You're right, modern German still uses the word "Kaiser" - it means "emperor". :) And I was straight out baffled that it sounds almost exactly like how you pronounced the famous man's name there! Funnily enough, the name "Caesar" (written the same way of course) is now pronounced "Zäsar" (you wouldn't write that). I remember being confused as a school kid when I first heard that the one was supposedly derived from the other!
My problem with this video (and other videos like this one on other channels) is that they first tell you that there's vast scientific evidence for something, and therefore we should trust the eggheads, but none of that evidence is ever presented so that everyone interested could check it out for himself and verify that "yes, indeed, that's how it must have been for real".
Another proof classical latin had velar (hard) c in all positions is Sardinian. The words for "a hundred" and "ten" is in certain dialect of Sardinian "chentu" (pronounced with a k sound) and deche (same hard k sound). It's very common in world languages to go from a k sound to a soft c sound like the "ch" in "chip" or even from k to s sound. But it's very unusual (I don't know any instance of it) for a soft ch sound to mutate into a k sound over time. So we also have a living proof of the "k" pronunciation of "c" even before "e" and "i" in classical latin. All romance languages palatalized (softened) that sound, while the more isolated varieties of the center of Sardinia kept it due to the conservatism typical of island communities.
It always so weird when people get worked up over reconstructed pronounciations. When I learned Old Norse there were some people who got mad at me(mainly Icelanders)for pronouncing things wrong when it's literally a different lanaguage lmao. Sure they are similar, but still a different language. I have a freind who knows Ancient Greek, and a lot of people from Greece get annoyed because they took a bs class in school and think they know everything. Only anceint language where most people learning/speaking it seem pretty chill is Old English which is what I'm currenty learning.
I think this is because Icelanders and Greeks see the ancient stages of their languages and see the connection to their native languages. It's a thing of pride, and if you use the reconstructed pronunciation, it alienates the natives from what they perceive as “their language” and makes them angry. It's like commenting on US politics as a European - one can only lose. With Old English, there is no such deep connection to any part of the English-speaking world, because it differs so much from the modern language. Who would be able to recognise Ælfric's sermons as English, if asked on the street? In some places, I'd be lucky if someone recognised the Canterbury Tales as English, when people think Shakespeare spoke “Old English”, because that's the oldest stage of English they were shown in school. For me, the oldest stage of my native language shown at school was Middle High German. But my favourite old Germanic language is Old English (Late West Saxon, which I'm also learning).
There is another channel of an Italian content creator who actually speaks and has a degree in Old Norse. It is Nova Lectio, section La Mitologia Norrena.
The main problem with reconstructed pronunciations is that they are educated guesses. Nobody "knows" what ancient languages sounded like. This wouldn't be a problem if they didn't make absolute claims. "We know" and "we have proven"
6:04 in Persian we call it Kesar. After the capture of Emperor Valerian by king Shapur I, Valerian and his soliders made many structures around the Sassanid empire, we named a bridge after him, we call the bridge "Band-e Kesar"
Every video so far on this channel has been very interesting to me. This channel is perfect for me! Especially this video as I am trying to learn Latin. Gratias, Metatron!
There's similar problem with Old Norse. Many people believe Old Norse should be pronounced like modern Icelandic because there are no recordings of medieval Scandinavians speaking it but of course linguists have used those methods Metatron mentioned to guess the most probable way of pronouncing Old Norse. Jackson Crawford has made a similar video about that topic.
Hey Metatron, big fan of your videos and keep up the good work. I thought I might share this: my name is قيصر it is an Arabic name meaning Caesar and is transliterated as "Qaysar" even though I write it as Kaisar this could be added in addition to Greek and German versions.
Linguistics is one of the most mind broadening sciences. Or many sciences if one takes the various paths available. Psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, phonology, historical linguistics and so on. I always think that children at school would benefit from a brief introduction to the subject. But there again, who would teach it? Hmm...
Thank you Metatron for tackling my comment on Latin in the previous video. Can't wait to see and hear more about it. 👍 Great job and keep teaching us correct and precise History.
I made a comment about not knowing pronunciations in one of your previous videos. I wasn't trying to be a jerk, and suggest we don't know at all, but even with modern languages there's a range within the phonetics that are used, and even in modern dictionaries some are just wrong. Hardly any English speaker for example pronounces truck as t-ruck. They pronounce it like tchruck, which has different phonetic symbols used for that T, but most dictionaries leave it as something like t-ruk. At best we can come close with some Latin words from some dialects. I'm glad you made the video to clarify that it's an educated guess as to how a specific word sounded in different contexts, but like with modern languages we can never know how any given person pronounced it in a given setting.
After so many of your videos on classical latin, I understand why my teacher in school mentioned how some scholars say that Portuguese is a VERY close language to latin. We use most of the things you mention of odd in latin pronunciation, like the very nasal M. In portuguese, if the M in the end of a sillable (or N if it is followed by a consonant) always have a nasal sound. Example being the number 1 "um", it is a very nasal sound, same with 100 "cem" (the c is soft in the case).
En realidade é "uN" con N velar ... mais os portugueses gustan de usar o M... Algúns agora xa pronuncian ise N velar como un M... Very close, maybe only the northern tradicional speaking portuguese... the european southern standard is miles away...
@@bilbohob7179 I live in the southish brazil, sao paulo to be precise, we use uM. Granted that in this city, if you change neighborhood you change accent, but in general, people use a nasal M in most words.
Well latin is lost between all the romance languages Even French and Romanian They differ a lot phonetically but still preserve a lot of classical Latin trace in spelling and vocabulary
@@Gab8riel No, actually meant I live in somewhere more south than north, specifically in the South east area. I tried to make it more general because the South East of brazil is a very small area compared to the northeast and noth reagions, even the center-west
I think what is always very important is to distinguish when we know something substantively as opposed to it being our best guess. When someone comes along and says "This is what it sounded like." I immediately question it. When someone comes along and says "This is what we think it sounded like." I am far less skeptical. The former requires explanation. The latter is understood not to be perfect and so far less scrutiny is given. In fact, the guesswork may be completely accurate. (And I mean "guesswork" in less of a "random guess" sense and more of a highly educated guess). Still, we should try and be clear if, at any part, we do not know for sure.
