From the bulletin of my suburban parish

stpats-pronunciation.png
With those bad “phonetic” spellings, it might be painful to hear, but I guess they have to start somewhere.

8 comments

  1. This reminds me of a friend of mine. When he first started learning Latin, he pronounced it with…a Southern drawl. I’m not even going to try to represent what that sounded like !
    (BTW, his Latin pronunciation has vastly improved since then, which is good because he is joining an Institute of priests who celebrate the Tridentine Mass ! Prayers for him as he prepares for seminary would be very welcome. )

  2. The Agnus Dei ones are pretty good if you ask me, except for the pacem. I’m sure you don’t like thinking of Agnus as “Ag-noose”, but, c’est la vie. They do need accents, though. And “mun-dee” should be “MOON-dee”.
    The Greek is butchered though. Naturally “Ay-laya” should be “ee-LAY-ah”. When I see “laya” I want to make it rhyme with “Maya” which is not right.

  3. Ouch!!! Re-reading these, MCNS’s comments about the Boston accent make sense, but still! The bulletin really needs to give a better and more detailed idea of how these “phonetic” pronunciations are really pronounced. And there should be stress marks also. Maybe something like this:
    **********
    Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem
    Ah’-nyoos Day’-ee , kwee’ toll’-lees peh’-kah-tah” moon’-dee, doh’-nah noh’-bees pah’-chem
    notes
    (1) the “gn” in “Agnus” is pronounced with an “ny” sound like the “ni” in “onion” or the Spanish n~ (the letter “n” with a tilde)
    (2) the “lis” in “tollis” is prounced with the sound of a long e; it sounds like the word “lease”
    (3) the “mun” in “mundi” sounds like the word “moon”
    (4) the “pa” in “pacem” is pronounced without an r-sound
    **********
    This might make for a long-ish bulletin insert, but something like that would probably give people a better idea of how these really sound, although the notes probably should also reflect ways to keep people away from regional pronunciations.

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