Gloria in egg shells

[pne]

Whenever the Latin phrase in excelsis occurs in a song (typically in gloria in excelsis), I sing it as "in egg-shell-sis".

That's a pronunciation our music teacher at school taught us at one point, and I've kept it up ever since. (Regardless of whether the remainder of the song is in Latin, German, or English.)

He also wanted us to sing "gloria" as (roughly) "glaw-dee-a", but I think that was mostly to avoid having an overly rhotic vowel as in "glorrrrrr-ee-a". Since my default speech isn't rhotic, I didn't pay that much attention to that bit.

Comments

[arthur-sc-king.livejournal.com]

"Egg-shell-sis" has been the consensus among the various choir directors I've worked with. I think the key reason is that trying to sing it like "ek-shell-sis" or even "ek-sell-sis" means that you end up with a really noticeable break after the "ek-" syllable, and it sounds like crap. Keeping the voicing on the consonant (i.e. making it "g" instead of "k") makes the word flow much more smoothly in the song.

OTOH, I've never seen the same emphasis on "gloria", what with us native Canadian English speakers being none too rhotic. Very occasionally, because the default Canadian "r" is not particularly euphonic at the best of times, we'd be asked to trill the "r" in Latin words, using the "tongue trill" most Anglos learn in grade-school French classes. (Not many Anglos have bothered learning the back-of-the-throat "r" for French as I have.)

Also, we're usually asked to emphasise the "o" in "gloria", making sure it really is an "o" and not an "aw". The "u" that usually sneaks in at the end of an English long "o" seems not to be a problem when singing something like this.

[ifeedformula.livejournal.com]

Whenever I've had to sing that (and I've done it 84,000 times in choir from elem all the way up to HS), we were told to pronounce it "Egg-shell-seize". Which made me think of a spasmodic chicken for some reason. XD

[sparkofcreation.livejournal.com]

We were taught "in eks-CHELL-sis."

But then again ... well, I'll spare you the rant about that music teacher.

[allegrox.livejournal.com]

He also wanted us to sing "gloria" as (roughly) "glaw-dee-a", but I think that was mostly to avoid having an overly rhotic vowel as in "glorrrrrr-ee-a".

In some English dialects, a medial /d/ is pronounced like a flap, which must be more similar to the Latin pronunciation than the usual English /r/ is (though that isn't known with any certainty just how it was pronounced).

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

"egg-shell-sis"

Why? I could think of "xc" being pronounced as [ksts] (German), perhpas [ks] (English), [kstS] (I suppose this would be the Italian pronunciation, but I'm not sure whether Italian really allows such consonant clusters) or [ksk] (classical pronunciation), but I don't where [gS] comes from.

Btw, what always kinda bothers me about the expression is when people pronounce the "i" as if it were a short vowel. I always want to tell them it's long.

"Since my default speech isn't rhotic, I didn't pay that much attention to that bit."

Doesn't virtually every speaker of English have a rhotic "r" in words like "gloria", i.e. where a vowel directly follows the "r"?

[pne.livejournal.com]

I imagine it's consonant-cluster simplification from [kstS], though that would explain [kS] better. I'm not entirely sure where the [g] comes from, either -- perhaps for the memorable mnemonic "egg shells"?

Doesn't virtually every speaker of English have a rhotic "r" in words like "gloria", i.e. where a vowel directly follows the "r"?

The vowel isn't rhotic, though, and that's the bit that is sung longer. That is, I think the teacher was considering the "colour" of the vowel, not the exact pronunciation of the /r/ that followed (trill, retroflex approximant, flap, etc.); he didn't want an "r-coloured" vowel.