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12-02-2002, 02:57 PM

Hi, 
 
Not sure where to post this if at all here. 
 
Last time I was at an event which included Roman Legionaries they were barking orders out in Latin. The only other time I have heard latin spoken is by a priest. They sounded very different !! 
 
I recall some years ago watching a TV comedy show called Chelmsford 123 about the Roman occupation. The first episode has the first 15 mins in Latin as spoken by the newly arrived govenor Aulus paulus ? The accent was very modern Italian .... better than the very English sounding Latin used by the said re-enactor. 
 
What is the current thinking on this ? 
Regards 
 
Conal

**richsc** · 12-02-2002, 03:10 PM

As I was taught back when, there were two pronunciations: classical Latin, and Church Latin. Since I'd also taken French and Italian, a later Latin teacher said I spoke Latin with a very nice French accent! 
I also tried to get a linguistics professor to talk about how scholars had decided upon 'classical' pronuciation, but he thought that a trivial occupation and went on about Noam Chomsky. 
Actually how the Romans pronounced Latin no doubt changed significantly over the centuries, and there may have been a common street pronunciation and a more learned one. There have been a few threads on this I think. Richard Campbell, Legio XX

01-02-2003, 01:59 AM

My latin lecturer is a young scholar (has a doctorate and he isn't 30 yet) with an interest in (um...history of language... forgotten the word...) so I think his knowledge is very current. He has some Italian background, but he doesn't use an Italian accent at all. It is also very different from Church latin. 'c' is always a 'k' sound (not ch or s) and the r is rolled. t is always 't' not 'sh' (like in station). V (u) is pronounced as a w or u depending on whether it is serving as a vowel or consonant (this is usually self evident). So 'veni, vidi, vici' is 'weni widi wikki' NOT 'venee videe vichee.' 
I think they base the pronunciation on the evidence of ancient texts and modern languages, like German, which retain a lot of latin. I'm curious to know what happend to make Italian so different. I'l ask him when we start back to class. 
 
cheers 
P.S.

**richsc** · 01-02-2003, 12:21 PM

Some examples of both uses of the V sound exist in English; compare 'vale' and 'welcome', 'wine' and 'vinum' . But in French it's 'vin'. Maybe the Normans spoke more like Romans and less like French, which I think they might agree with. Richard Campbell, Legio XX

TITVS SABATINVS AQVILIVS · 01-02-2003, 02:16 PM

Salue, 
 
about the latin-italian pronunciation: at the corner between 
"via Frattina" and "via del gambero" in the historic centre of Roma, is yet a 1770 A.D. marble plate, where the "Monsignor delle strade" the vatican chief of the urban streets control service warns that there: "ÃƒÆ’Ã‚Â¨ uietato farui immondezzaio" ("leaving rubbish here it's forbidden"). Note that the "v" was written (and pronunced) "u", like in the roman latin, while today it's written and pronunced: "ÃƒÆ’Ã‚Â¨ vietato farvi immondezzaio" with the "v"... 
 
Vale, 
 
Titus Sabatinus Aquilius 
 
"Desilite, inquit, commilitones, nisi vultis aquilam hostibus prodere" D.B.G.

01-09-2003, 06:41 AM

I hadn't thought about comparing the French. I guess whether a particular modern language uses one or the other might not be significant in itself, they must compare a multitude of sources. It would depend how much the native language influenced the Latin in each country too. Perhaps there are other languages related to indo-european that might offer clues as well. I'm very interested in this, but don't really need another hobby... think I'll settle for someone giving me something like a definitive answer! 
 
P.S.

01-11-2003, 01:37 AM

I'm a student of German at the moment, it's the first semester I've ever taken of the language. I was interested to see that someone's teacher pronounced in Latin the soft "ch" as "k" etc, because this is the way German words are pronounced, very hard sounding. So this got me wondering if perhaps the proper Latin pronounciations are closest to that of modern German? 
 
This has always been an interesting topic to me, I often wonder what the Latin Roman accent really was? I also would like to know how the Italians eventually moved away from speaking Latin and into what is now modern day Italian? What is modern day Italian made of? Is it a barbarization of Latin slowly developed after the integration of the barbians into Italian society? Is Italian half of some ancient lost language with pieces of Latin in it? 
 
Would be interesting to hear from someone who is knowledgable on the topic as I often think about this.

Dan Diffendale · 01-17-2003, 08:31 PM

If you're interested in a thorough investigation of what we know about Latin pronunciation, check out _Vox Latina_ by W.S. Allen (Cambridge University Press). I don't consider myself an expert, but I'll have a go. 
 
Three important things to keep in mind when talking about pronunciation and accent: location, time, and status... 
The speech of a 2nd century Athenian would likely be distinguishable from that of a Briton or a Gaul or a Spaniard or an Italian or, for that matter, a Corinthian or a Theban, though all were speaking Latin. So too would speech differ between an Athenian (or whatever) of the early first century and one of the third century. Cicero would have sounded different from a resident of the Subura in the mid-first century BC. 
So we can't ask what a Roman Latin accent would be. Well, we could, but we couldn't get a suitable answer. I suppose I'm treating this with a comb of rather fine teeth... 
 
As for Italian- Italian is a direct descendent of Latin, as are French, Spanish, Romanian, and several others (these make up the "Romance Languages"). Each of these evolved into their present form through a series of regular sound changes. Living languages are always evolving, and variations of dialect are a reflection of this fact. Given enough time, the same processes that cause regional variations bring about new languages. Very basically, once enough variations have stacked up so that two dialects are no longer mutually intelligible, they are said to be different languages. 
 
Starting with the modern day Romance languages, historical linguists can process them through the system of regular sound changes in reverse, eventually arriving at a system of sounds spoken at a certain point in history. They can keep going back, and identify what happened as Latin evolved from the early Republic to the later Republic and so on through Imperial times. A caveat -- the farther back you extrapolate, the less precise you can be about how each phoneme (sound unit) was actually sounded. 
It turns out that the great majority of European languages, and also some Indian languages, are descended from a common ancestor, which we call Proto-Indo-European or just Indo-European. The list of Indo-European descendants includes Latin (and thus the Romance languages), Greek, English, Dutch, German, Russian, Swedish, Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Welsh, Gaelic, Polish, and Lithuanian; there are many others. 
I hope I've answered a few questions... 
 
Edit: 
Here is a much more thorough discussion of Indo-European: [url=http://www.utexas.edu/depts/classics/documents/PIE.html" target="top]www.utexas.edu/depts/classics/documents/PIE.html[/url] Edited by: <A HREF=http://pub45.ezboard.com/bromanarmytalk.showUserPublicProfile?gid=dannoulpius>Danno Ulpius</A> at: 1/17/03 9:56:41 pm

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