Lost in Pronunciation

At the Lyceum the second morning class was Latin.  We had to take turns reading out a passage and give its translation.  “Gallia est divisa … Gaul is divided into three parts” and the like. This raised a great puzzle for me.  The Romans were formidable. I had learned about them from an early age, for in the Netherlands history was taught chronologically.  (By the time we started Latin we had arrived at the 1600s.)  But there hadn’t been Romans for a long time, how could we know how Latin was pronounced?  

Miss De Kuyper, our Latin teacher, liked the question.  She liked to display her erudition, gained as a young woman studying in Germany, before the war.  Catholic priests had performed the mass in Latin, she explained, throughout history since Roman times.  In southern countries Latin was thought to have been preserved in truth, and was taught just the way the priests pronounced it.  But up here in the cold north that Latin sounded suspiciously Italian.  So 19^thcentury German scholars had studied how the Romans must have spoken, and had replaced the Italianate by the Teutonic.  That was what we were taught.  Coincidentally it sounded rather like German, “Ceasar”, for example, is pronounced “Kaiser”.

This was actually easier for me than the high Netherlands that we were meant to speak in class.  In that tongue the diphthongs “eu” and “ui” sound different.  They both sound a bit like the French “eu” in “monsieur”, with subtle differences that matter much to the Hollanders.  In my dialect, Zeeuws, no such difference existed.  So I pronounce all three the same way, as Zeeuws do.

In our third year we were also given Greek, pronounced in just the same way as Latin.  Well, ancient Greeks talked with ancient Romans, didn’t they?  Saint Paul who was well educated must have been fluent in both.  Peter though … that girl in Jerusalem said Peter sounded Galilean, so he too came with a regional dialect.  I am quite heartened to think that Peter must have had some of the same difficulties as I have.

Our French teacher looked rather like Charles Aznavour, except for a neat little mustache.  He taught us to pronounce the French “p” by saying it while blowing out a lighted match.  The French “r” was much more difficult.  The Netherlands aristocracy had always spoken French, and so in the Hague, the capital, people say the “r” just like Parisians.  They do it by trilling the uvula.  I know the theory, but the practice is beyond me. This teacher consoled us by mentioning variations in the French “r” from Bretagne to Alsace: Paris is not all of France! When I met Isabelle in Paris I displayed what French I had, but she would laugh a little.  There is an Italian porn star who plays in French movies, she told me, you sound just like him.  Vainly I took it as a compliment: his French had surely to be very good …..

Then of course there is Dutch, my first language.  I can unfailingly tell, when people speak English, whether they are Dutch.  There is something that gives Dutch-ness away, in the speech (as well as, of course, other signs, like absence of tact, which they count as deceitful).  In 1979 I was at a conference in Erice, and one of the first lectures was by Roger Cooke.  A very English, or American name, but he had hardly uttered a few words before I said to myself “Dutch!”  Actually he had come to the Netherlands as a wandering jazz musician, at some time during the Vietnam war, and never left.  When I visited him in the Hague he took me sailing, and there was a special occasion when all his wife’s family came over.  The father regarded me with some amazement. “So Roger is American and sounds Dutch when he speaks English”, he said, “and you are Dutch and sound American when you speak Dutch”.  

Oh, well, what’s in a language, after all?

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PS. Someone once took me to task for being tactless about the Dutch and tact.  I won’t take it back, but I would soften the comment for the southern provinces.