Technically, I can call myself an alumna or an alumnus of Alabama but since they only have an Alumni Association I can only be a member of it. I can't make it Alumnae. And alumnae rhymes with "knee" not "pie." You've got that part backwards. 3 years of Latin and 30 years as a Catholic when they only used Latin....not to mention the Delta Gamma crib sheet....

I have however heard it - back in the day - pronounced alum-nay...but then you can get into the whole hard c/soft c thing too.....is it vee-chee or vee-key????? Only Cesaer knows for sure....

I always understood that TECHNICALLY alumni = alum-nee, alumnae = alum-nye, but I admit I had two years of Latin I was terrible at (technically three years, but the first year was a high school Latin 1 class I took for fun and barely counts).

As to veni vidi vici, I learned that in Italian it's veen-ee, vee-dee, vee-chee but in Latin it's wee-ne, wee-dee wee-kee.

How can people say "this is how to pronounce Latin words"? No one has ever heard it spoken that is living today (I'm not attacking you personally, angels&angles! OK?). The written language form is all we have, and we all know that written language is nothing like spoken language.

I could get into a long linguistics post, but I won't. No one cares except for the other SLPs and linguists on GC. They already know what I would say, anyway. *yawn*

No, but it's an Alumni Association because its members include males. That doesn't make every member on alumnus. A male member is an alumnus, a female member is an alumna, and collectively they are alumni.

Classical Latin and Church Latin are often pronounced differently, the latter having been influenced by later European languages, primarily Italian. But in both, the single vowel "i" is pronounced "ee" (or somewhere between "ee" and "ih"). So, alumni = "alum-nee" in Latin. Pronouncing it alum-nie (to rhyme with "pie") is an anglicization, much like pronouncing Phi "phie" rather than "phee" as it would be in Greek. English speakers have modified the "i" to an English long-I sound rather than using the "ee" that the letter represents in Latin or Greek, because we don't think "ee" when we see an "i."

As for "ae," in Classical Latin that represents the diphthong that English speakers consider the long-I sound, as in "pie." It's a diphthong of "a" ("ah") and "i" ("ee"). In church Latin, "ae" is pronounced more like the English long-A sound -- "ay" as in "pay" -- which is also really a diphthong of "eh" and "ee."

LOL. True.


The written form is all we have of Classical Latin. Church Latin is still used daily. ;)

Or we could go back to the Great Vowel Shift and really gum up the works!

Oh yeah, absolutely. I'm just parroting what I was taught. I think it does have something to do with linguistics and what we "know" was spoken in similar languages at the time. And also getting the rhyme and meter of Ovid's work and similar to mesh. I find it fascinating.

I'm really not sure when it was decided that there was no "v" or "ch" sound in Classical Latin. Fairly recently (last 30-50 years maybe), I think.

Ha! Very true.


I know from relatives that the no "v" or "ch" sound was being taught at least 100 years ago. My understanding is that the "ch" sound in Latin is the product of Church Latin. Church Latin tends in many respects to follow the rules of Italian, and in Italian, "c" before "e" or "i" = "ch."

Back in my voice major days, we had to take a class in Latin pronunciation. The people who had taken Classical Latin in high school always had a harder time getting the hang of Church Latin (which was obviously the main focus, given the amount of sacred music in Latin) because of the differences. And on the flip side, people who had learned Church Latin first had a harder time getting the hang of Classical Latin.

Unless they took Latin in a Catholic school in which case the nuns just made up their own rules and we had to do it the church way.

This thread is very entertaining. We women are all collectively alumnae who belong to an co-ed university alumni association. You can say you belong to the alumni association, or say you are an alumna of the university. Whatever works.

OP, do what is right for you and go through recruitment.

Got it! Thank you :D

ps the one year of Latin in 7th grade helped with the four years of Italian in college AND with every standardized test involving vocabulary that I ever had to take. Ciao!

And they were really in trouble if the nuns were German, since Germans pronounce some Latin (or liturgical Greek) words as though they're German. Ach! Himmel!

Oooooh - makes me remember my third grade teacher - a Benedictine named Sister Adelgunda. About as wide as she was tall! Achtung!

Sister Adelgunda? LOL -- I would say you have to be making that up, but I don't think anyone could make that up. Something tells me that she was a rather no-nonsense sort of nun.

One could say that! She hadn't been off the boat long, it was my first year in Catholic school AND I had skipped 2nd grade. That year was a disaster and it's a wonder she didn't kill me.

We still have romance languages to keep us straight.

Singular female = feminine
Singular male = masculine
Collective female = feminine plural
Collective male = masculine plural
Collective male and female = masculine plural