Latin Name Pronunciation

[Phaichtos]

Yep, that would be me. I've lost most of the regional from having worked in a phone center, where accents were discouraged.

But this thread really is about Latin, not US English. Does anyone know when the Latin hard C faded away, and the soft C replaced it? How about the CH sound for CI, CE in Italian? When did that start? French, Spanish, Portugese, and Italian all use the soft C. Could it be that the soft was used much earlier than commonly taught? Else how could the "Romance" languages universally use it?

That would be my inkling! As I said before, our evidence for regional diversification of Latin during the Empire is a bit shoddy, without much epigraphic evidence aside from a few examples here and there in literature and some graffiti. But I'd have to imagine it was diversifying long before that. To draw further upon the American connections, Europeans have been moving to what is now our country for around 400 years, and in that time we saw a wide range of regional accents develop. The time of the Roman "empire" (reaching back into the Republican period of expansion as well) was much longer than that, so it's hard for me to believe that there wouldn't have been a lot of "regionalization" going on for the whole period. Again, what we see in the literature is largely the "gold standard" for Latin, whereas with the speech of the "common folk" we have to sort of work backwards from modern times for evidence of sound change.