Pronunciation of Latin

@Aidan_() in another post brought up a really good and relevant question. How was Latin (specifically) pronounced? Certainly any dead language can be a compete mystery, especially so when many of us have never had any kind of linguistic education. This question interested me early on in my experience with ancient coins. How does one pronounce the words that we can clearly see written on the coins that we are collecting?

Over many years and with my personal experience with language I have come to the conclusion that there is no possible method in which anyone can possibly (or even remotely) know or realistically even suggest how any ancient language might have been spoken or pronounced.

Yes, I know, this is blasphemy for some (logic for others). I have run afoul of my opinion before on other forums. I had not intentionally or knowingly done so but in essence my opinion invalidated the life work of (two that i know) linguistic scholars. Now I do not pretend to be more educated than any scholar in any field. But I do have common sense on my side of the argument.

Language changes: Never before in human history has this been more obvious than now. Honestly, I have a difficult time understanding my kids frequently (but isn’t that inherent between generations?).

But, back to pronunciation. I think it can be put into a few simple categories:

Regional
As a young man I had no idea nor any exposure to any differences in language (other than what i saw on television). When I joined the Navy it was a real eye opener. I was exposed to people from all corners of the country and all their different accents. While I had a tough time understanding the guy from Kentucky I obviously was able to converse quite comfortably with the guy from Los Angeles. For many of us we were speaking the same language but we had difficulty understanding one another.

Generational
I will only give examples from my own experience. Let’s use my mother and my father-in-law. While I grew up in the same house (obviously) as my mother, she speaks very differently than I do (and this is common to my in-laws). While my mother might say for Wednesday “wends-deey” I say “wends-day”. Why is that? I have no idea. But it is certainly significantly different. And that also ties into the regional component. That same word might be pronounced much differently in other regions but it also has the generational component tied in.

Ethnic
My father was from Ireland. He spoke the same language I did but pronounced it much differently. “ting” for “thing”, “dat” for “that”, you get the idea (if you have heard any Irish people speak). But it is much more than this simple example. One time when I was traveling to London I took a cab from the airport to the hotel. The cabbie was quite chatty and enthusiastically engaged me and my brother in conversation. Honestly we had no idea what he was saying. I understood only (perhaps) one in ten words. We were completely without understanding.

So, in this brief opinion I dont think anyone can possibly know how ancient Latin was pronounced or spoken. I would bet my life that a Third Century BC Roman would likely have no understanding when attempting to converse with a Third Century AD Roman. There are too many generations and ethnicities between who had adopted or used the language for anyone to remotely suggest how any word might have been spoken.

I have been told that there have survived some writings related to language and pronunciation (I am not aware of them specifically), but I would again argue that all the things I have outlined above would only give one a snapshot possibility of one specific time in place and culture.

 

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That all sounds reasonable

When I was preparing to go to my first coin show I was suddenly very worried about how to pronounce names. Until that point, all of my ancient coin communication had been in writing and I had no idea how to correctly pronounce anything. Some of my mistakes were pretty funny (Ag uh THOKE uls... um, nope )

I posted here and got a lot of feedback and the bottom line was that in a bourse full of ancient coin dealers and collectors, there will be many different voiceings of any given name or ancient word. I still prepared as best I could... but sure enough, it seems that every dealer had a different pronunciation. I was still timid when pronouncing certain emperor names but I did the best I could given a few rudimentary principles of Latin. No one noticed or cared about my pronunciation.

 

Yup. And that is part of my idea which I sadly didn't mention above. Few are going to criticize anyone for pronunciation. No matter how you say "Elabagalus" everyone will likely know what you mean even though none of us really know how to say it either!

 

a:ah
e:a
i:e
o: o
u: oou

each consonant is a syllable or is it each vowel?



That is if I remember my 2 years of Latin in high school. Didn't really speak it as a language. We had to translate "History of the World" by Julius Caesar, in the second year. A lot of vocabulary to remember, and forget. Keep in mind I graduated in 1970. A few brain cells have vanished.

