Creating the First Digital Handbook of Latin Phonetics: Between Linguistics, Digital Humanities and Language Teaching

This article discusses the creation of an innovative e-learning resource that provides a unique
breadth of frequency, grammatical, and phonetic information on both Classical and Ecclesiastical Latin.
Designed to bridge teaching and research, this new digital toolkit, which is available as both an online
program and an Android mobile app, provides a frequency list of the most common Latin lemmas, as
well as phonetic and grammatical information, including their syllabication, accentuation, and Classical
and Ecclesiastical phonetic transcription according to the standards of the International Phonetic Alphabet. After providing a concise overview of the different ways in which Latin was and still is pronounced,
this article will discuss the methodological and practical issues faced by the creation of the toolkit from
the choice of an effective lemmatizing technique for identifying and categorizing inflected word-forms, to
the creation of algorithms to accentuate Latin lemmas and transcribe Latin sounds (potentially involving
multiple characters of the Latin alphabet) into IPA characters. In so doing, it will offer insights into the
technologies used to maximize the impact of this new e-learning resource on teaching and research.