pronunciation of denarii

Hello,

I know how to pronounce "denarius" (Roman silver coin) but how should this word be pronounced in its plural form "denarii".

Thank you for your kind answers.

myself

As in "triginta denarii"?

Well, as Latin is only a "living" language in its ecclesiastical guise and Church Latin tends to be pronounced along Italian lines, your guess is as good as mine.

Ha ha!

But seriously, so-called "Classical Latin" would have "denarii" rendered as "den-ARE-ee-ee." Ecclesiastical Latin follows suite in this instance.

Happy Easter!

The OED has /dE"nA:r\IVI/ which seems weird to me and /dE"nA:r\Ii:/ which seems a lot more reasonalble. The second one is basically what 06AN said, but not that the 'ar' is pronounced with the vowel of 'father'.

"[B]ut not that the 'ar' is pronounced with the vowel of 'father'."

You are correct.

I chose to approximate the supposed Latin pronunciation with "layman phonetics." In fact, it's less of "ar" as in "card" and more like "ar" in "Aragon." Since we're refining pronunciation here, the masculine nominative plural ending "-i" actually tends to dominate the other "i" - more like "ee-EE" though it should not be overexaggerated.

By the way, an accepted Latin variant of "denarii" is "denari."

And again, a caution. When we "speak" in Latin, we are are talking about using either what is known as the "Classical Method" or "Ecclesiastical Latin." Neither represents "real Latin."* The former is a tad contrived, the latter exhibits a strong tendency towards Italian pronunciation.

* Because of course, we really don't know what Latin actually sounded like. Though we do have the Romance languages as forensic evidence of its many dialects.

I think the pronunciation that I would use intuitively would be [d@"nA@`.i.aI] "duh-NAR-ee-eye", probably because [i.i] would be kinda hard to say. The pronunciation listed at dictionary.com is different still: [dI"nE@`.i.aI] "di-NAIR-ee-eye".

"The pronunciation listed at dictionary.com is different still: [dI"nE@`.i.aI] 'di-NAIR-ee-eye.'"

You bring up a very good point!

I assumed this was about Latin pronunciation. Maybe the person who started the thread merely wanted to know to say it in English.

In which case, the versions offered by yourself and Dictionary.com are fine.

In fact, I'm not sure it matters too much how you render the word in English!

Thanks a lot for all your interesting answers.

As Church Latin is not for me, I will adopt the following way of pronunciation : "di-NAIR-ee-eye", because I really like it.

Cheers. All the best.

myself