Shakespeare pronunciation?

Question:In the play The Two Gentlemen of Verona do you pronounce julia's maid's name, lucetta, with the c sounding like an s or a ch?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: In the play The Two Gentlemen of Verona do you pronounce julia's maid's name, lucetta, with the c sounding like an s or a ch?

ch. it's italian so it's ch.

It is pronounced as ch. Like the name Luciano. In italian C makes a ch sound

Just because it's Italian doesn't make it an automatic "ch".

In the Italian language, a single C is pronounced softly, like an S.

The "ch" sound comes from "cc"as in Puccini or cacciatore.

Ch sound.....

The 'c' is pronounced "ch" of course....but do remember that English during Shakespeare's day...before what is known as the Great Vowel Shift was pronounced very differently than modern English. For example...consider "word". In Shakespeare's time it sounded like "ward" (rhyming with 'bard'). So where we assume the letter 'u' is going to be a Long Vowel sound...it would actually/probably have been pronounced by the actors as a Short Vowel.

FIRST, do some research on how strictly Elizabethans adhered to the pronunciations of other languages. Look how Americans routinely butcher the pronunciation of other names!

Second. research how they were pronounced when PERFORMED! Elizabeth was a stickler, but NOT a linguist.

And for the record, as stated above. The "ch" in this name would sound like "Lu-chett-a". BUT...the name "Julia" would have been pronounced with a soft "zh", NOT a hard "J" sound!

And in the end, "the Play's the thing"!!!

You pronounce it as your director tells you to. :-)
Period enunciation is of little relevance here, as almost nobody does historically-informed performance practice in the theater. (BTW, Shakespeare was AFTER the Great Vowel Shift, but certainly different enough from modern English). For living languages, they would have made some attempt at accuracy, given the presence of Italians etc to correct them, unlike Latin, which evidence shows was pronounced like the vernacular; thus. "Creedo and Tee Deeum" and the sturdy Anglican "Geesu".

There is a literature on period pronounciation; most of it should be referenced in Klausner and McGee (?), _Singing Early Music_

I personally pronounce it with a C. I only finished reading the play a couple hours ago!