It's important to keep in mind that while if you take the entire reconstructed pronunciation as one thing, then yes it's our best guess, but if you focus on any given feature of the pronunciation, our certainty can range from tentative to extremely certain. In the case of Latin, most of the reconstructed pronunciation we have an immense level of certainty about, similar to how certain we are that Caesar was a real person or that Pangea existed. Only a few details are more tentative.
Friend, if we use your criterion we are sure of nothing. Nothing is substantive and nothing can go on textbooks. Because modern academia is based on taking nothing for granted, anything you ever say COULD be wrong even if in slight ways. I, personally, wouldn't follow your advice because it would not only be impractical but also tedious and i just find it silly. This is what I do. If we know something with like 99% certainty I WILL say "This is what it sounded like" and haters be damned. Cheers.
@@crusaderACR I set no criterion for how we are to know things. I merely asserted that we should be honest about what we actually know as opposed to what we speculate. In fact, your reply does the very thing I warn against in multiple places and is incorrect as a direct result.
I always find myself thinking of Phonology reciting the Credo. _nostram salutem_ takes me to my first Latin class. It was interesting to learn the pronunciation of v be ~ /w/. The /u/ in _salutem_ is very understandable if the v in _salve_ (and other words derived from the same root word) is pronounced ~/w/
the "K-sound" is actually very prominent in languages that stemmed out from the phoenicians (where we get our phonetic alphabet). "C" pronounced as "S", on the other hand, is more oriented to the cyrillic alphabet.
That's fascinating. I had this doubt, specially about Latin and Old Norse. I have another doubt, how does a language "die" and how long does it take for it to happen?
Neither Latin nor Old Norse ever died, but they are dead. A dead language is one that has no native speakers, and a language dies when it loses all of its native speakers. Latin and ON changed gradually over time into modern descendent languages, so we can't say they ever died, but we arbitrarily no longer consider the modern descendent languages to be the same language as their ancestor.
@@yulong29 Old Norse evolved into all of the modern north germanic languages (Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Faroese, etc). Icelandic is the most conservative of them (has changed the least) but it is not the same as Old Norse. It's a bit like if your cousin looked more like your grandfather than you, you're still your grandfather's descendent.
Indeed. Luke Raneri has many videos in both Greek and Latin phonology based on the times. I’d recommend checking his channel to see the variations throughout time and place. Ecclesiastical Latin, of course, is an example of Latin changing pronunciation. All the Romance Languages, in fact, involve Latin changing according to time and place. Some changed drastically (see French) and others less so such as Sardinian. But it’s a very dynamic thing like you said.
The guesses about consonants are probably better than those about vowels. It seems for instance quite possible that the long and short versions of vowels not only differed in length but also in quality like the vowels in English "peat" and "pit". Some Latinists actually argue that this was indeed the case.
Also vowels are much much more likely to change based on accent than consonants. And people living just 20 miles away from each other can have vastly different accents even today never mind 2000 years ago :)
about a year in to learning latin and from what i have learned so far the problem is not that we have problems telling how peaple would have sounded but that in the modern world we try to learn latin from a perspective where we need to understand all of the words (or at least words from many periods) developed in a 2500 ish year evolution of a language in order to maintain it as a functional language, this means that we have to mix words like dominus / herum / liberum and cassa / domus that come from different contexts in order to make a language thats coherent and preserves legibility across time, so like ecclesiastical medieval and restored classical do all have legitimate historical basis and use but its also important not to take them as too solid of a basis ether because language needs some fluidity in pronunciation to be learnable and we are going to come across terms that are anachronistic from the pronunciation styles we choose to learn with, especially because the objectives of those styles are highly specific too, like restored classical has a target of "what was spoken most commonly in Rome and Alexandria during the principate" and ecclesiastical's target is "preserve what was handed down to the church fathers as of the turn of the last century", so like we know so much about how things were spoken it makes kinda a web of compromises truisms and contradictions, all that being said i do think that r classical latin presents the language in its most beautiful commonly available form
Interesting video! When I learned latin back in the 80s, we`d eventually get into some latin poetry, Ovid mostly. If you have to read those verses out loud, you´ll quickly notice that in terms of alliterations and end rhymes, the linguistically reconstructed (classic) pronunciation makes a lot more sense, compared to later medieval or early modern versions. Proper rhyming is for instance also key to understanding how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe must have spoken German for the most part: some of his verses in "Faust" would only rhyme properly, when pronounced in a Hessian/ Frankfurt dialect. Having said that, I would assume that also spoken, classical latin 2,000 years ago certainly had it´s slangs, jargons and dialects. So, following a conversation between, say, Marcus Tullius Cicero and Caius Julius Caesar, it´d be by no means a given that both would have sounded exactly and entirely the same. So, as much as there still might be some leeway in pronuncing classic latin correctly, I´d say the way Metatron and most modern linguists are recreating, speaking and advocating it, is absolutely valid!
German borrowed the word cella twice, once when it was still pronounced with a /k/ yielding modern German "Keller" (basement, storage rooms) and later from medieval Latin to yield modern "Zelle" (cell, originally the room of a monk)
Mi spiace invadere i commenti parlando Italiano, ma ti seguo da parecchio sul primo canale e ora anche qui e sono tanto tanto arrabbiato per il fatto che , tutta la conoscenza divulgata in ben due canali gestiti da te, non può essere divulgata anche ai non anglofoni. Persone che vorrebbero tanto guardare i tuoi video e imparare tanto, ma non possono a causa della barriera linguistica. Non so se mai proporrai video in Italiano, ma sappi che c'è tanta gente che lo aspetta. Ad majiora semper!
Ciao e grazie. Ho un video sul canale principale in italiano intitolato "gli dei dell'antico Egitto", se vuoi dare un'occhiata. Se i dati analitici dovessero mostrare un riscontro favorevole, in futuro potrei aprire un "Metatron Italia". Vedremo.
Chiedo scusa per l intrusione 😅, ma a quanto ho capito dai recenti sviluppi di RUclips sarà possibile aggiungere una seconda traccia audio a tutti i video. Immagino una sorta di auto doppiaggio potrebbe essere interessante per chi non riesce ad fruire dei contenuti in inglese. Just saying😊 Good job as always
Hi Metatron. The hungarian language uses also long and short vovels, written just the same way as latin did. Maybe you should study some hungarian too, I am sure it would be great fun 🙂
I major Hebrew at uni and our professor insists in using modern Israeli pronunciation for Ancient Hebrew. I think this is a most heretic sin, after all, if you are reconstructing the "dead" patterns, words and grammar of a "dead" language, then why not do the same thing with pronunciation, taking linguistical science into consideration? I pray the psalms in Ancient Reconstructed Pronunciation and, among other stuff, when you make a distinction between long and short vowels, the poetic rhythm of the psalms become pretty aparent.
