Me, I say miki and nikil and mostly give a light glottal stop in other cases. Otherwise Abraham would be Abram!

It's very difficult in English to start a word with a vowel, minus the stop, as you can see if you try pronouncing "flyover" and "fly over". So "hodie" inevitably gets the stop, but no aspirate.

My 2c. I am not a native speaker.

The - in h-a is what I call a glottal stop.

Don,

That's how I've always pronounced it, at least in that word. I suppose I am puzzled by my own (unarticulated) inconsistency in my pronunciation of the H. For "Hodie," I have pronounced it. For other words (homo, hominum, hora), I lean towards what Andrew above suggests - a slight glottal stroke.

I humbly suggest that this is another place where we have to temper the rules with some regard for practicality. I also pronounce 'h' between vowels (mihi) with a 'k' sound, just so the word can be understood by the hearer. Nobody in our congregation would understand 'aec,' or 'oc' so I would pronounce the 'h' there like in 'hat.' If I were an Italian singing in Italy I might do something different (e.g., leaving out the aspiration since people would be less inclined to expect it anyway). I think it would be good to measure any kind of practice against what the hearer will understand. This also takes into account the acoustics of your church - in a small non-reverberant space I would guess you could be stricter, but accomodations have to be made where the sound is bouncing around a lot and you need more consonants.

Because English is the ONLY LANGUAGE in the history of forever that has inconsistent spelling or pronunciation. All other languages, especially Latin, are far superior in this regard, and we should feel ashamed to have been born into such a ridiculous language.

(That's the message I usually get from Latin-pronunciation guides.)

In general I follow the rules about not pronouncing "h" except in "mihi" and "nihil." But there have to be exceptions. Andrew, I would definitely agree with your gut instinct of pronouncing the "h" in "Hodie," because without it, it sounds like "odie," which I believe is a form of "odium," meaning "hatred." Not really a great word to start off Christmas!

We all know diction "rules" need to constantly be modified for singing different pieces of different styles and periods across different vocal registers.

Besides, "ecclesiastical Latin pronunciation" is kind of an artificial and fuzzy concept. In the US we more or less attempt to follow what became traditional in Rome, but "French Latin" or "German Latin" would sound quite different (and no less legitimate, liturgically OR artistically).

[The Anglicans have even retained some Latin traditions, and pronounce it according to English rules. Hence "vivat" is pronounced "vɑɪvæt." It kind of hurts listening to it.]

Jon

In the Sanctus, do you sing "Osanna in excelsis" or "Hosanna in excelsis"? Perhaps your Hodie/Odie should be consistent with that. (And is that Osanna or Ozanna, as is often heard, ... in the Zanctus.)

To say that ae began to be written in manuscripts as e when the diphthong monophthongized is only partly true. For a long time, ae was regularly written as a digraph, usually in words where classical ae existed, but sometimes in places where it never was. In other words, for a few hundred years in the early middle ages, scribes were trying to write as they thought the language should be written, not as they were pronouncing it. And yes, sometimes one finds h's left out where they should be and included where they shouldn't. In any case, most linguists think that even in classical Latin h was pronounced with less force than it is pronounced in modern English.

Ah, but "Alleluia" is a Hebrew word, and comes with its own baggage!

For that, I would simply default to whether or not the score has an "H" in is or not. If there's an H, sing it. If not, leave it out.

[The Anglicans have even retained some Latin traditions, and pronounce it according to English rules. Hence "vivat" is pronounced "vɑɪvæt." It kind of hurts listening to it.]

Sure. One of my earliest experiences of liturgy in an Episcopal parish was attending Morning Prayer on a Sunday, and the officiant told us, "We will sing the Venite (vuh-NIGHT-ee) in the hymnal, no. 695." I thought, "Is he kidding? Vuh-NIGHT-ee?"

But I've since gotten used to there being an English way of pronouncing Latin, which seems fine if you're saying some Latin words while otherwise speaking English. Church Latin would be used for singing a Palestrina or Byrd motet, of course.

Another fine canticle is the Benedicite (ben-uh-DYE-city).

"Aw-dee-ae" (slight dipthong)

Just curious... why the slight diphthong?

Church Latin is simply Roman Latin. This was recommended by Christoph Bernhard in the seventeenth century and was propagated by Abbot Guerranger as an aspect of his ultramontanism; it is now represented by the rules for pronunciation in the Liber Usualis. In every country, there is slippage; thus in France, one often hears Italian consonants and slightly French vowels. In England it is not slippage, it is a matter of pride to keep certain British pronunciations of Latin. The Roman pronunciation includes the silent h and "slightly voiced" s between two vowells. Mihi and Nichil as miki and nikil depend upon a pre-classical and continuing vernacular pronunciation in the classical period. It is spelled nichil in medieval spellings. Though the Liber does not address this, I always cultivate an Italian hard c and k without aspiration; the English overdo the opposite: Khhhee-rie. By the way, the spelling Osanna is found often in Renaissance sources. The name of a member of my choir is Rossella, which people often pronounce Rozella; she very urgently corrects them, instructing them on the difference between the unvoiced double s and the voiced single s.

Because English is the ONLY LANGUAGE in the history of forever that has inconsistent spelling or pronunciation. All other languages, especially Latin, are far superior in this regard, and we should feel ashamed to have been born into such a ridiculous language.

My Greek teacher often interjected, "English is a silly language." Put that in your pipe and smoke it Tolkien!

A practical rule of thumb, rather than principled, is to use whatever least impedes good pitch and comprehensibility with your forces at hand in the acoustic you have ... (more of an issue with German than Latin, but something to keep in mind when wrestling with choir members who've learned different practices under different directors/teachers in the past: it's often useful to say, screw the conflicting rationales, I need y'all to sing in this way because I've decided y'all will sound best doing so.)

What is the phonation of "y'all" up in Bywahston

aaaaaa yaaaaaa

And in some parts of the country ... "y'all" is singular and "all y'all" is plural (nominative and objective), "y'all's" and "all y'all's" are the corresponding singular and plural gentive forms for them thar folks.

And I won't even get started on "youse" and "you-uns."

I went to college in Virginia some three decades ago, so I picked that up as a useful usage. Youz is not as mellifluous . . . and all y'all is just ridiculous.

CK, attend a Turkington chant session, or a Mahrt. You'll be surprised by how your understanding of conventional practice will be authentically challenged.

I get this question all the time from the students: I also teach Spanish. The answer is that you simply don't pronounce the letter per the rules of the language. The same is true in Latin. The rule is that the h is not pronounced.

Mart wrote:

In England it is not slippage, it is a matter of pride to keep certain British pronunciations of Latin. The Roman pronunciation includes the silent h and "slightly voiced" s between two vowells.

It's not so much a matter of pride as a living tradition. The downside is that we're less likely to ask "why?", or consider how recently (as these things go) the tradition was founded, or how such things change over time and can be done differently with equal validity (I admit to a fleeting nonplussment on reading the thread title). The upside is local consistency and the living tradition thing.