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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

One of the more neglected and somewhat mind bendy aspects of Latin pronunciation is how often -m was not pronounced. Afaik the typical -um ending was a nasalized vowel with no /m/.

There was an article that made HN a while ago about censor being spelled cesor in an inscription. Probably because /n/, like /m/, was serving to nasalize the vowel before and was not itself pronounced.

It also starts to hint at how the modern romance languages dropped all those case suffices. Eg. if bonus and bonum were both pronounced /bonu/.

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Learning about this made Romanian, with all its words ending in -u, not seem strange suddenly!

Interestingly, spoken Catalan and spoken Portuguese also use -u as ending, while -o is written.

And further, latin nominative -us or -um has an -o- in some inflected forms. Example: bonorum, "of the good ones"

The article that mentioned cesor for censor also pointed out that in places where classical latin has -us or -um, early latin inscriptions might have -os, -om, or -o.

Sometimes i feel like when i hear speakers of modern romance languages talk really fast, unstressed o and u seem to get closer to one another. Maybe you could call it a continuum of "roughly that vowel".

>> And further, latin nominative -us or -um has an -o- in some inflected forms. Example: bonorum, "of the good ones"

And also, famously, "Babaorum".

Edit: oh, which btw does what you say, it's pronounced more with an "o" sound in French. Like all the "-um"'s. Otherwise "Petibonum" wouldn't work.

Portuguese, especially Brazilian Portuguese, retained this nasalization.

Portuguese has a lot of interesting stuff going on with nasal consonants. It always strikes me that they go for writing <m> in places other romance languages chose <n>. This also hints that over the history of latin languages, nasal consonants may have been kinda flexible.

I used to look at those topics and think in terms of what is "more like Latin", but at one point I realized... All of them are probably accurately capturing some form of the history of Latin, and there isn't right or wrong.

For words ending in "L" as well ... "som" (sound), "Brasil" (Brazil), the last consonants are dropped. Words ending in R like "lar" (home) often get a gutteralized or dropped R.

Portuguese did not retain the Latin nasal vowels, it was an independent development after the Latin nasal vowels had been lost.

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