I wonder where the Slavic pronunciation of latin C comes from, it's very consistently rendered as /ts/ at the beginning of words like in car (tzar), cesarz (emperor), Cezar, centrum - all starting with /ts/ sound.
bo nasze C to tak realnie TS 😂 tak samo jak nasze Cz to Tsz dlatego czasem ludzie wymawiają trzymaj jako czymaj od tylko do kilka też dwa kroki ch i k też mamy przemienne bez pamięci oryginalnych form może z jakiegoś dawnego kh co by tłumaczyło nieregularne słowa jak kształt (pszczoła = bzyczoła jak rzodkiewka rzadk-iewka) chąsać = kąsać łacińskie cuje to nasze czyje łacińskie cada to nasze każdy każde mamy raz kapelusz a raz czapka cholernie nierówno adaptujemy słowa obce dlaczego czytamy a nie cijtamy bo wybraliśmy jedną gramatykę oficjalną gdy było kilka organicznie funkcjonujących i chyba mało kompatybilnych raz czoło a raz g(o)laca nie mamy też żadnych słów oryginalnie z literą f 😉 hiszpański i kataloński są ciekawe tam pierwsze b wymawiają jakby byli z Afryki mBien w bardziej maturalnej dźwięcznej firmie kiedy nasze b już bardziej leci w p romańskiej pllorar nasze płakać ale i bliskie błagać może i brak hiszpańskie platan nasze banan może te oryginalnie wspólne jak plen plenić plon plemię nie zyskało wersji z b chociaż brzemię? brzemienna? w znaczeniu starszy patriarcha baba i papa ban i pan ale częściej u nas b zamienia się z w balia bania wanna może boleć i wołać ma coś wspólnego romańskie critar gritar to nasze krzyczeć kracze zgrzyta angielski ma grief żal żałoba ale jest i gorycz więc może sobie zmyślam mógłbym z tego dojść do corrida a to przecież od correr biegać
Pronunciation of "Caesar" reminded me of the city here in Turkey, "Kayseri". Supposedly the city has something to do with one of the Caesars but I'm not sure what it is right now... and yeah, it is pronunced just like you type it. With a solid "K"
''Surrounding languages'' yes but our knowledge of surrounding languages prununciation is also based on the same techniques. But I like the fact you admit is a guess even if I also agree it's not ''just a guess''.
Can we make this man record his voice speaking classical Latin pronunciation and then implement it to an Ai Bot that you can chat with and that uses his voice so we all can mimic his pronunciation? So that everyone in the world speaking Latin doesn’t use their own respective accents pronouncing Latin, so that everyone learning Latin now learn the right pronunciation from day 1 so it becomes right from the start? Kickstarter?
I wonder if there's any possibility that the marking on the vowels represent the stressed syllable. Instead of the prolonged vowel, much like they do it in Spanish....
Some seem very logical to me, for example why U in spanish is called "Uve" and when i say "vuelta" for example, it halfway shifts into what the latin classical pronunciation is.
10:30 I noticed you tend to list the vowels in the Japanese order (A I U E O), rather than the ”Western” order (A E I O U). I think I can guess, what language you’ve been delving into, lately. 🙃
There are many derivatives of Latin. I've heard some dialects of Italian are closer in some ways as far as vocabulary. I've also heard some dialects of Sardinian & perhaps Catalan may sound like Old Latin. Which of the modern languages do you think may sound more similar to 1st century Latin? I've even heard some say Romanian has similar pronunciation.
I wonder how did we end up with the modern Latin pronunciation that is used by the Church or even taught in school if there are such differences like the C-K sound or the AE-E one.
Ciao Raffaello, grazie e complimenti per i tuoi video. Non voglio essere l'ennesimo scettico senza argomentazioni, quindi ti esporrò cosa non mi convince di alcune giustificazioni per una certa pronuncia del latino. Tu dici che Caesar si pronuncia con un suono duro "K" perché i greci lo trascrissero con la K e perché in altre lingue contigue all'area latinofona si dice per esempio "Kaiser". MA io ti domando: i greci avevano un'alternativa alla "K" per traslitterare "Caesar"? In greco antico esiste il suono "C" dolce? Non mi pare. Non è che hanno traslitterato con la K perché non avevano altre opzioni più valide? INOLTRE perché per ricostruire la fonetica latina dovremmo dare così tanto peso a come vengono pronunciate oggi certe parole di origine latina da popoli che non parlano nemmeno una lingua romanza rispetto a come pronunciamo gli equivalenti noi che parliamo lingue romanze? Italiani, francesi, spagnoli, portoghesi...tutti che pronunciano i discendenti della parola "Caesar" con una C dolce; questo conta meno di come i tedeschi pronunciano Kaiser? Non voglio essere in nessun modo polemico, da non esperto vorrei solo capire. Grazie ancora e complimenti per il canale!
You forgot to mention that different languages evolve differently. That different languages including German and Greek preserved the pronunciation of the letter/phoneme K in most contexts is what allows us to know what ancient Romans sounded like.
@@jtinalexandria He didn't mention that different languages undergo different sound changes. The way people might understand his video is that only Latin changed into the romance languages, while in fact all languages changed and we can use the same comparison techniques to find out how ancient Greek sounded for example.
Credo potresti fare un video a tema linguistico in collaborazione con Yasmina Pani, ha detto di conoscere bene l'inglese quindi magari ne esce qualcosa di interessante anche per i nostri amici di tutto il mondo🤭
9:22 would've switched to Dutch on fruit.😅 11:00 in Dutch this is sort of obvious, so I guess it's not such a long stretch that this might be the same case in Latin as well. Ko"k"en (long o) a"pp"els (short a)
I don't know if they teach proper phonics in elementary school anymore, but I didn't understand short and long vowels in English when I was a kid. Vowel length had nothing to do with the terms. A long vowel said its name, and a short vowel made a different sound. I retained the information, and just figured that they had to call the different sounds something. I was also taught how to recognize a short or long vowel in writing, but that flew out the window once we got to the big words. To this day, I still find Russian easier to read than English, which is my native language.
