When and why did the
Latin the ancient Romans spoke change so much compared to the way modern Italians speak? Why is Latin sometimes taught with C pronounced K and sometimes C pronouced S? I’ve found a lot of Brits and my Scots grandfather learned Latin with the C=S.
Also, explain dead language. How much of a dead language is Latin ? There is no major population that uses it in daily life so it is dead. Right? But in the Sciences it is used constantly worldwide.
All languages change over time, not just in pronunciation but in other aspects.
I wouldn’t say that Latin is “used constantly worldwide” in the sciences. Latin words, possibly, but the Latin language, no. It is still in regular use at an official level in the Catholic church (and was in very widespread use in that church up to the 1970s). Nevertheless it is a dead language in the the sense that it’s nobody’s first or vernacular language, and it doesn’t change or develop (apart from the coining of necessary new words). It is precisely these qualities which made it useful as an international common language in the past.
Because there are no native speakers of Latin, Latin pronunciation is affected by the speaker’s native language, and the values which speakers of Latin give to vowels and consonants, and the stresses they give to words and phrases, tend to be the same as the values and stresses which are appropriate to their native language. Hence English speakers of Latin will often give the letter “c” and “s” value in a situation where it would have an “s” value in an English word, and so forth.
Latin has a long history. It is now a dead language in the sense that nobody learns latin as their first language learned from birth.
The infulence of Latin is still present in modern languages. The formal scientific name of each species of plant and animal is given in Latin - although many of the words used are almost pseudo-Latin based personal names etc. Latin phrases are are widely used in the legal profesion such as pro bono (short for pro bono publico - for the public good). And of course many every day expressions are actually Latin, for example: etc (et cetera).
In North Western Europe and elsewhere, the first people to be able to read and write learned to do so in Latin. When they came to write their own native languages they naturally used the Latin alphabet with which they were familiar. The sound value of some letters had to be changed and some new letters were required. English added J and K for example plus some other letters such as ‘thorn’ which have since been dropped.
For a long time Latin was taught primarily as a language for read and writting rather than for speaking. Aspects of Latin pronunciation became uncertain. Since then, the ancient pronunciation has been rediscovered by scholars, but there are still some areas of doubt. With people learning to read and write in their native languages before learning Latin it was inevitable that people would tend pronouce Latin using the sound values they had learned when reading their own language and so it was that et cetera came to be pronouced ‘et setera’ rather than the historically correct ‘et ket-er-a’.
How you pronounce Latin is really down to how it is taught. These days, most teachers will try to get close to the original classical Latin. In the past, many teachers in the catholic church or in private schools taught the more anglisised form. I am not sure, but it may be that chuch Latin continues the tradition of the more anglisised pronunciation.
As for Italian, well I dont know. Modern Italian, French and Spanish (and other languages) are based on Vulgar Latin. Vulgar Latin was the everyday language of the Roman people whereas Classical Latin of the famous Latin authors was always a taught and some what artificial language. Classical Latin was much more regularised than Vulgar Latin, resisted imported words etc. Of course, the difference between Classical and Vulgar Latin was less than that between Classical Latin and modern European languages, but it does mean that modern European languages were never based on the Classical Latin we learn today before they started to diverge.
Not so much rediscovered as reconstructed, I imagine. You can draw inferences about pronunciation from poems and oratorical works from the classical period, because we know that these were written for how they sounded as much as for the sense of the words. And you can also draw conclusions from such matters as puns (where records of thses survive), and even from mistakes like mistranscriptions. And then you can generalise from these. Once you know how a given word was probably pronounced, you can make decutions about similar words, or about words using similar syllables. And so forth.
I’d guess that there must be a degree of speculation about the whole exercise, though.
"Somebody found a scroll with pronunciation rules in some dusty corner?"
Well almost. The main source is too find ancient transliterations of Latin into other languages. For example we find that when centrio (centurion) is transliterated into Greek (I think there is a biblical example of this) it gets a Greek hard-K sound. As indeed do all other Latin ‘c’ words. So we know that in ancient Latin ‘c’ was pronounced as a ‘k’.
Other clues come from studying poetry and the spelling mistakes of semi-literates.
Here’s an example of what G. Cornelius mentioned. The biblical verse “They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” in Greek has forms of the word “kaisar” for “Caesar”. See it here: http://www.blueletterbible.org/cgi-bin/c.pl?book=Mat&chapter=22&verse=21&version=kjv
There are also old Latin texts where the author is making fun of the pronounciation used by some other group (the barbarians, the cultural elite, etc.).
And in some sense, Latin is still not dead. Nobody speaks it conversationally any more, and nobody learns it as a first language, but there are, at least, still people who know it. There are a great many languages of which this is not true, and nothing remains at all. These are the truly dead languages.
So the Germans went with kaiser and the Russians ran off in the other direction with czar. Why did the Germans go with k in the Russians with s (sort of).
Yup, for one year. I was awful at it, partly because I never learned English grammar, and partly because I was taking seven university courses concurrently, and it seemed the least important. I would like to study more, but I think I should learn all the grammatical terms first.
There are also some PC CDs available and these are a great help with pronunciation. I have Learn Latin with Asterix from EuroTalk. I can recomend this, but it is not for beginners.
Even so, sooner or later you will need a tutor. I found this quite difficult and faced the prospect of a long journey for the nearest evening class. I settled for a rather expensive, but much more convenient private tutor.
My son has been taking Latin and German for 3 years. Along with Scottish history and culture (grandparents are Stuarts and McGregors)he is fascinated with Latin and German history. It was Russian with me at that age.