That’s correct.

They’re Latin words and behave like them. Those are the correct pronunciations for those words, BUT, and this is why I prefer transcriptions (that many musicians know from opera classes or language class): unless for etymological reasons you need to have vowel-consonant (ad-o-ra-re, because ad- is a prepositional prefix to the infinitive; sic-ut, not si-cut), Latin tends to prefer (vowel-)consonant-vowel: /si.na.i/, not /sin.a.i/, which is important not just for choral diction but for chant in particular, since, if you create a score in square notation you have to hard-code syllabification in gabc and you don’t know if a hyphen will be created or not until after the score is generated. (With modern notation, of course you syllabify yourself too, and many CPDL scores have mistakes, but you can see and proofread at least, with just a few clicks back to fix it…)

This is the same for Tenebrae, the Gospel, etc.

There are quite a discussions on here about “Israel”: /is.ra.ɛl/, without a diphthong. (Wiktionary mysteriously gives /el/ for the last syllable, but it should be an ɛ) It’s not “Eez-rye-l”; sorry to depart from IPA, but it drives the point home. /mi.ka.ɛl/ for Michael. /da.ni.ɛl/ for Daniel. /a.a.ron./ (I’m not including lengthening, and unusually Wiktionary gives a phonetic transcription, but it’s basically what I give: [ˈaː.a.ron]). I do, uh, get a lot of laughs from the now-elder Millennials (we’re all elder Millennials) who grew up with Key and Peele when I teach this.

And so on and so forth.

Anyway there’s a comment there that deserves more treatment:

For Latin, if one follows the Italian pronunciation (as we should in English-speaking countries), s between two vowels is softened and pronounced like z.

No, that’s backwards. A /z/ is voiced, /s/ voiceless (if we use hard and soft, which doesn’t make sense, then hard is voiced, soft is voiceless), and in all cases it’s supposed to be voiceless. This is not French, which voices the consonant in “Joseph”.

In Latin, it’d be /jo.sɛf/, or should be. Is it often voiced anyway in words like “miserere”? Sure, but I do think that I’m right that most people don’t voice the middle consonant of “Joseph”…

There seems to be some confusion, as the linked post is about English choral diction, not Latin. Ah-do-nah-ee and See-nah-ee are correct in Latin. Voiced versus unvoiced intervocalic s in Latin is a can of worms, but various sources mention evidence for sonorization by the 4th century. Mass and Vespers (1957) is more helpful than the Liber in this regard:

S as in sea; but between vowels it is slightly softened; ex. the s in miserere is less close to z than in Engl. misery.

Although the soft-hard terminology isn't used by linguists in this context, it should be obvious that the "soft" variant referred to is the voiced z sound, not the unvoiced ss. For whatever it's worth, Wikipedia categorizes the voiced intervocalic s as an "informal" pronunciation. This can get rather pedantic, and some choirmasters who insist on Jessu, misserere, vissibilium, etc. don't take any steps to correct omnez, baptizma, or eleizon.

The pronunciation you have preferred is the correct one.
Only, one should be very carefull with those '-ees'. I prefer a somewhat clipped 'ih' sound - as in the word 'it'.

Off topic, the vowel-consonant thing reminds me of a late beloved choir director who said he did not want runts or wusses. Referring to (Messiah) 'Faw runto wuss a child is born'.

The /i/ vowel is the correct first example. The difference is the different vowels of bee and bit (as in kit etc. too), the vowel of which would be /ɪ/…

It cannot be a diphthong or just not quite there. You have to learn to hear the difference and work on it. Warm-ups are a good time for that.

For my part I only change to /ɪ/ if a diphthong comes up despite repeated practice of the diction like when followed by a consonant (the first syllable of Spiritui)

As an aside, Ky-ri-e is a problem for my people; the first syllable should not rhyme with clear, and while I take the point that any melisma makes it worse, changing the vowel is inelegant at best (because the congregation also sings this), but we do have to change /e/ in some contexts to some other vowel (at this point the symbols don’t matter, you’ll get a bunch of possibilities presented) in the propers; Americans lengthen Spanish é as in José which is fine in speech even in nonnative Spanish but it’s a problem when singing chant. Good singing technique matters.

@continuousbass Ah-men as the A sound (as in day) is for the letter e.
Latin:English a:ah (~am), e:ay (d~ay), i:ee (b~eef), o:aw (c~ot) u:oo (f~ood)
(I know, it would be better in IPA, and I'd have to either learn the keycodes or have a popup symbol keyboard handy.)

Edit: Actually it's more complicated than that, I was only thinking of Italian above. Don't mind me, here's a more official guide

Latin vowels are a little taller and higher in the mouth,

Aw, c'mon, all red-blooded Amurkans squish the formation of our vowels, dontcha' know? Those vowels need to have the life squeezed out of 'em, if they knows what's good for 'em.

Thanks @MatthewRoth - all that TypeIt needs now is a speech renderer so I know what those symbols sound like. I must check out ipa-reader.com . Heck, what I also want is a speech-to-IPA ASR app. ;)

Thanks @probe for the latin sheet; seen that a few times at workshops.

Here's the Hebrew... it sounds like the A- is more of a combination of Ah & Uh, as in the /ə/ sound. A short and unstressed /ə/. -men as we say men in America, at a slightly higher pitch.

https://translate.google.com/details?sl=auto&tl=en&text=אָמֵן&op=translate

On my side of the Rockies always spoken Ayee-men, always chanted Ahhh-men.

I imagine that the authoritative and exhaustive guide is the Gregorian Institute of America one by Rev. Andrew Klarmann. I have to confess TL;DR.