Prinkipes is how it should be pronounced.

V is pronounced W as well, so:

Veni. Vidi. Vici. = Waynee. Weedee. Weekee.

And I'm also prone not to believe that all C's were pronounced as K's... in Italian (direct descendant of Latin), ci is pronounced "chee", and ce is pronounced "cheh" so where does this K sound for all C's in Latin come from?

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and

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no, this is NOT a language error, that is how you say it.i am 100% sure of it!

EDIT: No more red. Read my comments in your RTR posts. -- Wartrain

[This message has been edited by Wartrain (edited 01-03-2006 @ 11:45 PM).]

same with Strat'e'gos

but Prinkuhpays sounds weird

And the singular of Principes is definitely something like Princip or Princep or something

Latin For Beginners, Benjamin L. D'Ooge, Page 6.

Believe what you like: it should be 'welites', whatever yor 21st Century ear thinks is 'better'. Wartrain's link confirms the pronounciation of V in the same section as C.

And I'm also prone not to believe that all C's were pronounced as K's... in Italian (direct descendant of Latin), ci is pronounced "chee", and ce is pronounced "cheh" so where does this K sound for all C's in Latin come from?

You're looking at it the wrong way: Latin was changed and bastardised over the years by other influences before it became Italian. It went from 'K', to 'TCH'. Where does 'TCH' come from in particular? I have no idea, but it's an external influence on the Latin root.

in latin when they dirctly translated they say "prink-uh-pays"

Edit: Spell error

[This message has been edited by Julis Caesar (edited 01-04-2006 @ 05:58 PM).]

Exactly. CA are sitting on the fence. They've used a hard 'c' in Principes because it's 'correct' yet they've shied away from using 'w' sound for 'v' because 'welites' sounds silly to us.

When we're speaking English we say See-zar for Caesar.

When we're speaking Latin (or tryng to in my case) we say Kye-zar.

The problem is that most folk know about the hard 'c' and so it has become fashionable in recent years to use a 'k' sound in English. Except for names like Caesar and Cicero (Kee-kero). Because they sound too strange or silly to us.

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So it looks (sounds) to me like Kaiser must have come from the Latin Caesar.

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You would be correct there wartrain. You will also notice the similarity in the russian word for king: czar or tsar.

They all have the same root origin - Ceasar.

GM

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no it's not it's pronounced liek vouw

English really sucks at explaining phonetics...

In real Latin (that is, vulgar Latin) C was /k/ before back vowels (a, o, u), and /k^j/ (a palatalized k) in before front vowels (i, e, y [in Greek loans]). This, of course, varied depending on the dialect, but that was the most widespread pronunciation by the first century BC.

The same goes for U (V), which by the first century BC was pronounced /B/, that is, a voiced bilabial fricative as in Spanish "deber". In English, /v/ is a voiced labiodental fricative, so you can see [v] is closer to the real pronunciation than [w].

Very informative Sukkit.

As an aside, how is it we know how Latin was pronounced at any given stage. I've never studied linguistics but how does one determine this sort of thing?

There are several ways to determine the approximate pronunciation of vulgar Latin:
- Phonological and philological writings by contemporary authors, who sometimes note what the folk (including the cultivated writers) pronounced, in opposition to the spelling and grammatical habits of the classical authors.
- Comparative linguistics. Spanish has mes, French mois, Italian mese, but Latin had mênsis (cf. the related English word moon). If the Romance languages have dropped the -n- in such a regular way, it seems reasonable to assume that phenomenon occurred in Vulgar Latin already.
- Spelling mistakes found in inscriptions everywhere (graffitti on the walls, inscriptions on tombs, etc).
- Adaptation of foreign loan words.