Latin is a language
It killed the Romans long ago,
And now it’s killing me.
That famed ditty isn’t likely to resonate with many modern school children, but interest in ancient Rome remains fairly robust.
We’ve come to accept that those stately ruins were once covered in graffiti.
We can recreate their meals from hors d’oevures (Boiled Eggs with Pine Nut Sauce) to dessert (Pear Patina).
Thermae Romae, a popular Japanese manga-cum-feature-film, took us inside Emperor Hadrian’s bathhouse.
But what did the Romans sound like?
Kirk Douglas’ Spartacus? Or Laurence Olivier’s Crassus?
The recent series Rome upheld the tradition of British accents.
Animator Josh Rudder of NativLang did a fair amount of digging in service of finding out What Latin Sounded Like, above.
(And he seems to have done so without the help of Derek Jarman’s NSFW Sebastiane, the only feature film to be filmed entirely in sermo vulgaris or vulgar Latin.)
Instead, he draws from ancient rhetorician Quintilian and Virgil’s’ poetic meter. Scroll backward through the romance languages, and you’ll see Germanic tribes trading with and fighting ancient Roman troops.
The result is not so much a reconstructive pronunciation guide as a linguistic detective story.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her latest comic contrasts the birth of her second child with the uncensored gore of Game of Thrones. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Because it was a language of pagan idolaters, who were both wanton & lascivious, the Church changed much of the pronunciation & even the grammar itself. And that I learned, along with proper classical pronunciations, back in Catholic high school, circa (id est: “kirka”) MCMLXII. So — illegitimi non carborundum!
Not true that the Church intentionally “changed” Latin to distance itself from “Pagan idolaters”. In the 4th century, the Church produced a Latin translation of the Bible, but in “vulgar” Latin (now called the Vulgate) instead of classical Latin. The reason? More people in Italy at that time spoke vulgar Latin, which was essentially a dialect. The Church wanted the Bible to be understood by as many people as possible. We now call the dialect of Latin that it employed, “ecclesiastical”. Centuries later, Latin was no longer a living language, and the Bible was understood only by scholars and clerics.
L.S.
This video would be so much more of interest for many if it wasn’t spoken so fast. Think of the multitudes with English as second language. Nevertheless very intersting!
Thanks,
Waldo Sweet produced an oral-aural Program
over 60 years ago.
Jesuit Novices in Wernersville, PA in Fall
1958 began this program. We talked about this very system this past weekend at a get-together
I had studied Latin for six years & then
added two more. The same for Greek!
Plus 30 years later I took the TEA, Austin, TX
Certification test in Latin.
I taught Latin I‑V, G‑9–12 for 20 years,
1989–2009 & then retired from Latin
Teaching. I have Sub-taught in TX,
Conroe ISD, Montgomery Co.
For vocabulary building I taught
Word Power for 5.5 years in Baytown,
TX along with the regular Latin courses.
Church pronunciation I usedr for classroom
Pronunciation. Church pronunciation went
On longer than Classical.
The European-Mediterranean nations
Took Classical Latin & changed it to
Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian,
Rumanian, etc.
Church pronunciation has remained more
consistent in 2,000 years.
Cordially
+Ken Walsh
I disagree. As a linguist especially one who is interested in the Indo-European languages, I can’t accept this non-linguistic reasoning. It is not mostly relgious practices that caused the change og Latin pronunciation. I see it as a linguistic process. It goes beyond just dividing the indo-european languages into Centem and Satem languages. But it is definitely linguistic change.
This article, and all others that claim to KNOW how Latin was spoken, or sounded like, are TOTAL bullshit.
I happen to speak some Spanish (5+ years catholic school in California), Brasilian Portuguse (4 years living in Brasil with in-laws) French (2 years catholic high school + 2 years college) and Latin (8 years catholic grade school + 2 years secular high school) along with a little conversational Greek, Arabic, Ukrainian, etc.
However, even when I speak French, Spanish and Portuguese, native speakers can ALWAYS tell that I am not a native.
