Pronunciation of "Horcrux"

[justcarol67]

Carol earlier:
> > Well, the letter "h" and therefore presumably the "h" sound
existed in Latin, so I think the audio books pronunciation is correct.
> 
jlnbtr (did I get that right? responded:
> The english H sound (as in Horace?) I don't think it existed in
Latin, I know it doesn't exist in french (the H does, not the sound),
and neither in Spanish (the H sound is more like a J), and neither in
 Italian. I think it's just an english sound.
>
Carol again:
IIRC, the H sound was indicated in ancient Greek by a breath mark (').
I think that the Romans indicated the same sound with the borrowed
Greek letter Eta, which in Greek represented the long e sound. If the
letter H, as in Horatius, were silent in Latin, there would have been
no reason for adapting a Greek letter to represent it. The name would
simply have been Oratius, with no need for an H. Nor could the H in
Latin have represented long e (EEOh RAY TEE US), a sound which in any
case was represented by E in the Latin alphabet, as it is in ours.

I'm not absolutely sure of myself here, but I don't think that French
pronunciation, which developed *from* Latin rather than vice versa, is
any indication of the existence of the H sound in Latin. The H sound
could have dropped out of the Vulgar Latin spoken in Gaul while the
letter itself remained. (The sound did exist in early Semitic
alphabets; it was not invented by the Saxons or by the later English.)

In any case, "horcrux," despite its Latin roots, would be an English
word with the same first syllable as "horticulture" or "Horace." Or
that's how I read it.

Geoff (or anyone who's taught or taken Latin recently), can you help
us out here?

Carol, who agrees that Fleur would pronounce the word as 'orcrux if
she could bring 'erself to pronounce it at all