It seems that few things delight our readers so much as a deep dive, as the young people call it, into the arcana of Latin pronunciation. There must be hope for the future after all.

Now, if you learned Latin in an American school in the past hundred years or so, and you were not Roman Catholic enough to learn the “ecclesiastical” pronunciation, you were taught the “classical” pronunciation. This is the simplest Latin pronunciation you can learn, because each letter has one sound, and it always has that sound, and the only complexity is the length of vowels, which is a matter of rhythm. Master this pronunciation, and you can speak the language of Caesar and Cicero and Virgil—or so you were led to believe.

It is all a convenient fiction, however, and a little thought will tell us that it could not have been that simple.

By the time of Cicero, Latin had been a written language for hundreds of years, and literacy was widely distributed. Rome had a big publishing industry. Spelling was standardized, meaning that there was a class of professional grammarians who knew the correct spelling of any word and would laugh at you for getting it wrong.

But a living language always runs past its spelling. Think of our own language, for example. We take our “silent E” for granted, but it was not silent for Chaucer. In the hundreds of years since his time, we have lost even the vestigial pronunciation of it, but it is still there, now serving no function but to change the pronunciation of the vowel in what used to be the previous syllable. This is obviously not the most efficient way to represent the sounds of our language, and many mad orthographic reformers have thought they could reduce English spelling to a logical method, and failed. Even the great W. W. Skeat, father of English etymology and president of the Simplified Spelling Society, could make no headway.

In the cours of a thousand years, great changes have taken place in the pronunsiation; a proposition which is true, to some extent, of all the other languages in Europe. Of these, the two which have changed most are English and French; and one result is that, in both these languages, the spelling by no means accords with the pronunsiation. In both, the forms at present in use frequently represent the sounds of words as they wer pronounst several centuries ago.⁽¹⁾

The same must have been true of Latin. Now, like all civilized peoples, the Romans greatly enjoyed sneering at people who pronounced their language wrong. Many of their sneers have been preserved, so that we have a great deal of information on the actual pronunciation of the Latin language.

So we know, for example, that the final M in Latin words was not really pronounced; instead, it nasalized the preceding vowel, just as the final M or N nasalizes the preceding vowel in French today. You thought you could get away from those difficult nasal vowels by taking Latin instead of French; but as soon as you climb into your time machine and set the dial for 54 b.c., you’ll find yourself stuck with a hopelessly funny accent.

If, therefore, you are planning one of those time-machine trips, you will want to acquaint yourself with the real pronunciation of Cicero. For that you will want A Short Historical Latin Grammar by W. M. Lindsay, M.A. (Oxford, 1915). In only 33 pages, you will learn all about “Pronunciation, Accentuation, and Change of Sound,” and how different systems are appropriate for different points on the dial of your time machine.

We say “only 33 pages” because the Short Historical Latin Grammar is meant to be a quick student handbook, and thus leaves out many of the details. For a more thorough treatment, we must turn to Lindsay’s earlier work, The Latin Language (Oxford, 1894). Here we find that the chapter on “Pronunciation” runs from page 13 to page 145—and then the next chapter is “Accentuation,” meaning that it is treated separately from the pronunciation of individual sounds. Here you will learn important facts about mediae and tenues, and how they were confused, and you will be forced to confront the sad fact of parasitic vowels.

We began our discussion of Latin pronunciation as some advice to podcasters. We do not withdraw that advice; it is sound for most purposes. But if you really want to be known as the most pedantic of all possible podcasters, then you will learn the real classical pronunciation of Latin, and how it varied over time, and you will pronounce quotations from each classical author correctly for his era. There will be almost no reward for this pedantic correctness; almost no one will notice, and the few who do notice will probably think that you are simply getting the pronunciation wrong. But any real pedant knows that pedantry is its own reward, and does not require validation from an outside observer.

Footnotes

1. “On the History of Spelling,” by the Rev. Professor Skeat. Simplified Spelling Society, 1908. (↩)