The vowels of English are pronounced as narrow diphthongs. This really sets English apart from the pronunciation of modern European languages, and also from Latin as reconstructed. Finns certainly have a distinct accent in many foreign languages, but they do less violence to Latin than people from the USA or UK.
It's possible for Americans to do the correct vowels, though. We have most of them elsewhere in the language. I started learning Romance languages fairly young and at my peak fluency [a little rusty these days] I had people telling me I sounded near-native in Spanish.
Personally the thing that bothers me most about American accents with these languages is failure to make diphthongs out of adjacent vowels. An American accent will stretch a Romance diphthong out into lengthy syllables. For example in this audio link above, the speaker says hodie has "HOE-dee-ay". I speculate someone more used to speaking a Romance language would say /'hodje/, two syllables. (I note English wiktionary has it as 3 syllables. Not sure what an ancient Roman would do.)
In any case I think a lot of the confusion is orthographic in nature. An English speaker is used to an <e> being /i/. It's not that they can't do an /e/ sound if they tried. A lot of people in the US also have very little real exposure, eg. we have language classes in school where making a real attempt to drop our accents and interact on a level plane with natives is never even seriously considered, it's just a place to hold you in a desk and fill out worksheets.
it's just a place to hold you in a desk and fill out worksheets.
The US education system is incredibly diverse--as is the US as a whole. That may the case in some schools, but it's certainly not the case everywhere. My southern high school was suburbun/almost rural and had enough kids on free lunch to qualify as a low income, but my German classes were extremely intensive. The French and Spanish classes were no joke either.
And in much of the country almost everyone will interact with native Spanish speakers fairly often.
It depends on accent, and short vowels tend to be pure in all accents of English, to the extent they are in other languages. Long vowels can become diphthongs though. Here are the vowels in Received Pronunciation and General American (and one other accent): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set
Even RP has some pure long vowels (e.g. NURSE, THOUGHT, BATH).
FLEECE and GOOSE do tend to be realized as narrow diphthongs, though.
In my own accent (Scottish), except for the four diphthongs (PRICE, PRIZE, CHOICE, and MOUTH) of which the first two are allophones, all the other vowels are pure. I verified this while developing a formant speech synthesizer.
Accounts of phonetic properties of the italian orthography have been ... slightly exaggerated :-)
E.g. Italian has 5 written vowels, although (in many dialects, including standard Italian) if has 7 (the o in "corto" is not the same as in "cosa", and there are some words which would be allophones were it not for the different quality of the "e" vowel, like "pesca" which means peach with a phonetic ɛ/è vs fishery/inflection of the verb to fish, when with a phonetic e/é)
Comments
Finnish has a phonemic orthography, almost. So it's quite easy to just read Latin the way it is written.
This doesn't necessarily mean that their vowels are closer to ancient Roman vowels than Americans' vowels are, though, for example.
The vowels of English are pronounced as narrow diphthongs. This really sets English apart from the pronunciation of modern European languages, and also from Latin as reconstructed. Finns certainly have a distinct accent in many foreign languages, but they do less violence to Latin than people from the USA or UK.
It's possible for Americans to do the correct vowels, though. We have most of them elsewhere in the language. I started learning Romance languages fairly young and at my peak fluency [a little rusty these days] I had people telling me I sounded near-native in Spanish.
Personally the thing that bothers me most about American accents with these languages is failure to make diphthongs out of adjacent vowels. An American accent will stretch a Romance diphthong out into lengthy syllables. For example in this audio link above, the speaker says hodie has "HOE-dee-ay". I speculate someone more used to speaking a Romance language would say /'hodje/, two syllables. (I note English wiktionary has it as 3 syllables. Not sure what an ancient Roman would do.)
In any case I think a lot of the confusion is orthographic in nature. An English speaker is used to an <e> being /i/. It's not that they can't do an /e/ sound if they tried. A lot of people in the US also have very little real exposure, eg. we have language classes in school where making a real attempt to drop our accents and interact on a level plane with natives is never even seriously considered, it's just a place to hold you in a desk and fill out worksheets.
The US education system is incredibly diverse--as is the US as a whole. That may the case in some schools, but it's certainly not the case everywhere. My southern high school was suburbun/almost rural and had enough kids on free lunch to qualify as a low income, but my German classes were extremely intensive. The French and Spanish classes were no joke either.
And in much of the country almost everyone will interact with native Spanish speakers fairly often.
It depends on accent, and short vowels tend to be pure in all accents of English, to the extent they are in other languages. Long vowels can become diphthongs though. Here are the vowels in Received Pronunciation and General American (and one other accent): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set
Even RP has some pure long vowels (e.g. NURSE, THOUGHT, BATH). FLEECE and GOOSE do tend to be realized as narrow diphthongs, though.
In my own accent (Scottish), except for the four diphthongs (PRICE, PRIZE, CHOICE, and MOUTH) of which the first two are allophones, all the other vowels are pure. I verified this while developing a formant speech synthesizer.
All of them?
The accent still remains, in the specific way each letter is pronounced and in the global intonation.
Italian has almost phonemic orthography, as well, yet the Italian accent can be quite noticeable.
Accounts of phonetic properties of the italian orthography have been ... slightly exaggerated :-)
E.g. Italian has 5 written vowels, although (in many dialects, including standard Italian) if has 7 (the o in "corto" is not the same as in "cosa", and there are some words which would be allophones were it not for the different quality of the "e" vowel, like "pesca" which means peach with a phonetic ɛ/è vs fishery/inflection of the verb to fish, when with a phonetic e/é)
What does this nice property of Finnish orthography have to do with speaking Latin or reading it out loud?