 

it's all relative. i can always hear how something sounds spoken with my minds ear, but it may be quite different sounding to someone else. i can remember when i was in the Air Force telling my buds(who were from all over including other countries) that they indeed had accents and i, bn from Missoura, was the only one who didn't. they howled @ that statement. i've found accents change in local areas in a rocks throw. but i think the differences are neat and kool sounding.

 

When I had Latin in school (eons ago ), we had to read Caesar's De Bello Gallico, and we all pronounced the author's name "the proper German way" - sounded like tsay-zah. The next teacher however insisted on the C being pronounced as K. And then ... Kikero?? Well, that is probably how Marcus Tullius would have said it.

A few things we know from how words "developed" later. For example, a Latin word that was adopted by English (or some other language) in the Middle Ages will come with a pronunciation that was influenced by post-classical Church Latin. Earlier "imports" however will be closer to the classical pronunciation.

But does it really matter? There is a Latin Christmas song named Gaudete - and while in German we pronounce it the way it should be pronounced , in English it sounds like Gowe-day-tay. So what?

Christian

 

Veni, vidi, vici!

Chris

 

I think it’s fair to have some healthy skepticism as to what Latin “really” sounded like. I would agree, very generally, that no one knows exactly how a first-century Roman spoke, or whether a Latin speaker in Alexandria sounded like one on the Danube. Dialectal variations abound in every language, until the dialects become languages themselves.

With that having been said, I won’t shrug my shoulders and say that anything goes. We have very detailed grammatical treatises which lay out in excruciating detail issues of pronunciation and prosody. Book 1 Chapter 5 of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (95 A.D.) can be sampled at the link below to see what I mean. Roman poetry was also rigidly metrical, giving us an idea about the rhythms of Latin. The way alliteration, assonance, or rhyme works in poetry can offer phonological clues.

I teach the History of the English Language, so my background is not in classical philology. But from my HEL experience I can say that language often proceeds quite regularly and systematically, allowing linguists to formulate “laws” and guidelines that even result in reconstructed Proto Indo-European. Now *that* seems quite fanciful to me. But Latin? Not so much.

So I don’t disagree with the broader statement that no one really knows precisely how Latin was spoken. But I am reasonably confident that a classicist speaking Latin today could be understood by a first-century Roman. Unfortunately, without a time machine, that hypothesis can’t be tested.

Valēte!

http://rhetoric.eserver.org/quintilian/1/chapter5.html#17

 

I think that's a very good point. One must consider, however, the essentially conservative and text-based nature of the Roman middle and upper classes. Case in point: St. Augustine writes his Confessions ca. 400 A.D., and he tells us that in his boyhood (ca. 370) he practiced memorization exercises of the Aeneid, a work "published" in the late first-century B.C. The Aeneid did for Latin what the KJV would do for English or the Qur'an would do for Arabic: fix a very conservative linguistic standard. Even today people in the American South pray using "thee's" and "thou's." Why? The KJV. Canonical texts act as a brake on language change. The schoolboy Augustine studying in Roman North Africa in the late fourth century would be looking at the same Latin text a young emperor probably studied in first-century Rome. That might argue for a more conservative view of language than the "snapshot" metaphor might allow.

The question for me is how koine Greek became a lingua franca for the ancient Mediterranean world without such a textual standard. When Pontius Pilate spoke to Jesus in the New Testament, I bet they conversed in Greek.

 

I agree fully with Ken's take on the matter.

People who don't like run on posting should leave now. You were warned.

In addition to pronunciation we have grammar which changed in similar ways. Today's teachers deny the English subjunctive so they think the Fiddler on the Roof song "If I Were a Rich Man" should have been Was but I was taught that were indicated he was not rich while was would have been ambiguous and poor form.

Chaucer was the "Father of English Literature" in the 14th century AD. That was as long ago as as separated the Aes Grave period from the Fall Of Rome. Those of you who were forced to read Chaucer in school may recall wondering in what language it was written. Would you like to hear what my Greek professor (a Homer to 5th century guy) had to say about the language in the New Testament or Late Roman authors who wrote in Greek. Not suitable for public posting! Ken mentioned generational problems. Try 20 generations.

