Best example of Latin pronunciation I've heard so far

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

True colour image of Ireland, captured by a NASA satellite on 4 January 2003. Scotland, the Isle of Man, Wales and a part of south west England are visible to the east.
"Tres magnas insulas habet, quarum una vergit contra Armoriacas et vocatur insula Gueith: secunda sita est in umbilico maris inter Hiberniam et Brittanniam et vocatur nomen eius Eubonia, id est Manau: alia sita est in extremo limite orbis Brittanniae ultra Pictos et vocatur Orc. sic in proverbio antiquo dicitur, quando de iudicibus vel regibus sermo fit: 'iudicavit Brittanniam cum tribus insulis'."


First I should start this off with a disclaimer that I don't know that much Latin and thus wouldn't be able to identify any mistakes in Latin pronunciation that another person made unless they were really obvious, so I could be wrong.

However, the fact is that a lot of the time when you want to find an example of spoken Latin you'll end up with a kind of weird university class-type Latin where every long vowel is almost sung and seemingly way too long, and the overall impression is that there's no way this was the way that people who owned and ruled most of the known world for hundreds of years really talked. No way.

I've known about the online Latin newspaper Ephemeris for a long time, but never knew that some of its articles had voice recordings as well, and stumbled across this article today that has the best (= coolest) Latin voice I've heard so far. This is what I would want the people that took over and are now running my small village to sound like.

Here's half of the article:

Hibernia sola est ex Europae XXVII civitatibus, cuius lex suprema de Foedere Europaeo cives interrogandos esse constituit, utrum ipsi consentiant an reiciant: nam mutatio quaelibet Hiberniae legis supremae a populo adprobanda est. In ceteris civitatibus Unionis Europaeae senatuum tantum est de re deliberare. Foedus Olisiponis loco legis supremae Europaeae anno MMV a Francogallis et Batavis repulsa a regiminibus adprobatum est.
It seems to be about Ireland's rejection of the European constitution.

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