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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Pellinore, post: 4402620, member: 74834&quot;]To be sure, there has been substantial scientific research for how Latin and Greek must have sounded. I believe the main standard works were written in the 1960s by British linguist William Sidney Allen: Vox Latina and Vox Graeca (Cambridge University Press). You might find them in the second hand book world (I&#039;m using Vialibri) for about 20 or 30 dollars.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>There are several ways to find out how these languages sounded, even if there are no audio recordings. Here I paraphrase some convincing arguments from an article by a Latin teacher, Casper Porton, on the subject.</p><p><br /></p><p>- In ancient times, grammarians have written about the pronunciation. So we can read firsthand where certain sounds were spoken in the mouth;</p><p>- Romans were fond of word jokes and sound effects and imitating natural sounds;</p><p>- The development of the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc.)</p><p>- The ways in which the Romans rendered their words in letters (spelling conventions) including spelling mistakes (they are very significant);</p><p>- The way Latin words are pronounced in other languages;</p><p>- The internal structure of Latin itself, including the different metric patterns.</p><p>- It is also important to realize that there were variations in pronunciation, just as today in our own language. This fact was (and is) used in theatre to depict someone as a funny foreigner or a backward yokel. The way Latin or Greek was put to use by the many theatre authors of Antiquity to show these effects, point to the pronunciation, too.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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