So the claim that Latin CAN be “spoken” is bullshit. The only people who spoke Latin nearly continuously were Catholic royalty. And the ones I knew, priests and bishops, did NOT speak it the same, they just read out loud, because they were NOT ROMAN, having come from all corners of the globe.
Because there are NO sound recordings of Romans speaking Latin, NOBODY REALLY knows how a Roman pronounced it.
NO WAY, NO HOW.
Millions can read most European languages that use the “Latin Alphabet”, but it would confuse and confound Romans if they heard it.
For example, when I was in France a few years ago, a car pulled up to the curb, and the driver leaned out and asked me where a particular cathedral was.
I happened to be staying in a hotel, just a block away from said church, so I gave him accurate directions, and he was satisfied, turning back to drive. Then he stopped, quickly turned to look at me, before shaking his head, and driving away.
I was sure that he at first thought I was a french local by my clothes, etc. Although I am from the US, I always study the language of my destination, from Greek to Arabic to Chinese out of admiration and respect for the locals, and to distance myself from “ugly entitled Americans”.
I NEVER speak English especially if there are Americans in the vicinity, because they would latch onto me like leeches if they heard me speaking the local language, and English. However in the case in Tours, France my accent was horrible for a French native. He probably drove away thinking that he would not find the cathedral where I said it was. I turned to look and, sure enough he drove right where I told him to go.
This is a prime example of the futility and outright arrogance of anyone who is not a Roman, claiming to “speak” Latin.
Anyone can read Latin out loud, but there is NO WAY to know without a doubt how Latin SOUNDED when spoken by Romans without any sound recordings from before the fall of the Roman Empire.
Hell, I can read most German text, and my grandparents were German, but I refuse to learn it because it is disgusting and guttural. So I can get around fine in Switzerland and Germany, by reading and understanding signs and newspapers.
The closest to Latin would be Italian, since the Romans ruled from Rome, Italy and some of the sounds were possibly handed down. I also speak passable Italian, so much so that I frequently pepper my French, Spanish and Portuguese with Italian.
My in-laws in Brasil usually understood me just fine if I came up short of the correct Portuguese word, and dropped in the Italian or Spanish version. The lone exception was an old woman who was a neighbor, and she did not even finish grade school according to her daughter, so she was not really fluent herself
I had a cousin from Mississippi who I could not understand when he spoke, with what sounded like a hillbilly with a mouth full of rocks. On the other hand, his sister spoke clean English with just a touch of N’Orleans where she lived. All of us were from America.
When I was in Greece, I had practiced and spoken Greek for two weeks, and was widely understood by the locals, who were VERY polite. One day, when I went to a pharmacy to pick up some nail polish remover for my wife, the pharmacist refused to help me. A nice local Greek woman in line behind me, understood what I wanted, And got it for me.
In fact when I was in Athens a week earlier, I went into a pharmacy and asked for Ibuprophen. The old pharmacist working there seemed impressed that I spoke passable GREEK. He even asked if I was a doctor, then invited me to go to his cabinets and take whatever I needed. Imagine a pharmacist in the US doing that?
When the woman on Paros came outside with the item, she told me, in Greek, that she knew the pharmacist was a “B” and she DID understand me, but she hated RUDE British tourists who inundated the small island of Paros all summer, and apparently mistook me for a rude Brit.
If you ever saw the film “Shirley Valentine”, the scenes in Greece show what the locals have to deal with, condescending British.
One time a group of people from my work were planning a trip to Ensenada Mexico, mostly because I told them about the great “lobster houses” restaurants in Lareto, Baja.
When I heard that a particularly obnoxious, always foul-mouthed and racist co-worker was planning to go, I canceled my participation. I explained that I love and respect Mexico and the hard working, honest people there, and I was sure that the guy would sit at the first place we went and loudly say “look at all the dirty, stupid Mexicans”, even though most understood English and would be horribly insulted.
Not the thing any guest would do.
You idiots just like to think you are special by making absolutely FALSE claims. Maybe you should run for public office, because that is what dishonest politicians do. You don’t know jack-shit about how to “speak” Latin…