# authenticity of spoken Latin



## User With No Name

(I hope no one objects to an occasional slightly random question from someone who knows far less about language and linguistics than most who post here...)

Latin today, of course, is rarely spoken. And from what I understand, one of the few groups who might still very occasionally speak it are Catholic clergy, who normally pronounce it quite differently than, say, classical scholars. So here is my question:

If Caesar or Cicero were to resuscitate tomorrow, would today's Latinists be able to have a pretty good spoken conversation with them, or would it be rough going?


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## Yendred

Interesting question   I look forward to reading the discussion.


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## Hulalessar

Today's Latinists have a pretty good idea of how Latin was pronounced in Cicero's day. Whether the language Cicero used when chatting to ordinary citizens on the way to the Forum is quite like his prose is not known, but if addressed in the language he used in his speeches with everything correctly pronounced he would surely understand even if the speaker did not sound like an Ancient Roman. A modern Latinist though might though have a problem because I do not think that many of them actually engage in Latin conversation. They might have a bit of difficulty keeping up. Roman Catholic clerics may do better, though their pronunciation is not classical.

If Cicero came back it would be interesting to now what he would make of the language spoken in Rome today.


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## Yendred

Hulalessar said:


> what he would make of the language spoken in Rome today


Can you be more specific? What do you mean?


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## Hulalessar

Yendred said:


> Can you be more specific? What do you mean?


I mean what would he make of Standard Italian or Romanesco.


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## Yendred

Hulalessar said:


> I mean what would he make of Standard Italian or Romanesco.


Yes, but what do you mean by "what would he make of it"? You mean for example would he make speeches as good as in Latin?


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## Delvo

"What would he make of it" means "what would he think about it" or "what would be his impression of it".

My answer is that he would probably not even recognize it as a version of his language at all at first.


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## merquiades

When did palatalization begin in spoken Latin and how did it advance century by century?  Would Cicero have said kikero, k'ik'ero, cicero or tsitsero?


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## berndf

When it started in *colloquial *language is unknown. What is clear is that in *standard *Latin, there was no palatalisation in the classical time, i.e. during the republic and the principate (i.e. until the end of the 2nd century AD).

Having said this, pronunciation of the _c_s in Cicero as [c] rather than [k] would not necessarily have left any trace in the works of classical grammarians. For speakers of languages that do not distinguish between /k/ and /c/, the difference between these sounds may be too small to even perceive it. As a German, I do not hear any difference whatsoever between the kappas in Modern Greek _Κηφισιά_ and _καλός_, though, when I say these words, I recognise that the positions of my tongue are not identical. But this difference does not produce anything I would be able to identify as different sounds.


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## merquiades

berndf said:


> When it started in *colloquial *language is unknown. What is clear is that in *standard *Latin, there was no palatalisation in the classical time, i.e. during the republic and the principate (i.e. until the end of the 2nd century AD).
> 
> Having said this, pronunciation of the _c_s in Cicero as [c] rather than [k] would not necessarily have left any trace in the works of classical grammarians. For speakers of languages that do not distinguish between /k/ and /c/, the difference between these sounds may be too small to even perceive it. As a German, I do not hear any difference whatsoever between the kappas in Modern Greek _Κηφισιά_ and _καλός_, though, when I say these words, I recognise that the positions of my tongue are not identical. But this difference does not produce anything I would be able to identify as different sounds.


Yes, I know what you mean.  When I was in the Peloponnese I heard a huge difference between the palatalized and non-palatalized /k/ and /x/.  I can pronounce the sounds too and the point of articulation is definitely in the front of the mouth. Yet I cannot associate them with sounds in any language, except maybe Russian where any consonant can be palatalized.   The closest sound for this palatalized /k/ is the sound I assimilated for "y" as pronounced in center/ west central Iberian Spanish when I learned the language orally.   It is not the /j/ in yellow nor the /dʒ/ j jam but something like a palatalized /dj/ if that exists in any language.  It's not the same, just closer...
Anyway I agree that educated Latin speakers could have been palatalizing their sounds for several centuries without realizing it.
Of course, this does not help us in deciding what way we should pronounce Latin today.


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> Yes, I know what you mean. When I was in the Peloponnese I heard a huge difference between the palatalized and non-palatalized /k/ and /x/.


That is an interesting example. The palatalised and the non-palatalised Greek /x/ are [ç] and [x]. Those match sounds of German, the _ich_-Laut and the _ach_-Laut, respectively. As my language has both of these sound and differentiates between them (albeit only as allophones), I have no problems hearing the different. This is totally different then with [c] and [k], although objectively, these two pairs are equally far apart.


merquiades said:


> Of course, this does not help us in deciding what way we should pronounce Latin today


Luckily, in linguistics we usually aren't concerned with "should" questions.
At any rate, the very strong difference between the palatalised and non-palatalised versions as they exist in Italian and Ecclesiastical Latin were certainly not present in classical Latin.


