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Re: Marking-up changes of language from English to Latin

for

From: Guy Hickling
Date: Apr 3, 2023 11:05AM

It seems to me that we already "anglicise" Latin when learning it in school
(as some of us had to!) and when using Latin terms in speech - including in
high-quantity usage such as in botanical texts. So there would be nothing
to gain in marking up these terms, even where speech synthesisers can do
something for it, since such terms should be spoken with an English accent
anyway. I am willing to bet that the Romans didn't use a pronunciation
anything like today's modern English, or like how we pronounce Latin, but
since Julius Caesar and his ilk are unavailable for comment and would not
know how to use this forum anyway, I don't suppose anyone can tell us how
they pronounced it!

But, let's ask the same question from the point of view of French websites
containing Latin terms and text passages. French has a pronunciation
nothing like English. Now, do French people pronounce Latin with the same
pronunciation as English and American people do (i.e. anglicised), or do
they give it their usual French pronunciations? I don't know on that - we
need a few French participants on this forum to tell us what they normally
do in France, or a bit of research.

Because, if they use the same pronunciations for Latin that we do, they
they would most certainly need all Latin terms, in French websites, to be
marked up with lang attributes so they don't get given French
pronunciations. The question is, what lang attribute should they use? If
most screen readers don't have a Latin module to provide a correct
rendering, then nothing will be achieved by using the Latin attribute -
everything will just be given a French accent. It might be better to use an
"en" lang attribute so the Latin texts get anglicised instead of being
given French pronunciations.

And the same question arises for websites in other languages that are very
different from English, such as Polish, or Chinese - how do they normally
pronounce Latin text?