Yeah. English used to have p̟honemic vowel length, ie. a distinction between long and short vowels. The long vowels, however, were affected by what linguist call "the Great Vowel Shift" so that they changed considerably in quality. For instance the letter i, denoted the sound /iː/ in middle english, but by the end of the Early Modern English period it had turned into /ai/, similarly /uː/ had become /əʊ/. So English long and short vowels do not only differ in terms of vowel quantity (ie. time) but also in vowel quality, hence the qualitative difference between /slɪp̟/ (slip̟) and /sliːp̟/ (sleep).
... de hecho los primeros que poblaron el territorio de la actual Rumanía, procedentes de las estepas al norte del Ponto Euxino (Mar Negro) trajeron una lengua (el Proto Romance) que luego dió origen a las demás lenguas romances incluído el latín, o sea que no fue el latín la lengua madre ... el latín fue una de muchas lenguas que llegaron a lo que hoy es Italia y los territorios de lo que hoy son España, Francia, Portugal, etc ... en fin ... que cuando las huestes latinas invadieron a Dacia/Valaquia, ya en ese territorio se hablaba el romano antiguo ... ... ... han hecho creer que el latín es la lengua precursora de las lenguas romances, pero es un invento/construcción de la iglesia para imponer su hegemonía ... ... ... en muchos textos encontrados en bibliotecas rumanas hay mucha información valiosa que desmonta la teoría del latín como lengua fundacional de las mal llamadas lenguas neo-latinas ... ... ... face-blue-smiling ... que es obvio que las oleadas de los hablantes en Proto-Romance pasaron primero por Dacia (hoy Rumanía) dejando a su paso la semilla del Rumano y luego por el resto de los territorios mal llamados neo-latinos ... y no al revés ... ... ... lo que se ve no se pregunta ... no se puede tapar el sol con un dedo ... la verdad siempre sale a relucir ... !!!
No matter how the supposed Classical Latin pronunciation is defended - I don’t find these contentions convincing. I appreciate that many people have their hearts set on this hypothesis - it can only be called that at best- I think it is best to contend that there are a number of theories. Each to their own! Interesting video though.
The secret is the word "educated" in the expression "educated guess": it doesn't mean what academics want us to believe it means. Educated means only that there is an institutional political frame around a certain problem, not that there is any kind of super-partes authority implied in it. It's just a guess, and, frankly a waste of time (nothing against wasting time in ways that are entertaining) that has become an industry and a political industry at that. About Latin: guesses are guesses, but the only people still speaking Latin are the clergy of the Catholic Church (not as much as they used to), so Latin pronunciation is presently, definitely, the Ecclesiastical one. The rest is just fun and games.
In my dialect in Spanish, Some words when I shorten them they get more of long vowel sound like in NADA I say NAA, Which means NOTHING, I'm from Mexico
probably all true more or less but still we have no idea what "vulgar-latin" sounded like and that must be spoken by the vast majority of uneducated ( hence just by hearing , not meaning the misspelling grafitis! ) people in the roman empire...
I like the way Metatron speaks it. It sounds so alive. In my head, I've always thought of it as a very stilted sounding language. Which is my own ignorance. All languages change over time. I doubt if I would be able to understand someone speaking English from 500 years ago very well.
Only Romans had a great preserved and documented history Not any other civilisation did The Greeks somehow preserved a lot and again thanks to Romans Viva la Latina
My roots are Serbian and Croatian but i was born in Romania,,,,,,,,,, when i was young/child i hated school😂😂😂😂 in my first 4 years of school we had to learn Russian and Latin language 🤣🤣🤣🤣 they removed Russian from year 5 and introduced french and English 😁😁😁😁 i hated and still hate school, i hate school because of how education brainwashing sistem works
Could you please expaine, for all English speaking astronomers out there, how to pronounce Uranus properly. Because they are stuck in their urine/anus problem for a while now. Thank you in advance 😀
I think the most annoying thing I keep seeing is the "different regional pronunciations" fallacy. Yes, Rome was big and had many regions, languages, and socioeconomics causing people to pronounce things differently. However, this doesn't mean there were different pronunciations. Their different pronunciations were the result of them trying to pronounce Latin with their native sounds. That doesn't mean those were the sounds of the language...Latin sounds were always Latin sounds.
This. It's a bit like saying that English spoken by people from India is its own "dialect" of English...it's not. It's just non-native speakers using their own native sound sets to approximate English sounds. Just because a German might pronounce "thick" as "sick" doesn't mean that "sick" is a valid/alternative pronunciation of "thick", it just means that German fellow needs to practice his dental fricatives to make his English sound more natural.
@@thethrashyone Agreed. There is a growing problem with the polarization between phonetic purism and phonetic chaos. Both extremes are equally incorrect and should be stopped at all costs. A purist will say that a language has these sounds, and only these pronunciations are correct. This is nonsense. Even natives, speaking their own languages, will have small differences in their sounds and pronunciations. Chaos lovers will say all sounds are a matter of perspective. For example, let's say that there is a small group of native speakers that don't say the "ch" (tʃ) sound like everyone else, but instead use the "sh" (ʃ) sound. Chaos lovers will try to argue that this is proof we don't know the correct sounds of the language because we have an example of a minority doing something different from the majority. This is nonsense. If it was a 50/50 split I would say OK we need to examine what is happening. If we have a 60/40...or...70/30 split I would say perhaps there's a phonetic transition in play, or maybe a phonetic exchange happening between neighboring languages, or something else which needs to be examined. But this is a rarity. The majority of the time we find like a 80/20 or a 90/10 split. And it's almost always the phonetics of a foreign language being used for pronunciation of target language.
From what I understand, people in rural 1st century Italy did pronounce things slightly differently (ae and oe were both pronounced kind of like e, while palatalization started to appear at around that time). Still, when learning a language, it's generally the best bet to learn either the standard language or a specific dialect (eg picking either Mexican or European Spanish when learning that language).
@@akl2k7 It's a question of how fine we want to split the hairs. Yes, there are going to be differences in pronunciation for a number of reasons. However, there is a difference between saying "...there are differences in pronunciation because of socioeconomics or foreign language influences..." and saying something like "...a language has multiple possible pronunciations because different pronunciations were being observed..." Which is the what the groups I was talking about like to do. For example, they will say things like "I found a reference with Julius complaining they pronounce the 'c' like an 's' therefore we have to accept that the 's' was pronounced for a 'c'." No, I'm sorry that's not how real world academics work. We need to know a lot of information here in order to say this type of thing....like...who said it, when did they say it, were there any contributing factors to them saying it? That type of thing.
