05-09-2011, 01:40 AM
To begin with, we really don't know exactly how Classical Latin in Julius Caesar's or Cicero's, or the Kings' era, or Hadrian's day was pronounced, or how these might have differed. There are no voice recordings, of course. The best reference we have is the Latin Vulgate of the medieval Roman Catholic church and the Latin Vulgate Bible. Were they similar? Probably so. Were they identical? Doubtful. Consider the language of whatever country you are from, and ask yourself: 500 years ago, was the grammar, spelling and pronunciation the same? Odds are, not at all. The English of the 1500s would be almost not recognizable today, and the English of a thousand years ago would be mostly indecipherable to our modern ears, and vice versa.
The phonetics that were listed below are what these words are thought to sound like without using diacritical marks, which are really a language all to themselves.
Along with what Robert says, the singular and plural uses are just how they used them, sometimes singular, sometimes plural, with very little pattern that we can determine. But it doesn't matter, really, the idea of the drill in Latin is to try to make it sound out of the ordinary, and to try to quote the words that the Latin-speakers would have used. By Mauritius' Strategikon, the Latin had been fairly well mixed up with Greek, and some words had changed from what we think the older Romans used.
One example of this is ad contum, or "to the spear (pole)", meaning "to the right". Earlier sources, such as Vegetius said "to the spear", but did not use the word contus(which is a Latinized form of the Greek kontos). As Gaddius Agrippa says below, "ad gladius" (which should probably be "ad gladium") could be confusing, as some soldiers and all officers wore their swords on the left, and later on, pretty much all soldiers wore their swords on the left.
Is any set of drill commands perfect? No, not until we find one list from ancient source, and it is doubtful that we will, though it would be wonderful if we did. Are some sets of commands fancifully made up by different reenactment groups? Yep. And that's ok, if it works for that group. The list I alluded to before was brought into being because we had several years of having many different lists being used by the several groups that attended multi-group events. It was a little like the workers on the Tower of Babel. The troops heard the words, but didn't know what to do. So the Tactica we finally produced was an attempt to bridge that gap, and create a usable list that multiple groups would understand. It's fairly successful, though limited to those commands that we could find referenced in ancient documents, and we totally realize that mixing Vegetius, Mauritius, Asclepiodotus, Arrianus, et al., into a single list is at best a strange brew. But our aim was to include the commands that were findable, and footnotable, not necessarily to try to set them into a "century-correct dialect".
We admit it is not a perfect work, but we also agree it was a heckuva lotta work, arrived at after hundreds of hours of research, argument, compromise, gritted teeth, and finally, hopeful smiles of satisfaction. If you can make use of it, we hope you will. If you can't, well, that's how it goes sometimes. The file is too big to upload here, but if you contact me via PM or at dwills777 at yahoo dot com, I will email you one
The phonetics that were listed below are what these words are thought to sound like without using diacritical marks, which are really a language all to themselves.
Along with what Robert says, the singular and plural uses are just how they used them, sometimes singular, sometimes plural, with very little pattern that we can determine. But it doesn't matter, really, the idea of the drill in Latin is to try to make it sound out of the ordinary, and to try to quote the words that the Latin-speakers would have used. By Mauritius' Strategikon, the Latin had been fairly well mixed up with Greek, and some words had changed from what we think the older Romans used.
One example of this is ad contum, or "to the spear (pole)", meaning "to the right". Earlier sources, such as Vegetius said "to the spear", but did not use the word contus(which is a Latinized form of the Greek kontos). As Gaddius Agrippa says below, "ad gladius" (which should probably be "ad gladium") could be confusing, as some soldiers and all officers wore their swords on the left, and later on, pretty much all soldiers wore their swords on the left.
Is any set of drill commands perfect? No, not until we find one list from ancient source, and it is doubtful that we will, though it would be wonderful if we did. Are some sets of commands fancifully made up by different reenactment groups? Yep. And that's ok, if it works for that group. The list I alluded to before was brought into being because we had several years of having many different lists being used by the several groups that attended multi-group events. It was a little like the workers on the Tower of Babel. The troops heard the words, but didn't know what to do. So the Tactica we finally produced was an attempt to bridge that gap, and create a usable list that multiple groups would understand. It's fairly successful, though limited to those commands that we could find referenced in ancient documents, and we totally realize that mixing Vegetius, Mauritius, Asclepiodotus, Arrianus, et al., into a single list is at best a strange brew. But our aim was to include the commands that were findable, and footnotable, not necessarily to try to set them into a "century-correct dialect".
We admit it is not a perfect work, but we also agree it was a heckuva lotta work, arrived at after hundreds of hours of research, argument, compromise, gritted teeth, and finally, hopeful smiles of satisfaction. If you can make use of it, we hope you will. If you can't, well, that's how it goes sometimes. The file is too big to upload here, but if you contact me via PM or at dwills777 at yahoo dot com, I will email you one
M. Demetrius Abicio
(David Wills)
Saepe veritas est dura.
(David Wills)
Saepe veritas est dura.
