Latin Pronunciation A Short Exposition of the Roman Method

版权信息
I INTRODUCTORY.
II SOURCES OF OUR INFORMATION.
III THE LATIN ALPHABET.
IV SOUNDS OF THE LETTERS.
V SOUNDS OF THE DIPTHONGS.—SUMMARY.
VI A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE SUBJECT.

　　A QUESTION of much interest to the student of Latin, and one that does not always receive a satisfactory answer, relates to the sources of our information.
　　What knowledge have we of how the Romans pronounced their own language nineteen hundred years ago? How is it possible after so long an interval to reconstruct the laws of a pronunciation which prevailed at a given period of the remote past?
　　Briefly summarized, the sources of our information are six in number.
　　(1) Statements of the Roman writers themselves, which modern scholarship has laboriously collected. These are of different degrees of explicitness, and of different degrees of value. It is evident that a statement of Cicero, however brief, is more trustworthy and more convincing, with regard to the usage of his own time, than whole pages of testimony in a writer like Priscian who wrote in the sixth century, by which period the language had become corrupt.
　　We may, then, broadly divide the ancient authorities on this subject into two groups,—the first consisting of those writers who themselves belonged to the classical age; the second, of those grammarians and commentators who have left us very full statements, though the date at which they wrote somewhat impairs the value of their testimony.
　　The chief classical authorities to whom appeal can be made are M. Terentius Varro, a contemporary of Cicero, whose treatise on the Latin language has in part come down to us; Cicero himself, from whose rhetorical works one can gather many valuable facts; and M. Fabius Quintilianus, the author of the treatise Institutio Oratorio, in twelve books. It is not merely when these authors speak of definite points of language and pronunciation that they are valuable; sometimes a casual remark, an anecdote, or a pun, may be of very great importance, as will be seen from time to time in the following pages.
　　Of the other writers on language who treat the subject very minutely, a great number might be cited. The most important are Terentianus Maurus, who wrote, perhaps about the third century, a poem on letters, syllables, feet, and metres, which is twice quoted by St. Augustine; Verrius Flaccus, the tutor to the grandchildren of the Emperor Augustus and author of a work on the meaning of words which has come down to us in a later abridgment; Aulus Gellius, who, toward the end of the second century, compiled a huge scrap-book on a variety of subjects, many of them of great linguistic interest, and, with the exception of a few chapters, still extant; Priscianus Caesariensis, who wrote under Justinian at Constantinople eighteen books of grammatical commentaries which form the most complete grammar of antiquity; and Aelius Donatus (A.D. 333), whose elementary treatise was so highly thought of in the Middle Ages that the name "donat" (Chaucer) was used as a generic term for a grammar.
　　From these and many other writers one gathers a great mass of instructive facts; and their very silence is sometimes as significant as what they say.
　　(2) The orthography of the language itself as seen in the inscriptions. Latin orthography was in the main phonetic (Quintilian, I. 7. 11). The language was pronounced as it was spelled. But as is always the case, changes in orthography lagged a little behind changes in the pronunciation. Hence even the blunders made by an ignorant lapidary in cutting an inscription are often a source of information to us.