The Romans were diglossic: they spoke Vulgar Latin (Proto-Romance) in their daily lives, but wrote and used in official purposes another dead language which we call 'Latin' today.
says much because the fact of language preferring hard sounds also mix of hard sound with I like KI in KIKERO won't change KI into softened version which "Ch" can be example of this is very popular in my language with quite a variety of such sounds to that ci is spelled getting as confusing as Korean with it's English like j and ch both hard to differentiate or in English karakter into character this hardness was power of Latin because makes it easier to learn and keeps things simple and reading exactly as written
Answer: we don't. Those are unfounded hypotheses and conjectures which do not give enough data to reconstruct the phonetics and phonotactics of Latin. Also, the (educated) Romans spoke Latin with a Romance accent, but the Romance (aka Vulgar Latin) was not written or reproduced in literary works, so we have ZERO idea how 90% of illiterate second-language speakers pronounced the official Latin.
You're right, modern German still uses the word "Kaiser" - it means "emperor". :) And I was straight out baffled that it sounds almost exactly like how you pronounced the famous man's name there!
Funnily enough, the name "Caesar" (written the same way of course) is now pronounced "Zäsar" (you wouldn't write that).
I remember being confused as a school kid when I first heard that the one was supposedly derived from the other!
You still often find the spelling "Cäsar" instead of Caesar. Besides from that you are absolutely correct.
@@keyem4504 suppose you're right. 😅
KAICAP Greek, Qaysar Arabic .
Pretty easy. Cæsar is the Latin spelling
The Russian word Tsar comes from Caesar also
IN Finnish schools we at least in the 80s pronounce Ceasar with a K but e as the wovel. In Finnish emperor is keisari.
The only problem with this channel is that it's new and I can't binge watch it for a few hours :(
My sentiments exactly!
Luckily that's just a temporary issue
Well, he also has the "Metatron" channel, with years of content that you can binge until you turn blue. :)
@@skaruts already did :(
My problem with this video (and other videos like this one on other channels) is that they first tell you that there's vast scientific evidence for something, and therefore we should trust the eggheads, but none of that evidence is ever presented so that everyone interested could check it out for himself and verify that "yes, indeed, that's how it must have been for real".
Another proof classical latin had velar (hard) c in all positions is Sardinian. The words for "a hundred" and "ten" is in certain dialect of Sardinian "chentu" (pronounced with a k sound) and deche (same hard k sound). It's very common in world languages to go from a k sound to a soft c sound like the "ch" in "chip" or even from k to s sound. But it's very unusual (I don't know any instance of it) for a soft ch sound to mutate into a k sound over time. So we also have a living proof of the "k" pronunciation of "c" even before "e" and "i" in classical latin. All romance languages palatalized (softened) that sound, while the more isolated varieties of the center of Sardinia kept it due to the conservatism typical of island communities.
A kent'annos!
Dalmatian used to have hard k before e, but soft c before I; but got supplanted by Venetian and Croatian.
Great Video
Loving Metatron's Academy. The uploads are informative and not too long. Keep up the good work❤😁
I love it too. It's funny though, I'd prefer even longer videos with even more detail. I guess we are all different! haha
It always so weird when people get worked up over reconstructed pronounciations. When I learned Old Norse there were some people who got mad at me(mainly Icelanders)for pronouncing things wrong when it's literally a different lanaguage lmao. Sure they are similar, but still a different language. I have a freind who knows Ancient Greek, and a lot of people from Greece get annoyed because they took a bs class in school and think they know everything. Only anceint language where most people learning/speaking it seem pretty chill is Old English which is what I'm currenty learning.
I think this is because Icelanders and Greeks see the ancient stages of their languages and see the connection to their native languages.
It's a thing of pride, and if you use the reconstructed pronunciation, it alienates the natives from what they perceive as “their language” and makes them angry.
It's like commenting on US politics as a European - one can only lose.
With Old English, there is no such deep connection to any part of the English-speaking world, because it differs so much from the modern language.
Who would be able to recognise Ælfric's sermons as English, if asked on the street?
In some places, I'd be lucky if someone recognised the Canterbury Tales as English, when people think Shakespeare spoke “Old English”, because that's the oldest stage of English they were shown in school.
For me, the oldest stage of my native language shown at school was Middle High German.
But my favourite old Germanic language is Old English (Late West Saxon, which I'm also learning).
There is another channel of an Italian content creator who actually speaks and has a degree in Old Norse. It is Nova Lectio, section La Mitologia Norrena.
The main problem with reconstructed pronunciations is that they are educated guesses. Nobody "knows" what ancient languages sounded like. This wouldn't be a problem if they didn't make absolute claims. "We know" and "we have proven"
6:04 in Persian we call it Kesar. After the capture of Emperor Valerian by king Shapur I, Valerian and his soliders made many structures around the Sassanid empire, we named a bridge after him, we call the bridge "Band-e Kesar"
❤very interesting and makes perfect sense your explanation about Latin
Every video so far on this channel has been very interesting to me. This channel is perfect for me! Especially this video as I am trying to learn Latin. Gratias, Metatron!
Interesting video keep them coming.😊
There's similar problem with Old Norse. Many people believe Old Norse should be pronounced like modern Icelandic because there are no recordings of medieval Scandinavians speaking it but of course linguists have used those methods Metatron mentioned to guess the most probable way of pronouncing Old Norse. Jackson Crawford has made a similar video about that topic.
Hey Metatron, big fan of your videos and keep up the good work. I thought I might share this:
my name is
قيصر
it is an Arabic name meaning Caesar and is transliterated as "Qaysar" even though I write it as Kaisar
this could be added in addition to Greek and German versions.
this channel keeps the week entertaining
I'm currently studying Latin and I find it very interesting and it's also fun.
Linguistics is one of the most mind broadening sciences. Or many sciences if one takes the various paths available. Psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, phonology, historical linguistics and so on. I always think that children at school would benefit from a brief introduction to the subject. But there again, who would teach it? Hmm...
Thanks
I was asking myself this question after watching one of your previous videos.
Thank you Metatron for tackling my comment on Latin in the previous video. Can't wait to see and hear more about it. 👍 Great job and keep teaching us correct and precise History.
