Farm1 wrote:
Just curious, I heard someone on the radio teh other day talking about
Viburnum tinus and they pronouced tinus in a way I'd never heard
before ao it made me wonder if I've been doign it wrong for all these
years.

Would anyone like to have a go at putting on screen how they pronouce
tinus?

IMHO every language has its own bias in pronoucing latin words - and
seen as latin is no longer a spoken language, there is only a very
limited ability to provide a "correct" benchmark.

Hence, anglophones will pronouced Viburnum "Vaybernem", while an frog
such as yours truly would say "Veeburnum" (french narrow u). This is
because "i" can sound like "aye" in English in certain positions within
words, while "i" will never be pronounced that way. Similarly, the
French would not naturally pronounce "u" like "ou", though when we are
taugh latin, we are taught that u in latin is to be pronounced ou. We
are also told that c is hard in all cases (if memory serves me right),
which it is not in French, etc.
Sorry if this sounds a little confused: the point I am making is that
while there may be some official pronounciation standard for latin, it
often falls down in the face of the person's own language bias.

For those reasons, i have limited patience for those who try to correct
one-another in their pronounciation of what is after all a dead
language :-)

Cat(h)