English.SE, Hi, first time being here. I have had this confusion about the pronunciation of "a priori" and "a posteriori" for a long time, normally I just read the last vowel as /i/, however today my office mate asked me about this for he saw the pronunciation on Merriam-Webster online dictionary shows that the last vowel reads as /ai/, this reminded me that the philosophy professors whose lectures I took before didn't agree on this pronunciation either. Since I learned that Immanuel Kant borrowed these words from Latin, I wonder what is the correct way to pronounce these words in Latin or at least in a Latin'ish way.
Learn English – The correct pronunciation of the last vowel in words “a priori” and “a posteriori”
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After your edit and the clarification the comments to the question have brought about, it is now much clearer what it is you’re asking here.
The simple answer is no.
Generally speaking, plosives in English are mandatorily aspirated [pʰ tʰ kʰ] when they come at the start of a stressed syllable, or (usually) word-initially. In all other cases, they are usually non-aspirated [p t k], though they may sometimes optionally be aspirated for effect.
Aspiration here refers to a short period of time after the closure in the oral cavity that blocks the airflow is released, but before your vocal cords start vibrating to produce a voiced sound. During the aspiration phase, also known as the voice-onset time, there is airflow, but no voice; you’re essentially pronouncing a [h]. When a /k/ comes at the start of a stressed syllable, the voice-onset time in English tends to be somewhere around 80 ms. Even in unaspirated plosives, your vocal cords don’t start vibrating immediately: unaspirated /k/ normally has a voice-onset time of about 15–20 ms in English.
In the example you give, books, the /k/ comes in the syllable coda, and as such is not normally aspirated. If you really want to emphasise that you’re saying books and not boogs, then you can aspirate the /k/ and say [bʊkʰs], but that is not very common, so use it sparingly.
However, the sound that follows /k/ here is a voiceless fricative and therefore by definition entails a continuous unvoiced airflow, just like regular aspiration does. The only difference is that in /s/, the unvoiced airflow is restricted by the position of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, with only a narrow hole the air can pass through.
When your tongue transitions from [k] to [s], the back of the tongue has to ‘let go’ of the soft palate, while the blade of the tongue in front has to ‘catch’ the alveolar ridge. These two movements are naturally difficult to time exactly, and it is very common that the first takes place perhaps 40–50 ms before the second. During that period, you do likely have some aspiration of the /k/; but it is not really noticeable, because it is shorter than the ‘full’ aspiration we find in can [kʰan] (perhaps half as long), and it tends to blend in with the sibilant airflow of the following /s/.
Generally in English the addition of an inflectional ending does not affect stress. That is, the ending itself is not stressed, and stress remains on the same syllable as it is in the uninflected form. For instance, even though in morphologically simple forms, we don't get 3 unstressed syllables at the end of a word in English, the addition of the -ing inflection of the progressive aspect does not affect the stress, even when it is added to a verb ending with 2 unstressed syllables: interest/interesting, amnesty/amnestying.
Likewise, the regular English plural ending is inflectional, and its addition never causes stress to shift to the right, nearer the end of the word: parentage/parentages, Cavendish/Cavendishes.
Therefore, if the -ta is a plural ending and is counted as an inflectional ending, like the regular plural ending, one would predict that stress would be unaffected by adding it, and you would get stigmata ending in 2 unstressed syllables. That is a big "if", though, since I don't think stigmata is actually the plural of stigma in current English, and I never heard it pronounced on anything but the penult. So I think the stress you are asking about is archaic in English.
Best Answer
The OED gives ay - pr - eye - 'or - eye as the only pronunciation. I (an American English speaker) usually say ah - pr - ee - 'or - ee (which appears in the MW pronunciation you cited), but I hear both. As for Immanuel Kant, he would have likely pronounced it differently than an ancient Roman anyhow. One of the key differences between classical and ecclesiastical Latin (the latter of which Kant certainly would have learned) is pronunciation. So, it's hard to say which one would be more "Latin" (neither is spot on).