If Latin were still a spoken language, what would the accent of a native speaker be closest to?
Saturday, October 10th, 2009 at
6:17 am
If they were to learn and speak English, that is. I've heard Romanian & Italian. Also, please let me know what you are basing your suggestion on. Maybe you have taken a class in Latin, or you study languages, etc. Thanks so much.
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Tagged with: amp • latin • study languages • suggestion
Filed under: Latin Language
The premise of this question is wrong, as Latin is still a spoken Language, and have been spoken in Europe continuously since the time of the fall of the Roman Empire. Various European pronunciations developed over time, and in the 1700’s a more began to restore the original pronunciation.
Latin users can be found happily chatting away in Latin on schola
http://schola.ning.com
There is an online free course for spoken conversational Latin, using the restored classical pronunciation
http://latinum.mypodcast.com
One episode deals with the question of the evidence we have for this pronunciation:
http://latinum.mypodcast.com/2007/02/Bennett_On_Latin_Pronunciation_the_evidence-31085.html
Based on vocabulary, modern Italian is closest to Standard Latin. The pronunciation has, of course, changed. I am not sure that even historians are exactly certain exactly what spoken Latin sounded like. The way that the Catholic Church pronounces Latin words is based off of "Church Latin," basically Latin with an Italian twist to make it flow like Italian. Remember that a lot of Romans spoke Greek because it was easier to speak than Latin was.
To give a proper answer, you’d have to say which Latin you want.
Several dialects of Latin existed and they evolved over a long period of time. There is no way to say exactly when Latin stopped being Latin. And since there is no recording, it’s hard to say. But geographically, we’d have to say it should be close to Italian, but there are also several dialects of Italian, so…
That’s an interesting question.
Assuming Latin had not evolved from classical Latin, probably something closer to Swiss.
Comparing the mouth position of spoken Latin (as we can estimate it), the tongue seems to have moved forward quite a bit in modern Italian and in Castilian Spanish. We see evidence of this in late Latin writings. Where these writings deviate from high Latin, we can surmise that this deviation is due to local pronunciation. Indeed, there is a wall in Spain with graffitti dating to the 1st century that says something to the effect of "HOMINEM NON HOMNEM", lamenting the vocalic shift and concatenation of words.
I remember I once browsed a Latin grammar book, and it said French.
But, it was a French book (Bescherelle or Bled).
If I were to guess, I would say Italian, just because it was the language of the Romans, who lived in present day Itay.
i take latin II n i think that a native speaker would sound like a mix of italian with spanish especially w. tha long a’s and i’s