I made a comment about not knowing pronunciations in one of your previous videos. I wasn't trying to be a jerk, and suggest we don't know at all, but even with modern languages there's a range within the phonetics that are used, and even in modern dictionaries some are just wrong. Hardly any English speaker for example pronounces truck as t-ruck. They pronounce it like tchruck, which has different phonetic symbols used for that T, but most dictionaries leave it as something like t-ruk. At best we can come close with some Latin words from some dialects.
I'm glad you made the video to clarify that it's an educated guess as to how a specific word sounded in different contexts, but like with modern languages we can never know how any given person pronounced it in a given setting.
Tremendously well done, mate!
Glad that you now have a linguistics dedicated channel. Will definitely be watching each video.
Optima pellicula, magister! Gratias tibi agimus!
After so many of your videos on classical latin, I understand why my teacher in school mentioned how some scholars say that Portuguese is a VERY close language to latin. We use most of the things you mention of odd in latin pronunciation, like the very nasal M. In portuguese, if the M in the end of a sillable (or N if it is followed by a consonant) always have a nasal sound. Example being the number 1 "um", it is a very nasal sound, same with 100 "cem" (the c is soft in the case).
En realidade é "uN" con N velar ... mais os portugueses gustan de usar o M... Algúns agora xa pronuncian ise N velar como un M...
Very close, maybe only the northern tradicional speaking portuguese... the european southern standard is miles away...
@@bilbohob7179 I live in the southish brazil, sao paulo to be precise, we use uM. Granted that in this city, if you change neighborhood you change accent, but in general, people use a nasal M in most words.
Well latin is lost between all the romance languages
Even French and Romanian
They differ a lot phonetically but still preserve a lot of classical Latin trace in spelling and vocabulary
@@Pedro_Colicignosouthish? You mean south east?
@@Gab8riel No, actually meant I live in somewhere more south than north, specifically in the South east area. I tried to make it more general because the South East of brazil is a very small area compared to the northeast and noth reagions, even the center-west
I think what is always very important is to distinguish when we know something substantively as opposed to it being our best guess. When someone comes along and says "This is what it sounded like." I immediately question it. When someone comes along and says "This is what we think it sounded like." I am far less skeptical. The former requires explanation. The latter is understood not to be perfect and so far less scrutiny is given.
In fact, the guesswork may be completely accurate. (And I mean "guesswork" in less of a "random guess" sense and more of a highly educated guess). Still, we should try and be clear if, at any part, we do not know for sure.
It's important to keep in mind that while if you take the entire reconstructed pronunciation as one thing, then yes it's our best guess, but if you focus on any given feature of the pronunciation, our certainty can range from tentative to extremely certain. In the case of Latin, most of the reconstructed pronunciation we have an immense level of certainty about, similar to how certain we are that Caesar was a real person or that Pangea existed. Only a few details are more tentative.
Friend, if we use your criterion we are sure of nothing. Nothing is substantive and nothing can go on textbooks.
Because modern academia is based on taking nothing for granted, anything you ever say COULD be wrong even if in slight ways.
I, personally, wouldn't follow your advice because it would not only be impractical but also tedious and i just find it silly.
This is what I do. If we know something with like 99% certainty I WILL say "This is what it sounded like" and haters be damned.
Cheers.
@@crusaderACR I set no criterion for how we are to know things. I merely asserted that we should be honest about what we actually know as opposed to what we speculate. In fact, your reply does the very thing I warn against in multiple places and is incorrect as a direct result.
I always find myself thinking of Phonology reciting the Credo.
_nostram salutem_ takes me to my first Latin class. It was interesting to learn the pronunciation of v be ~ /w/. The /u/ in _salutem_ is very understandable if the v in _salve_ (and other words derived from the same root word) is pronounced ~/w/
the "K-sound" is actually very prominent in languages that stemmed out from the phoenicians (where we get our phonetic alphabet). "C" pronounced as "S", on the other hand, is more oriented to the cyrillic alphabet.
Cyrillic is also from Phoenician. Cyrillic and Latin С and C are unrelated, despite they look the same.
This is very interesting indeed!!! Many thanks :)
I have been enjoying Duolingo. It's a good review. Even though I am living in Ticino I never get to speak Italian. Grazie.
That's fascinating. I had this doubt, specially about Latin and Old Norse. I have another doubt, how does a language "die" and how long does it take for it to happen?
Neither Latin nor Old Norse ever died, but they are dead. A dead language is one that has no native speakers, and a language dies when it loses all of its native speakers. Latin and ON changed gradually over time into modern descendent languages, so we can't say they ever died, but we arbitrarily no longer consider the modern descendent languages to be the same language as their ancestor.
@@Glossologia I once heard that Old Norse evolved to Modern Icelandic. Is that true?
@@yulong29 Old Norse evolved into all of the modern north germanic languages (Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Faroese, etc). Icelandic is the most conservative of them (has changed the least) but it is not the same as Old Norse. It's a bit like if your cousin looked more like your grandfather than you, you're still your grandfather's descendent.
Does it make sense to think of it as a single pronunciation method? Wouldn't it have varied a bit based on time and region?
Indeed. Luke Raneri has many videos in both Greek and Latin phonology based on the times. I’d recommend checking his channel to see the variations throughout time and place.
Ecclesiastical Latin, of course, is an example of Latin changing pronunciation. All the Romance Languages, in fact, involve Latin changing according to time and place. Some changed drastically (see French) and others less so such as Sardinian. But it’s a very dynamic thing like you said.
The guesses about consonants are probably better than those about vowels. It seems for instance quite possible that the long and short versions of vowels not only differed in length but also in quality like the vowels in English "peat" and "pit". Some Latinists actually argue that this was indeed the case.
Also vowels are much much more likely to change based on accent than consonants.
