I pondered my thoughts … 
Siriously!
There are potential rich pickings for SSi in my native South Africa.
The country now has eleven (yes, eleven!) official languages - Afrikaans, English, Xhosa (the mother tongue of the late great Nelson Mandela), Zulu, and seven other indigenous African tongues. English is the language of business and general communication and although it’s the mother tongue of only around 10% (I think) of South Africans, it seems to be in the process of sweeping all before it (as English does).
I try to keep abreast of language developments in SA via Google alerts, and by all accounts some of the languages are in slow but steady decline. Wouldn’t it be good if SSi could ride to the rescue!
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After visits from musicians to the Dyfi Valley earlier this year, I quite fancy learning Galician.
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Would that be part of the Celtic chain linked to Welsh?
Justin
We could try to argue that…
Galicians I know are very firm on their Celtic heritage… 
[They’ve also taught me not to say ‘But that’s Portuguese really, isn’t it?’…;-)]
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Given recent events and the continued banning of the language in some countries, out of fellow feeling, I’d fancy SSiKurdish, but I do not know any teachers thereof!
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See above! If it’s too political, please delete!
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More SSIAncientLanguages would be pretty cool. I’ve already been fiddling around with the idea of a SSIKoineGreek, though of course I’m not native. And the SSILatin could use some updating, since I’ve at least found the pronunciation is very Anglicised, and not very Latin, Classical or Vulgar or otherwise.
Is it Church Latin, as in used by the Catholic Church until services finally went into English?
Found an interesting guide to this “minefield” here:
http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/mc/latinpro.pdf
edit: a slightly more subjective, also interesting viewpoint here:
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/LatinBackground/Pronunciation.html
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No; listening to it again, it’s an attempt at Classical pronunciation, but there are very English pronunciations of long o and e, -o and -e (-e varies between English -ay and -y where it should be closer to “-eh”), voiceless consonants (they’re aspirated where they wouldn’t be), unstressed vowels (they’re reduced), and dropped consonants (eg. the ‘p’ in tempto).
eg. Volo temptare discere latine is being pronounced as [wɔləʊ̯ tʰɛmtʰa:ri: dɪskəɾɛɪ̯ latʰiːnɛɪ̯] where it should ideally be ['wɔloː tɛmp’taːrɛ 'dɪskɛɾɛ la’tiːneː]. ie. pronunciation of long o and e should mirror how Northern English speakers pronounce ‘oa’ as in ‘boat’ and ‘ay’ in ‘day’, p, t, k should be pronounced as in Romance languages, and each short vowel should be uniformly pronounced the same.
Here’s a closer pronunciation (mine) for comparison (with added pitch accent! Yay, pitch accents are fun 
). If people want to, they could probably do better than me with practice.
EDIT: Latin pronunciation usually depends very much on what you feel like nowadays, it’s true, since we have no native Latin speakers to teach or correct us. Classical and Vulgar Latin are both varieties that don’t exist anymore as they characteristically were, after all. Authentic pronunciation was what I was wanting to question though, because there is such a thing, and Latin doesn’t have to be spoken as if speaking English. For those who wanted authentic pronunciation of one form of Latin or other, the SSILatin course falls short.
Also the problem with using English as approximating pronunciations is it only works as just that: approximations. Hence Julius as YOO-lee-us KYE-sahr is not useful if you have a fronted ‘u’ as in ‘you’ (like my dialect has), you aspirate consonants (like most all English varieties do), your ‘u’ as in ‘us’ is unrounded and unstressed (as it is in most English varieties except for Northern English and maybe West Country English, besides others), and you drop ‘r’'s at the ends of words in pronunciation (like most speakers outside the Americas do except for West Country speakers and some others).
Wow!! Mae ddrwg gen i! You lost me on the first line. You are clearly an expert, whereas I gave up Latin after a ‘just pass’ at O-level GCE in 1958!!
To @mikeellwood I found your sites fascinating!! I actually went to a Convent school for a while, then moved and went to an ordinary county grammar. I had to try to change from ‘v’ to ‘w’ and ‘ch’ to ‘c’, so I totally understood the point made! I always found it hard to ‘feel’ that “Weni! Weeni! Weeki!” had the same conquouring ring as “Veni! Vini! Vichi!”!!!
Heh heh, I’m only a linguistics student and conlanger, and that only for the past few years. I’m not by any stretch of the word an expert. Learning the IPA or the International Phonetic Alphabet and then even just studying how English sounds work in your own dialect and how they have evolved over time really halves the difficulty of understanding of what different languages’ sounds are and how they work and are put together. All with looking at what is documented for each language of course.
Well not mine; I just found them with the help of Professor Google. You did better than me. I failed both Latin and Religion O level (obviously wasn’t cut out to be a priest ). I assume what Latin I did learn was pronounced as Church Latin - I’m with you on veni, vidi, vici (Pronounced the other way, it sounds as if Caesar had forgotten to put his teeth in. 
)
You have shown me an actual benefit of a ‘good Catholic education’!!! (Not that I am or was a Catholic!). However, I was obliged to ‘do’ Scripture at the County school and made to drop history as the Head believed no child could get more than 8 o-levels!! After a while, and much protest from my Dad, she realised that, as I was ‘doing’ scripture, I might as well take the o-level! My dad told me to do no work for it! I obeyed implicitly, but still passed! I didn’t realise it was actually possible to fail, but now I see that I had imbibed so much at the Convent that I didn’t need to learn anything!!
“Weeny, weedy and weakly” and all that, from “1066 and all that”, of course!
If you look at the Latin words which came into Welsh at the time of the Romans, it’s clear that people in Britain were of the “v pronounced w” and “hard c” type of pronunciation. Personally, I quite like the sound of it myself!
Thanks, @Znex, for that info! Interesting! And thanks for the sound link- very interesting!
When I did Latin for ‘O’ level, I had two different teachers- I can remember them differing very strongly on how it should be pronounced!
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Many years ago when I was traveling around Europe by myself (after a month-long summer German course in Austria) I visited Pisa during high tourist season. I kept being hit on by Italian men and was able to (mostly) make them give up on me by pretending that I ONLY spoke German (when I really spoke very little of it). It was a useful dodge!
[quote=“henddraig, post:69, topic:2954, full:true”]
Is it Church Latin, as in used by the Catholic Church until services finally went into English?[/quote]
Even more years ago, in ninth grade, I was taking Latin and also taking choir. (It was a totally secular school, by the way.) In Latin class we were taught classical pronunciation, and I got into a big disagreement with the choir teacher about the pronunciation of something we were singing in Latin. She insisted we sing it her way, which she said she got from a relative who was a priest. It was only later that I understood the very different divide between “classical Latin” and “church Latin”, the latter of which is pronounced more like Italian.
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And then there is the pronunciation of Latin as learned by speakers of other languages. Take, for example, 'regina".
An English speaker with a classical education will say “re-jai-na”
In church Latin it is “re-gee-na” (soft g)
A Greek speaker will say “re-gh-ina” - (hard g)
It really is a minefield!
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I have sung Latin a fair amount, and most people will want it sung with an Italian ‘accent’. However, sometimes the early music enthusiasts go for a different approach so, for example, sing an ‘aggnus dei’ (with a hard ‘g’) for Haydn or ‘humilitatem ankillae sure’ (with a hard ‘c’) for Purcell. It makes for an interesting life…
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