It is often possible to derive likely pronunciations from poetry or jokes in comedies but these only apply to one time and place. Many jokes rely on word play and the only people who 'get' them would be those who share some fine point. We even have a word for this. Who knows Shibboleth?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth

Before the 19th century English did not take some things all that seriously but it became fashionable to put down people who failed to use your spelling and pronunciation dictates. Onto this scene came a generation of Classicists who worshiped Cicero and failed students who spoke incorrectly. Most of these guys never read anything after the 1st century so, even if they were right, they avoided problems by saying there was nothing worth reading.

Septimius Severus was said to speak Latin with a thick accent. Julia Domna rarely spoke it. If you have taken both, you might prefer Greek, too. I did but it was only a dozen times harder because the gap between Homer and the Byzantines was greater than that between us and Jesus.

I strongly suspect Pilate and Jesus could converse in Greek or Aramaic. I have never seen anything to suggest Jesus spoke Latin that could not be attributed to the Roman Church.

This is a great question but one with no answer. The only thing I believe with certainty is that those who claim to know every answer rarely understood the question. We do the best we can. We do better when we try to communicate rather than make fun of those who are different in some little way. The more we learn, the more we should realize we do not know. "I was so much smarter then, I'm dumber than that now."

 

We know from Ancient historians that senators and courtiers would laugh behind Emperor Trajan's back and make fun of Trajan's hokey provincial Spanish accent.

So if there was that much difference in Latin pronunciation between Italy and Spain, could you imagine a Greek trying to speak in Latin, or an Egyptian Latin speaker? I bet you the differences were just as pronounced as the differences in accent between British English, American English, Irish English, and Australian English...if not more so.

 

when in Rome.... speak as the Romans do...

 

Thank you Ken for this thread!

If I were smarter I would add something, but alas I will read in silence and hope I pick something up.

 

LOL, Yeah, especially with a Mizzura Accent!

 

I will still call it the subjunctive. It could also be called the "past unreal conditional". Not all language have ways to reference the imagination.

One interesting thing about tense in English is that if the main verb in a phrase or sentence in in the simple past it is more unlikely than using the verb in the simple present.

For example:

Unlikely-If I drank a lot of gin I would be ill.

Likely- If I drink a lot of gin I will be ill.

Unlikely-If I went to Australia I would have to fly.

Likely- If I go to Australia I will have to fly.

These conditional sentences give people who are learning English a real headache.

We also use tense to refer to factual information.

Which is correct?

The teacher said "Jupiter is the largest planet"
The teacher said "Jupiter was the largest planet"

The first one is correct because Jupiter has not stopped being the largest planet.


Doug, as to the language of Chaucer, no one had to force it on me. I picked it up on my own before studying it formally. Yes, I was a strange kid. I still find Chaucer hilarious, and I return to him again and again for the pure joy of it.

I remember standing in front of 450 students, most of whom would go on to be teachers, and telling them that in the supposed words of Socrates "the only thing I know is that I know nothing". I still consider this a proper attitude and way of life for a teacher, lecturer, or professor It is also an excellent reminder that the arrogance that sometimes emerges from the formally educated is ugly and unnecessary. When you study something in great detail it becomes obvious how much you do not know about it. I believe this especially applies, or should apply, to the formally educated.

Thanks for the interesting post.

 

This is a great thread, I wish I had more to add. I just want to add one
joke that I saw long ago on a Usenet group. (Kids, ask your parents about Usenet.) Important background information: It seems to be accepted by modern scholars that Classical Latin (as opposed to Church Latin) pronounced the letter "v" more like English-speakers pronounce "w". So, someone deliberately made this mashup of Julius Caesar quotes: "All Gaul is divided into three parts: the weenie, the weedy, and the weak-y."

 

Thanks Ken, lots of great info here!

 

but this guys name was actually pronounced "poopy anus" right? because learning that has seriously been the best part of the week for me.

 

Seems to me I originally saw this video in these forums, but I think it gives a rather brief but detailed overview of how we know some of the pronunciations (I am no linguist, but this was also how I was taught how to pronounce Latin, so perhaps I'm biased...)

 

hmm.. i'll have check the weak-y pedia on that.