[Ansteorra] Congratulations to our new heirs, Their Royal Highnesses, Prince Sven and Princess Antigone

[Jay Rudin]

JP wrote:

>I found it interesting that they were saying VIE-vat instead of the way we
>normally say vee-VAT.

How many different ways is English pronounced? Latin has just as many. The two most common ways to pronounce medieval language are Oxford Latin and Church Latin. The Westminster school singers are using Oxford Latin.

Ansteorra uses neither. We are (mostly) using the vowels of Church Latin and the consonants of Oxford Latin. Church Latin would be closer to "Wiwat!"

Detlef wrote:
>The stress should be on the first syllable, and not the last (VI-vat, not
>vi-VAT). In even medieval Latin, the primary stress is placed on the final
>syllable only in monosyllabic words.

Sort of, but it's more complicated than that. Latin is more quantitative than accentual-syllabic. A "stressed" vowel in Latin isn't stressed more; it's held longer. Short vowels are quarter notes; long vowels are half notes. This means that their metrical substitutions are different from ours.

No English speaker, unless he has far more training than I do, can give it quantitative stress without accentual stress. I tried writing quantitative verse, but I couldn't make it work. English has stresses whether you want it too or not.

Also, it's a cheer. When we shout Ansteorra at war, we give much more stress to the final syllable "-ra".

Robin of Gilwell / Jay Ru\din