accumbas, clam mihi tange pedem. Where that’s the case, it feels like a pronounced h would be helpful. Latin doesn’t have many words in any form where two identical vowels follow each other without a consonant to separate them. There is the perfect -iit, but that is rare in classical texts; many writers only found -iīt legitimate (or -ît).
