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Message:: [QUOTE="Neal, post: 4403065, member: 43872"]Very good summary of how this is done.  I am very much aware of these methods.  While not a linguist, I have taught French, have a masters degree in the Greek New Testament, and have studied and read about pronunciation and how we think things were pronounced.  But in the end, it is still something of a "best guess."  For instance, we can learn much by seeing how words were pronounced in other languages, say, a Latin name spelled in a Greek text.  But that begs the question of how it was pronounced in Greek (or Hebrew, or Coptic, or Hittite, or whatever).  And compare that to Paris.  If 2000 years hence linguists are trying to understand how Paris was pronounced in French and they compare it to English, they will get it completely wrong.  For that matter, the name Paris is, as you know, from Homer, so who is to say the French get it right?  Paris, Texas, might be closer.  And spelling variations and mistakes give us a lot of information, but they may give us information also of how the word was mispronounced by contemporaries.  Puns and other plays on words are very helpful, but again, their usefulness depends on our understanding of the pronunciation of the words being played on. My point is, let's be aware of how much even "experts" don't really know and be tolerant of one another's pronunciation.[/QUOTE]