And people living just 20 miles away from each other can have vastly different accents even today never mind 2000 years ago :)
very interesting, thank you!!
about a year in to learning latin and from what i have learned so far the problem is not that we have problems telling how peaple would have sounded but that in the modern world we try to learn latin from a perspective where we need to understand all of the words (or at least words from many periods) developed in a 2500 ish year evolution of a language in order to maintain it as a functional language, this means that we have to mix words like dominus / herum / liberum and cassa / domus that come from different contexts in order to make a language thats coherent and preserves legibility across time, so like ecclesiastical medieval and restored classical do all have legitimate historical basis and use but its also important not to take them as too solid of a basis ether because language needs some fluidity in pronunciation to be learnable and we are going to come across terms that are anachronistic from the pronunciation styles we choose to learn with, especially because the objectives of those styles are highly specific too, like restored classical has a target of "what was spoken most commonly in Rome and Alexandria during the principate" and ecclesiastical's target is "preserve what was handed down to the church fathers as of the turn of the last century", so like we know so much about how things were spoken it makes kinda a web of compromises truisms and contradictions, all that being said i do think that r classical latin presents the language in its most beautiful commonly available form
Interesting video! When I learned latin back in the 80s, we`d eventually get into some latin poetry, Ovid mostly. If you have to read those verses out loud, you´ll quickly notice that in terms of alliterations and end rhymes, the linguistically reconstructed (classic) pronunciation makes a lot more sense, compared to later medieval or early modern versions.
Proper rhyming is for instance also key to understanding how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe must have spoken German for the most part: some of his verses in "Faust" would only rhyme properly, when pronounced in a Hessian/ Frankfurt dialect.
Having said that, I would assume that also spoken, classical latin 2,000 years ago certainly had it´s slangs, jargons and dialects. So, following a conversation between, say, Marcus Tullius Cicero and Caius Julius Caesar, it´d be by no means a given that both would have sounded exactly and entirely the same. So, as much as there still might be some leeway in pronuncing classic latin correctly, I´d say the way Metatron and most modern linguists are recreating, speaking and advocating it, is absolutely valid!
German borrowed the word cella twice, once when it was still pronounced with a /k/ yielding modern German "Keller" (basement, storage rooms) and later from medieval Latin to yield modern "Zelle" (cell, originally the room of a monk)
I didn’t know that, and I thought I knew German fairly well. Thanks for the info!
Mi spiace invadere i commenti parlando Italiano, ma ti seguo da parecchio sul primo canale e ora anche qui e sono tanto tanto arrabbiato per il fatto che , tutta la conoscenza divulgata in ben due canali gestiti da te, non può essere divulgata anche ai non anglofoni. Persone che vorrebbero tanto guardare i tuoi video e imparare tanto, ma non possono a causa della barriera linguistica. Non so se mai proporrai video in Italiano, ma sappi che c'è tanta gente che lo aspetta. Ad majiora semper!
Ciao e grazie. Ho un video sul canale principale in italiano intitolato "gli dei dell'antico Egitto", se vuoi dare un'occhiata. Se i dati analitici dovessero mostrare un riscontro favorevole, in futuro potrei aprire un "Metatron Italia". Vedremo.
Chiedo scusa per l intrusione 😅, ma a quanto ho capito dai recenti sviluppi di RUclips sarà possibile aggiungere una seconda traccia audio a tutti i video. Immagino una sorta di auto doppiaggio potrebbe essere interessante per chi non riesce ad fruire dei contenuti in inglese.
Just saying😊
Good job as always
Another very interesting video at the Academy 🏛
Hi Metatron. The hungarian language uses also long and short vovels, written just the same way as latin did.
Maybe you should study some hungarian too, I am sure it would be great fun 🙂
I major Hebrew at uni and our professor insists in using modern Israeli pronunciation for Ancient Hebrew. I think this is a most heretic sin, after all, if you are reconstructing the "dead" patterns, words and grammar of a "dead" language, then why not do the same thing with pronunciation, taking linguistical science into consideration? I pray the psalms in Ancient Reconstructed Pronunciation and, among other stuff, when you make a distinction between long and short vowels, the poetic rhythm of the psalms become pretty aparent.
Gratias tibi, Metatrone.
I wonder where the Slavic pronunciation of latin C comes from, it's very consistently rendered as /ts/ at the beginning of words like in car (tzar), cesarz (emperor), Cezar, centrum - all starting with /ts/ sound.
bo nasze C to tak realnie TS 😂
tak samo jak nasze Cz to Tsz
dlatego czasem ludzie wymawiają trzymaj jako czymaj
od tylko do kilka też dwa kroki
ch i k też mamy przemienne bez pamięci oryginalnych form może z jakiegoś dawnego
kh co by tłumaczyło nieregularne słowa jak
kształt (pszczoła = bzyczoła jak rzodkiewka rzadk-iewka)
chąsać = kąsać
łacińskie cuje to nasze czyje
łacińskie cada to nasze każdy każde
mamy raz kapelusz a raz czapka
cholernie nierówno adaptujemy słowa obce
dlaczego czytamy a nie cijtamy
bo wybraliśmy jedną gramatykę oficjalną
gdy było kilka organicznie funkcjonujących
i chyba mało kompatybilnych
raz czoło a raz g(o)laca
nie mamy też żadnych słów oryginalnie z literą f
😉
hiszpański i kataloński są ciekawe
tam pierwsze b wymawiają jakby byli z Afryki mBien
w bardziej maturalnej dźwięcznej firmie
kiedy nasze b już bardziej leci w p
romańskiej pllorar nasze płakać
ale i bliskie błagać może i brak
hiszpańskie platan nasze banan
może te oryginalnie wspólne jak plen plenić plon plemię nie zyskało wersji z b
chociaż brzemię? brzemienna?
w znaczeniu starszy patriarcha baba i papa
ban i pan
ale częściej u nas b zamienia się z w balia bania wanna
może boleć i wołać ma coś wspólnego
romańskie critar gritar to nasze krzyczeć
kracze zgrzyta
angielski ma grief żal żałoba ale jest
i gorycz więc może sobie zmyślam
mógłbym z tego dojść do corrida a to przecież od correr biegać
What is the soundtrack that you are using? It's a really good
Pronunciation of "Caesar" reminded me of the city here in Turkey, "Kayseri". Supposedly the city has something to do with one of the Caesars but I'm not sure what it is right now... and yeah, it is pronunced just like you type it. With a solid "K"
Yep, Kayseri is where the city of Caesarea once was :). “Kaisáreia“ in Greek.
''Surrounding languages'' yes but our knowledge of surrounding languages prununciation is also based on the same techniques. But I like the fact you admit is a guess even if I also agree it's not ''just a guess''.
I enjoy your channel my friend. I find it greatly informative. Thank you!
What about the retracted "s", do you have a video explaining that?. See ya.
Not sure whether you did a video about Roman graffiti, including typos. Would be cool 😎
Can we make this man record his voice speaking classical Latin pronunciation and then implement it to an Ai Bot that you can chat with and that uses his voice so we all can mimic his pronunciation?
