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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Gavin Richardson, post: 2714210, member: 83956&quot;]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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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 <i>Institutio Oratoria</i> (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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Valēte!</b></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://rhetoric.eserver.org/quintilian/1/chapter5.html#17" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://rhetoric.eserver.org/quintilian/1/chapter5.html#17" rel="nofollow">http://rhetoric.eserver.org/quintilian/1/chapter5.html#17</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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