The IPA transcription I have provided is based on the Latin spelling and pronunciation article on Wikipedia, which in turn is based on several books on reconstruction of Classical Latin pronunciation, particularly Sidney Allen's Vox Latina. It's certainly true that relatives of Latin such as Ancient Greek, and its closest descendants, like Italian and Spanish (if they're what you're referring to), didn't have nasalized vowels (Sanskrit and Proto-Germanic did, though). But nasalization in Latin is suggested by the fact that the nasals n and m were lost in certain cases (both in inscriptions and in the Romance languages: cosol for consul; Italian mese and French mois for Latin mensis), final vowels + -m were elided before vowels in poetry, and in the cases where n and m are lost, there's indication that the preceding vowel was lengthened. Loss of nasal with lengthening points to nasalization. This is the reasoning given in Vox Latina. (Another source is Allen and Greenough's Latin Grammar; The Blackwell History of the Latin Language mentions only nasalization of final vowels before -m.) I've been doing some recordings of Latin lately for Wikipedia, and maybe I will try pronouncing the phrases and see if I can see what you mean about emotional expressiveness. Italian has similar stress and is emotionally expressive, so maybe the problem can be worked out.