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.

[Astiryu1]

Would there be a difference in pronunciation between The Western Roman Empire and The Eastern Roman Empire? Maybe the soft "C" was Eastern and the hard "C" was Western or Vice-Versa.

[Phaichtos]

Would there be a difference in pronunciation between The Western Roman Empire and The Eastern Roman Empire? Maybe the soft "C" was Eastern and the hard "C" was Western or Vice-Versa.

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it would have been the opposite, actually. The Eastern Empire was largely Greek-speaking anyway, so I would imagine when they spoke Greek-accented Latin, all the C's would have remained hard. The West, on the other hand, is where we see (for example) French with its characteristic softening of...well...almost everything :mrgreen: So perhaps it was well on its way toward this end during the time of the high Empire (and even before, really).

[bellatrix]

Phaichtos,

Since language is a special interest item for you, what have you learned about people in the Roman empire being bilingual? Did they pretty much stick to their native languages, or did they learn Latin as well? Since the Romans ruled everything, it would seem that learning Latin might be essential to success in the empire. If I'm way off here, you can tell me.

[Phaichtos]

Phaichtos,

Since language is a special interest item for you, what have you learned about people in the Roman empire being bilingual? Did they pretty much stick to their native languages, or did they learn Latin as well? Since the Romans ruled everything, it would seem that learning Latin might be essential to success in the empire. If I'm way off here, you can tell me.

It is hard to say too much about the lower classes in the provinces with much certainty. Archaeologically speaking though, their material culture (including things like building type) seems to have changed relatively little during Roman occupation, so we can assume that Roman society itself must have been largely confined to urban centers. As such, while the cities may have been largely Latin-speaking with the locals imitating the Roman elite, the countryside could have largely been left to its own devices to speak their ancestral languages. Rome was pretty good about letting subject peoples do their own thing as long as they had at least their theoretical allegiance (and tax money!) A good (and *gasp* readable!) book which touches upon the subject of how the "barbarians" conducted themselves under Roman occupation is Peter Wells' The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped the Roman Empire.

The elites though, throughout the Empire, were a different case. At least through the high empire, Roman (originally Italian, but later from the provinces as well) elites were essentially a bilingual class of people who spoke Latin in their daily lives, but were also raised on a heavy diet of Greek culture. Take for instance the fact that Marcus Aurelius, perhaps seeking to look like a "true philosopher", wrote is Meditations in Greek, despite being a Latin speaker. We also have to remember too that from a line somewhere around Illyria and eastward, the Hellenistic footprint of Greek never really went away. Perhaps since the east was always richer than the west, they never felt the pull of Romanization (at least in the form of language) the way the western provinces did; and since, as mentioned, the Romans had a sort of built-in reverence for Greek culture, this never seemed to become a problem for them. We can imagine the local administrators during the high empire perhaps writing dispatches to Rome in Latin, and the locals in Greek. But then, (and this might just be my opinion, but...) it seems to me that the local elites in the East felt far less pressure to use Latin in local matters than did the local elites in, say, Gaul; the Gallic elites might have had their aboriginal language displaced by Latin, but the Hellenistic royalty in the East were speaking a "more noble" tongue which was brought to the area by Alexander himself. What Roman administrator would take issue with that? As an example, we might think of how Josephus (aka Yosef Ben Matityahu), who was himself a member of the local Jewish priestly elite in Palestine, wrote his history of the Jewish people in Greek; Greek (as opposed to Latin) was the prestige (as well as practical) language of the East, so it is perhaps telling that he wrote in that language, as opposed to Latin (the language of the region's recent conquerors), his ancestral Hebrew, or even Aramaic. He knew his audience, and they spoke Greek.

As a side note, it has always been interesting to me that the eastern half of the Empire, after the "fall" of the west, has become known to us as the Byzantine Empire, even though the people themselves kept on believing that they were Romans ("???????") until at least 1453. I suppose the best rationale for this is that after the city of Rome itself was "lost", there could be no more "Romans"... but then again, Roman emperors had been coming from the provinces for centuries by that point... so who is to say what "Roman" was, really? I think the biggest reason people often don't connect the two (Roman Empire = Byzantine Empire) is because after the loss of the Latin west, all that was left was a Greek-speaking, more foreign-seeming (to the modern observer) realm which on the surface may seem to have had little in common with Rome of the days of Cicero. But then again, other than the Latin language (which may have been substantially different by that time!), how similar was Rome of 50 BCE to Rome of 350 CE?

Anyway, I digress, but I hope I touched upon some of what you were asking

[Astiryu1]

Many writers were Greek as well such as Polybius, Strabo, etc. Greek was a fashion maybe to the point of becoming the universal language more so than Latin by common use. I would Imagine that Latin and Greek would be required for people that were Merchant's, Trader's, etc. Translator's may have also been in some demand as well.
Please correct me if I am wrong!

[Phaichtos]

The problem with such an assertion as I see it is, at least with the two men you mentioned, they actually *were* Greek, so it wasn't like they were just Italians who were "faking it" or something. Merchants historically have been multi lingual as well, so it would make sense that many cities along the Mediterranean coast would have been cosmopolitan blends of different peoples speaking a variety of tongues, even if it didn't extend much inland from the harborfront

[Astiryu1]

Subject: Latin Name Pronunciation

The problem with such an assertion as I see it is, at least with the two men you mentioned, they actually *were* Greek

That's exactly what I mean they were of Greek nationality,speaking and writing under major Roman influences. Their main readers would have been Roman Officials and Military right?

[Phaichtos]

Subject: Latin Name Pronunciation

The problem with such an assertion as I see it is, at least with the two men you mentioned, they actually *were* Greek

That's exactly what I mean they were of Greek nationality,speaking and writing under major Roman influences. Their main readers would have been Roman Officials and Military right?

As best as I understand it, the target audience for most of the treatises surviving from the ancient world would have been the elites themselves. Since the Roman elite would have spoken Greek too, it would have made sense for a Greek to just use his own language since it would have sounded more prestigious than using clunky Latin

[bellatrix]

Phaichtos,

You DO plan to write a book on the linguistics we've been discussing in this thread, right? :wink:

I think your book would have a large audience, myself included...there is so much more to this than I could have imagined!

[Phaichtos]

Phaichtos,

You DO plan to write a book on the linguistics we've been discussing in this thread, right? :wink:

I think your book would have a large audience, myself included...there is so much more to this than I could have imagined!

Maybe one day Technically speaking, I'm not really "qualified" to write a book about linguistics, since all of my training thus far is in history/classics/archaeology. I feel like I would need a little more of a background in linguistics in order to have the requisite nuts and bolts needed to write a book-length study on this subject! For instance, right now, I can tell you THAT language changed, but I can't really tell you the physical reasons why, since I'm a bit rough on all the terminology and all. But who knows, maybe someday I'll be able to do it as something more than an interested amateur. Until then, I will probably stick to writing articles about Rome's interactions with aboriginal Europe 8)