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NOTE: After comment by @Draconis and others: I have used the term "accent" as per Webster: effort in speech to stress one syllable over adjacent syllables. Sorry if this is not the scientific term. It is maybe "stress": a syllable having relative force or prominence.

I am not asking about the type of general pronunciation or the type of Latin (classical vs medieval or ecclesiastical), but about the impact of the modern languages and their accents on the way Latin is taught and used in school and scholarly environment, although accentuation is part of the pronunciation and is very important especially in poetry but also overall in the Latin literature and culture (so very much centered on rhetoric).

I have often noticed and accepted up to a point the opinion that the accent per se is not decisive when learning a language. But people that learn French, English, Italian etc usually make more effort in learning the specific accents and their differences from those of the native languages than they do when they learn Latin.

In many cases I have expected a degree of effort put into at least trying to get a proper accent, and at least from the part of specialists, for example in dedicated educational programs like I have found here. It is a French program on poetry where a few times Latin verses are recited. There, at 17:13 we can hear "De rerùm naturà" and at 17:32 "quid labòr aut benefectà" (that is, closely following French natural accentuation, like in "labeur"). The person speaking is a professor of Latin literature. The radio host, is not a specialist and his contribution is illustrative. But overall there is no difference between the two, and no effort made to put forth a Latin accent different from the French one!

(I wonder what happens at international conferences when Latinists with different accents meet!)

I may be wrong but I would have expected something like "de rèrum natùra" as heard here (first variant) and "quid làbor aut benefècta". As it happens that coincides with my native Romanian inclination of putting the accents. (Am I wrong?)

Do we know the proper classical Latin accents in most cases? And if yes, are they consistently promoted in English education areal?

(What about other aspects, like, for example, are students taught to use a more Italian-like r consonant rather than the English one? -- I guess it makes no point asking about the French areal! - I guess Italians and Romanians are simply lucky that their natural accents are in most cases closer to Latin - although I know that for other things the common pronunciation in such languages can be misleading.)

cipricus
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  • Just to clarify, by "accents" you mean the stress patterns, where the accent falls within each word? – Draconis May 30 '23 at 13:44
  • @Draconis - I have used the term "accent" as per Webster: effort in speech to stress one syllable over adjacent syllables. Sorry if this is not the scientific term. It is maybe "stress": a syllable having relative force or prominence. – cipricus May 30 '23 at 15:01
  • @cmw - I definitely don't mean the general manner of expression, but the stress put on a sylable. I have tried to underline the main vowel. – cipricus May 30 '23 at 15:03
  • @cmw Now that I've read this more carefully, you're right, it's clear. Sorry. The reference to French threw me off. – cmw May 30 '23 at 15:14
  • Stress in Classical Latin is well-understood (it's almost perfectly predictable) and generally taught correctly, but as French doesn't have lexical stress anymore it's not surprising francophones would struggle with it and generally ignore it, in the same way that everyone replaces Greek's pitch accent with a stress accent because almost no European languages have a pitch accent. – Cairnarvon Jun 02 '23 at 06:29
  • @Cairnarvon - But given that French doesn't have lexical stress anymore: (1) what should we call the very characteristically French phenomenon of the last syllable or vowel being emphasized? Is that not "accent" or "stress"? And isn't it because of its importance (not the absence thereof) that French speakers use it in Latin as if Latin words were French words? (2) is that a negligible effect on the quality of Latin pronunciation? find it intolerable myself! (Those people are language specialists after all!) (3) did French language had that "lexical stress" in the past? – cipricus Jun 02 '23 at 11:53
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    French does have prosodic (i.e. phrase-level) stress that manifests itself as stress on the final syllables of words in certain positions. Of course it used to have lexical stress: Latin did, and French descends from Latin. Whether or not the difference is negligible depends on your point of view: it's not how Latin was pronounced, but because Latin stress is (almost) perfectly regular it also won't ever lead to confusion in meaning the way it would in e.g. Greek, where the location of the accent is phonemic and τόμος and τομός are different words. – Cairnarvon Jun 02 '23 at 15:02

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