74
NOTES AND QUERIES. [9*s.vm. JULY 20,1901.
MR. S. O. ADDY, still survives on the Con-
tinent. One recently sent me from France
not only announces the death of the person,
but states the exact hour of the decease and
gives a general invitation to the burial. Sur-
mounting it is a little scene of a churchyard
and an open grave surrounded by mourners.
Similar funeral cards may often be seen in the entrances of Roman Catholic churches amongst the ordinary mortuary cards. They are usually printed on a quarto sheet of black-edged paper, with a cross or some other Christian symbol at the heading, and differ from the mortuary card in that they give particulars of the death and state the time and place of the interment.
I am told that at the funerals of celebrated personages on the Continent these funeral cards serve also as tickets of admission to the church where the funeral requiem is to be celebrated. Some of the religious orders in England follow the continental custom of sending to other religious houses funeral cards announcing the death and interment of one of their members ; and this is also done at the deaths of bishops and other high ecclesiastical dignitaries.
FREDERICK T. HIBGAME.
COL. THOMAS COOPER (9 th S. vii. 168, 353, 438). May I suggest that it is not possible to identify Thomas Copper, alderman of Oxford, with the Cromwellian colonel of the same ~ame? Thomas Cooper, draper, was Mayor .f Oxford in 1630, and M.P. for Oxford in the Short Parliament of 1640. The registers of St. Martin's Church, Oxford, have the entry :
" Aug. 13, 1640. Mr. Thomas Cooper, sometimes the maior of this citie, the alderman, and late burgess for the Parliament for the citie, was buried." Andrew Clark's edition of Wood's 'City of Oxford,' iii. 36.
C. E. D.
GREEK PRONUNCIATION (9 th S. vii. 146, 351, 449). LORD SHERBORNE asks how we can be sure what was the " Roman fashion " of pro- nouncing Latin. Of course, we cannot be sure. We can only suppose that the modern Roman fashion is at least as near to the ancient as that of any other place. Again we can be quite sure that the English Pro- testant pronunciation is as far from the original as we could possibly go. The general insularity imposed upon us at the Reforma- tion is doubtless the main cause of our anomalous national pronunciation of Latin At the same time, it must be rememberer that our English change of the first vowel sound, from a to e t has been gradual, to wit a, a, e. The first vowel in "Father," as pro
tounced in the west of England, has the
ound of a, while in other parts of the
- ountry the sound is purely e ("feyther").
Here at Cardiff one may hear Catholic etving-boys at Mass respond thus: "Sed ibera nos a malo." In Welsh, too, this un-
- ertairity of the first vowel prevails in
he dialects of Monmouthshire and East jlamorgan, tad being pronounced tad, or edd, and so in other instances. The transi- ion from i to ai, by way of e'i, might be imilarly illustrated. The Irish tinn is tein tane) in West Cork. The Anglican pro- nunciation of Latin is after all an evolution )n natural lines, though insular religious prejudices may have fostered it and given t official sanction. It is certainly time we dropped it, and put ourselves more into line with the rest of Christendom. Frenchmen might well "dress up" in this respect too. JOHN HOBSON MATTHEWS. Town Hall, Cardiff.
LORD SHERBORNE'S communication on Rieti, the modern Italian equivalent of Reate, an ancient town forty-eight miles north-east of Rome, is interesting. It seems to show that the tendency of vowel slide a to e, e to i, is not wholly confined to English. But LORD SHERBORNE would not assert that the Italians say Mileyno for Milano, though he may see the same tendency to change e to i in the first syllable of that word, which is from the Latin Mediolanum. T. WILSON.
Harpenden.
In the extract quoted at 9 th S. vii. 351 from Burton's life it is stated that " we have an o and an a which belong peculiarly to English." I fail, however, to see in what the normal English pronunciation of o (as in " note" and "not ") differs from that of other languages ; indeed, o seems to be the only vowel which we do sound in accordance with the pro- nunciation of other nations. The real mischief lies in the other vowels : the long a in " make," the i in " like," the e in " see," and the u in "tune "are all peculiar to our lan- guage. It is these four, with the soft sound of c and g, and the mispronunciation of ce and ce, that make the English pronunciation of Latin so far from that both of the ancients and of other modern countries. The o, how- ever, keeps its sound practically unaltered in all the principal European tongues ; as in French (chose, donner), Icelandic (dom, koma\ and German (7/o/, Gott). I believe it is pro- nounced in the same way also in Spanish, Italian, &c. ; and it certainly is in the ac- cepted " Roman " pronunciation of Latin.
E. B. E.
