"How do you pronounce "velites"? " Topic

So Caesar said:

"Weeni, weedi, weechi"?

Score for Miss Johnson, who had nothing pretentious about her (and was quite attractive— not unlike a young Maggie Smith— which didn't hurt maintaining interest).

The Romans were quite efficient in their use of the alphabet. One notes that, unlike today, letters generally had one phonetic sound associated with them; hence they had no need to duplicate C, which was always hard, with K or create constructions in spelling for sounds perfectly reflected in a single letter. Thus, it is quite easy to see that since "V" stood for "u" it is far more logical for it to have an association in consonantal usage with "w," which it more closely resembles in sound, than our modern voiced fricative "V" (the voiced partner of "F"), which is Germanic in origin, not Latin.

(I may not be an expert in Latin, but I did study the origin of the English language in college, and know my fricatives and stops and from whence they arose.)

For those who are curious, the correct pronunciation of Parzival, is, as I understand it "PAR-tsi-fal." But of course, it is Old High German, not Latin or English.

And I checked the mirror— no tattoo.

Waynee, weedee, weekee.

(Not to be confused with "waynee, weedee, wookee," which translates as, "I came, I saw, I tore their arms out of their sockets.")

As Sir Winston was fond of saying, "Foreign languages were made to be pronounced in English".

Vel-i-tess. Or, if you prefer, "Veal-ites"….

George Carlin once said, "There are 2 kinds of drivers, s and mainiacs. An is anybody who drives slower than you, and a maniac is anybody who drives faster than you." The same applies to knowledge apparently. "There are two kinds of wargamers: hopeless morons and insufferable pendants."

"way-LEE-tays."

/Weedy gits in wolf skins/

I've been called a few things but I don't think I've ever been called an "insufferable pendant…"

This pdf

PDF link

uses the Vox Latina noted earlier as a source, but is a much pared down.

"How do I say this without sounding like an insufferable pillock?"

That is possibly the most important consideration. I also learnt Latin at school, but you'd have to hammer nails into my spine to get me to pronounce Velites as starting with W in public.

I call them Vee-lights.

Thwow him to the gwound wuffly.

Ps(O)

WAY-lih-tes

or

FUHR-reez

^,^

Just for interest sake, how would you pronounce vigiles?

Don't think I've ever used vigiles in a sentence before. Had to look that up to check vowel length. They're all short vowels, so that would be: WIH-gih-les

Vee-GEE-lays.

The working class don't use "w" sounds. We leave that to the patricians.