Disputatio:Gibunoscius

Pronunciation

Here we have an attestation in "church Latin" (the modern Italianate pronunciation system) that's going to mislead classically trained readers. The spelling Gibunoscius for Japanese conventionally transcribed as Jibu-no-shō would lead Cicero redivivus to the pronunciation /gibunoskius/. whereas the attesting author undoubtedly intended for the name to be pronounced something like /d͡ʒibunoʃus/. Cicero, invoking the Latin phonology of his day, might have transcribed the modern Japanese name (were he to have heard it) as Sibunosus. But then the Japanese pronunciation of the first century BCE might have differed from the modern Japanese pronunciation! Whether any of this should be noted in the text—and similarly with similar orthographic doublets in other words—may one day be a pertinent question. IacobusAmor (disputatio) 11:36, 17 Iulii 2023 (UTC)

Ita vero, recte dicis; vereor tamen ne a se ipso excogitatum condemnetur. Quodcumque id fit, haud sane dubito quin, qui Iaponicam noverit linguam, appellationem rectam intellegat; qui verum "Ciceroniana" ista appellatione utatur minime impediatur, quominus de qua agit rem legat. Aristippus Ser (disputatio) 17:21, 17 Iulii 2023 (UTC)

In general I agree with avoiding the church pronunciations. However the case of the [sh] sound is very interesting, because [sk] became [sh] in a lot of European languages, like English, German, French, Italian, just to mention some (the very fact that you say “shoe” is because in PIE it was *skek-). So if Cicero had encountered a Proto-Germanic person and both had an argument about someone called Gibuno[SK]ius, and the story ended up in folk tales, today's German, English, and Italian might all have a word similar to Gibuno[SH]... --Grufo (disputatio) 01:41, 18 Iulii 2023 (UTC)