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## Keith Bradford

User With No Name said:


> ... If Caesar or Cicero were to resuscitate tomorrow, would today's Latinists be able to have a pretty good spoken conversation with them, or would it be rough going?


It would be rough going because both of them would speak ancient Greek as their everyday language!  It was the spoken lingua franca of their time among educated people.  The plebs in the streets would have spoken low Latin, which we know from the _Appendix Probi_ was deviating from classical Latin by the 3rd century at least.

Probus was a teacher in North Africa who left behind several pages of notes on correct spelling which begin:
_Speculum non speclum_​_masculus non masclus_​_vetulus non veclus_​_vitulus non viclus_​_baculus non vaclus..._​from which we get an idea of the common mistakes his pupils were making.  Unstressed vowels were being omitted, the "b" was beginning to be pronounced as "v" and /tl/ was turning into /kl/.  However, in the hundred or so lines I'm reading, there's no sign of a change in the "c" which you're asking about.

Source: Appendix Probi cited in Studer and Waters _Historical French Reader_, 1962, OUP.


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## User With No Name

Keith Bradford said:


> It would be rough going because both of them would speak ancient Greek as their everyday language!


Wow. Thanks. I really did not know that. (Granted, ancient Rome is not my thing.) I was aware of the importance of Greek culture to classical Romans, but I did not know that I would hear the smart set chatting in Greek as they walked to the Forum in 50 B.C. The things one learns...


Keith Bradford said:


> Probus was a teacher in North Africa who left behind several pages of notes on correct spelling which begin:


Probus would have fit in well on this forum, wouldn't he?


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## Abaye

Keith Bradford said:


> It would be rough going because both of them would speak ancient Greek as their everyday language!


Is this an established fact? My language was influenced by Latin (many words have survived until today) at Caesar's and  Cicero's time, or maybe few decades later, most likely via the Roman legions that occupied the land. I think that at this era the military was pure Roman (ethnically), led by the nobility, and yet spoke Latin, not Greek.

*"My language" at those times = Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic.


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## S.V.

We can mention they were bilingual, without suggesting they _could not_ speak in Latin to each other.  "_in 92_ [] _the Roman schools of rhetoric were closed down_"1 (when Cic. was 14); "_before 88 B.C. _[] _the lectures of Diodotu_s"2, "_declaiming daily, often in Latin, but still more frequently in Greek_."3

It is likely the Class. reconstruction is not perfect, but you talk of an 'accent' in that scenario. You find some around (cf. Cat. & Hom.).


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## Apollodorus

S.V. said:


> We can mention they were bilingual, without suggesting they _could not_ speak in Latin to each other.


Latin was the language of administration and law, as well as being the language of the masses. But it is true that the educated classes tended to know Greek, this being the language of literature and culture. Reading Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey followed by Plato and Aristotle was not uncommon. Cicero’s writings (_Academica_, etc.) show in-depth knowledge of the Greek philosophers and he seems to have coined a number of Latin words modelled on the Greek originals.

Claudius, who was bilingual, referred to Latin and Greek as “our two languages”, took every occasion to declare his regard for the Greek language and its superiority, quoted Homer frequently and used Greek in the senate when communicating with ambassadors (Suetonius, _Claudius_ 42.1).

Having said that, he was also fluent in Etruscan which apparently was still spoken at the time …. 🙂


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## Hulalessar

I have never heard it suggested that educated Romans used Greek among themselves in the same way that Russian aristocrats used French. If they did then surely all Cicero's and Pliny's letters would be in Greek.


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## Abaye

Apollodorus said:


> Latin was the language of administration and law, as well as being the language of the masses.


I believe that in the east, Greek was the language of administration and local aristocracy (not sure if including Rome-born officials). 

<off-topic>


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## Apollodorus

Hulalessar said:


> I have never heard it suggested that educated Romans used Greek among themselves in the same way that Russian aristocrats used French. If they did then surely all Cicero's and Pliny's letters would be in Greek.


Greek may not have been as widely spoken in Rome as French in Russia, but that many members of the upper classes knew and spoke Greek is not in dispute. Cicero was one of the Romans who were educated in Greece while others had native Greeks (including educated slaves) as private teachers. So, they could have spoken Greek among themselves, had they wished to do so.

Some did write Greek, e.g., Scipio Africanus wrote his memoirs in Greek, St Paul wrote his Epistle to the Romans in Greek, Clement of Rome wrote his epistles in Greek, Marcus Aurelius wrote _Meditations_ in Greek, etc.

Otherwise, the language normally used at Rome was Latin. Obviously, Greek would have been more widely spoken in the eastern part of the empire where it had been in use at least since Alexander the Great.


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