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

[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.