Latin accents
Sometimes it's easy to forget how strongly accented most people's pronunciation of classical Latin is -- for instance, I have a horrible American English accent when I speak Latin. But has Henry Beard said, "memento: nulli adsunt Romanorum qui locutionem corrigant"; he's right, at least with regard to ancient Romans, and the lack of native speakers makes it hard to compare our accents against an obviously correct standard.
I was startled to hear an extremely pronounced French accent in the Latin recording of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights made by a Belgian woman called Ezwa who is a native French speaker. I'm sure that her accent in Latin is no worse than mine, but it really brings out the point that we all do exhibit distinct accents when speaking Latin. Even if you don't speak Latin, I'm sure that you'll be able to tell that the text is being spoken by a native French speaker, because the vowels (and the "r") are extremely French. (Also, she drops initial "h" before a vowel, leading to words like "ominibus"! And I suspect that she may be omitting a few consonants at the ends of words, although I haven't found a specific example.)
I found this recording on the Librivox UDHR recordings collection, via a post on Boing Boing.
I've spoken Latin with two people who were not native English speakers, but I never before noticed the foreign accent as strongly as I do in Ezwa's case. (One of the two is a native Italian speaker, but he uses church Latin pronunciation, and doesn't sound so dissimilar to American Latin speakers who use the church pronunciation.)
