# Deus Nos Iunxit



## peyman

Please tell me how to pronounce this phrase '' Deus Nos Iunxit'' which

means '' God Joined Us ''.


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## Outsider

[deus nos 'junksit]

n = velar nasal, the sound of the digraph "ng" in the English word "sing".


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## Cagey

I think that Outsider and I are advocating the same pronounciation of _iunxit_,  but in English we would transliterate the *I *as *Y* (rather than *J*). 

So my version would be "_yunksit_". 

This has to do with a difference in how we pronounce the letters "j" and "y" in our native languages, not a difference (I believe) in how we pronounce the Latin "i".   Here is a link to audio guide to pronounciation; the "_i_" pronounced as a consonant is relevant to your question.


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## Outsider

If you're going to use English spelling, then I think it should be "deh-oos nohs yoongkseet".


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## Cagey

Outsider said:


> If you're going to use English spelling, then I think it should be "deh-oos nohs yoongkseet".



I think not.  Among other things, the final "_i_" in _iunxit_ is short, not long. 

Perhaps my comment offended you?  I didn't mean to be correcting your version, which seems fine to me.  It was only that the question had been posted in English by someone who is a native of Iran.  Therefore, I wasn't sure what sound "*j*" represented to him,  and I wanted to provide an alternate representation of the Latin pronounciation.


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## Outsider

Cagey said:


> I think not.  Among other things, the final "_i_" in _iunxit_ is short, not long.


I was referring to the quality of the vowel, not its length. But I concede that the quality of Latin unstressed vowels is somewhat debatable. An English short "i" might do the trick, as well.



Cagey said:


> Perhaps my comment offended you?


Not at all. My apologies if my post sounded blunt. I just wanted to make a few clarifications, because English-based spelling can be quite different from phonetic spelling. 



Cagey said:


> It was only that the question had been posted in English by someone who is a native of Iran.  Therfore, I wasn't sure what sound "*j*" represented to him.  and I wanted to provide an alternate representation of the Latin pronounciation.


Yes, I think you made a useful clarification.


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## mateo19

These sorts of issues come up often in my phonetics class because different articles from different text books use different transliteration systems (for languages in general, we rarely see examples from Latin). Whenever possible though, I always use the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) to represent any phonetic/phonological transcriptions that I may need. I find writing foreign words phonetically in English is an eye soar to read and is confusing and arbitrary based on each native speaker’s individual competence.

I would write ['deus nos 'junksit], although I'm not sure if the ju was pronounced in Classical Latin as "i.u." or as a dipthong "ju".

Also, I was wondering what makes the n velar. Might it have been palatal instead? Maybe I’m just thinking of that Romance language sound (SP - ñ, CAT - ny, FR, IT - gn, PT - nh), which is palatal.


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## Cagey

Outsider said:


> I just wanted to make a few clarifications, because English-based spelling can be quite different from phonetic spelling.



English based spelling results in a spelling similar to the one you gave originally as a pronounciation guide.  The link I provided has a pronounciation guide with the (non-phonetic) representations of Latin pronounciation customary in my part of the world. I realize that it will be less precise than phonetic spelling.


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## Outsider

mateo19 said:


> Also, I was wondering what makes the n velar. Might it have been palatal instead? Maybe I’m just thinking of that Romance language sound (SP - ñ, CAT - ny, FR, IT - gn, PT - nh), which is palatal.


Assimilation. The phoneme /n/ had a velar allophone before velar plosives. This is a common phenomenon cross-linguistically. For example, it happens in English and Spanish. 
The palatal nasal did not exist in classical Latin, and it has an entirely different origin.


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