*I have been studying Latin in college and one thing that strikes me is,
the pronunciation of the letter “C,” as a K, and the V as a W, How is it
that scholars know what is the correct pronunciation of classical latin?
*
**There are a great many ways that scholars can deduce the pronunciation of
Classical Latin. One way has to do with how the Romans adopted the Greek
alphabet to write their own language. If they had adopted it directly from
Greek they could have used the Greek letter “gamma” for the Latin G sound.
But they didn’t. They adopted their alpabet from the Etruscans, who got it
from the Greeks. The Etruscans didn’t need a G letter, so they didn’t use
“gamma”, but they did need a K sound, which they wrote as C (simplifying
the K letter by eliminating the initial vertical stroke and rounding the
other two strokes that meet in the middle). The Romans needed to reinvent
a G letter. They realized that the sounds K and G are pronounced the same
in the mouth, and only differ in the throat (they differ in that G is a K
with vibration of the vocal cords of the glottis. Since C was used as K in
Etruscan, the Romans made a mark on the C to invent the letter G and use it
for the G pronunciation. Working backwards, we can see that C was
pronounced as K in Latin, just as it was in Etruscan and in Greek
(understanding that Latin/Etruscan C is an altered drawing of the Greek K
letter).
Words borrowed at the time from other languages whose pronunciation is
known also confirm the pattern. Words borrowed INTO Latin from Greek with
a “chi” were spelled C+H, as they still are, cf. psyCHe (= soul),
CHemistry, etc. This sound at the time in Greek was literally K+H, so the
Latin C represents the K sound of Greek chi (X in the Greek alphabet).
Words borrowed FROM Latin into other languages also show the pronunciation
at the time, for example, the W sound of “Wine” in English from Latin
“Vinus”, and the pronunciation Kaiser in German from Latin Caesar (note the
current English pronunciation of “caesar” comes to us through French), also
Scots “kirk” for English “church”, from Greek kurike. Note that Greek uses
a K letter (called “kappa”) to represent the sound, but in Old English
there is no K, the C was used according to Latin convention at that time to
represent the K sound, OE cyrce from “church”, originally pronounced like
Scots “kirk” and only later pronounced in English “church” with the “ch”
sound represented according to a later French spelling convention rather
than the old Latin spelling convention of “ch” to represent the old Greek
sound of X (“chi”). (So, in English “ch” has a K sound in words of Greek
origin, according to the Latin way of spelling them, and “ch” has the
“CHeese” pronunciation in words of French origin which indeed had that
sound at the time. Later, “ch” changed in French to a “sh” pronunciation,
“CHief” and “CHef” are actually the same French word borrowed at different
times, once before the change of “ch” > “sh” and once after. The original
Latin word was “caput”, meaning “head”. English and other languages keep
the K pronunciation in words based directly on this Latin word, e.g.,
“Capital” and “Captain”.)
You probably want to ask how we know how any of the other languages were
pronounced at the time, in order to make the comparisons. The whole thing
is a large puzzle in which only the right solution works and then
everything falls into place. A basic principle for the K sounds has to do
with the commonness of the historical change from a K to a CH (as in
church), to SH (as in maCHine, the modern French outcome of an original K,
related to Greek “meCHanical”), or S sound “caesar”, “circle” etc etc), but
never the reverse, that is, “ch”, “sh” and “s” sound don’t change into “k”.
There are no major problems or controversies among linguists about these
issues. They are among the things that we understand extremely well, and
have for well over a century.
P.S. the change from W to V is also very well known, for example, in most
of the continental languages, e.g., German (also the descendants of Latin).
However, the change from V to W is also possible through a series of
stages. Nevertheless, we know from deep historical comparisons that
direction of change in Latin etc was from W to V, for example, that English
has remained faithful to an old W sound for over six thousand years, while
it changed to V in Late Latin almost two thousand years ago (but had not
yet changed in Classical Latin).**