Bitmap dixit:
The pace of speech is not a characteristic of a language per se, but of the individual speaking the language. I've heard English speakers pumping out like 20 words per second, too. Still, I wouldn't recite Shakespeare that way.
Oh yea, that's a good point. I didn't mean to imply that, but I guess I did. In the US, the fastest speakers tend to be those who are in the NE, such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The more west one goes, the slower people tend to speak. The pace at which English is spoken is separate from the language on a more general level, but if you speak slowly to a New Yorker, or quickly to someone from Utah, they might not think you're speaking English correctly.
Certainly not all Italians speak very fast, but the ones who don't are certainly in the minority. What I meant was that, although it's wrong-headed to simply retroactively apply modern speech styles/habits of a language to the older forms of that language, the fact that the majority of speakers of Romance languages speak quite rapidly makes it rather odd to speak or read aloud Latin much more slowly. When, say, scholars do so, it implies that they understand Latin to have been spoken at a much slower pace than all of it's modern descendents, particularly because much of their effort appears to be focused on getting the vowel quantities and pronunciation of consonants right. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but that by mostly speaking/hearing Latin at a slow pace doesn't allow one to get a feel for how it might have sounded in real life. It's like practicing speaking Italian really slowly--it might be correct pronunciation, but one might miss the more musical elements that can only be fully appreciated at normal, conversational pace.