So that everyone in the world speaking Latin doesn’t use their own respective accents pronouncing Latin, so that everyone learning Latin now learn the right pronunciation from day 1 so it becomes right from the start?
Kickstarter?
I also have a hard "C". But seriously, this is an excellent video.
Can you imagine this question for English where it is different in spelling and pronunciation?
I wonder if there's any possibility that the marking on the vowels represent the stressed syllable. Instead of the prolonged vowel, much like they do it in Spanish....
Some seem very logical to me, for example why U in spanish is called "Uve" and when i say "vuelta" for example, it halfway shifts into what the latin classical pronunciation is.
10:30 I noticed you tend to list the vowels in the Japanese order (A I U E O), rather than the ”Western” order (A E I O U). I think I can guess, what language you’ve been delving into, lately. 🙃
Also, was there rhymed poetry or song in ancient Rome? The lyrics could provide clues about pronuciation.
No rhymes weren’t used in Classiclal Latina and Greek poetry. Unfortunately!
(Un)fortunately it would be too easy to rhyme Latin lol
@@crusaderACR It's why Latin favored hyperbaton and meter in poetry.
There are many derivatives of Latin. I've heard some dialects of Italian are closer in some ways as far as vocabulary. I've also heard some dialects of Sardinian & perhaps Catalan may sound like Old Latin. Which of the modern languages do you think may sound more similar to 1st century Latin? I've even heard some say Romanian has similar pronunciation.
I wonder how did we end up with the modern Latin pronunciation that is used by the Church or even taught in school if there are such differences like the C-K sound or the AE-E one.
Ciao Raffaello, grazie e complimenti per i tuoi video. Non voglio essere l'ennesimo scettico senza argomentazioni, quindi ti esporrò cosa non mi convince di alcune giustificazioni per una certa pronuncia del latino. Tu dici che Caesar si pronuncia con un suono duro "K" perché i greci lo trascrissero con la K e perché in altre lingue contigue all'area latinofona si dice per esempio "Kaiser". MA io ti domando: i greci avevano un'alternativa alla "K" per traslitterare "Caesar"? In greco antico esiste il suono "C" dolce? Non mi pare. Non è che hanno traslitterato con la K perché non avevano altre opzioni più valide? INOLTRE perché per ricostruire la fonetica latina dovremmo dare così tanto peso a come vengono pronunciate oggi certe parole di origine latina da popoli che non parlano nemmeno una lingua romanza rispetto a come pronunciamo gli equivalenti noi che parliamo lingue romanze? Italiani, francesi, spagnoli, portoghesi...tutti che pronunciano i discendenti della parola "Caesar" con una C dolce; questo conta meno di come i tedeschi pronunciano Kaiser? Non voglio essere in nessun modo polemico, da non esperto vorrei solo capire. Grazie ancora e complimenti per il canale!
hey metataron when i asked about the medium foot guard for the samurai armour i didn't get an good explanation kan u pls explain a bit better??
You forgot to mention that different languages evolve differently. That different languages including German and Greek preserved the pronunciation of the letter/phoneme K in most contexts is what allows us to know what ancient Romans sounded like.
He mentioned that... didn't he?
@@jtinalexandria He didn't mention that different languages undergo different sound changes. The way people might understand his video is that only Latin changed into the romance languages, while in fact all languages changed and we can use the same comparison techniques to find out how ancient Greek sounded for example.
Grātiās prō hōc, Metatrōn! Lingua Latīna amanda'st. Quam diū didicistī (vel etiam nunc discis ) Linguam Latīnam, obiter?
9:18 ancient latin teachers complaining about people dropping sounds HAHAHAHAHA. I love it. Some things never change.
Credo potresti fare un video a tema linguistico in collaborazione con Yasmina Pani, ha detto di conoscere bene l'inglese quindi magari ne esce qualcosa di interessante anche per i nostri amici di tutto il mondo🤭
9:22 would've switched to Dutch on fruit.😅
11:00 in Dutch this is sort of obvious, so I guess it's not such a long stretch that this might be the same case in Latin as well.
Ko"k"en (long o) a"pp"els (short a)
I don't know if they teach proper phonics in elementary school anymore, but I didn't understand short and long vowels in English when I was a kid. Vowel length had nothing to do with the terms. A long vowel said its name, and a short vowel made a different sound. I retained the information, and just figured that they had to call the different sounds something. I was also taught how to recognize a short or long vowel in writing, but that flew out the window once we got to the big words. To this day, I still find Russian easier to read than English, which is my native language.
Yeah. English used to have p̟honemic vowel length, ie. a distinction between long and short vowels. The long vowels, however, were affected by what linguist call "the Great Vowel Shift" so that they changed considerably in quality.
For instance the letter i, denoted the sound /iː/ in middle english, but by the end of the Early Modern English period it had turned into /ai/, similarly /uː/ had become /əʊ/.
So English long and short vowels do not only differ in terms of vowel quantity (ie. time) but also in vowel quality, hence the qualitative difference between /slɪp̟/ (slip̟) and /sliːp̟/ (sleep).
Metatron's a language master.
look up polish historical movie about Roman times, made all in reconstructed Latin
You still can't know for sure, there aren't any surviving Roman anime.
Proto-Indo-European and Sanskrit also feed into this subject.
How do you pronounce this name: Gneus Ivlvs Agricola?
Alphabet is greatest development in writing. It allows for phonetic carry overs without need for the primary speaker.
... de hecho los primeros que poblaron el territorio de la actual Rumanía, procedentes de las estepas al norte del Ponto Euxino (Mar Negro) trajeron una lengua (el Proto Romance) que luego dió origen a las demás lenguas romances incluído el latín, o sea que no fue el latín la lengua madre ... el latín fue una de muchas lenguas que llegaron a lo que hoy es Italia y los territorios de lo que hoy son España, Francia, Portugal, etc ... en fin ... que cuando las huestes latinas invadieron a Dacia/Valaquia, ya en ese territorio se hablaba el romano antiguo ... ... ... han hecho creer que el latín es la lengua precursora de las lenguas romances, pero es un invento/construcción de la iglesia para imponer su hegemonía ... ... ... en muchos textos encontrados en bibliotecas rumanas hay mucha información valiosa que desmonta la teoría del latín como lengua fundacional de las mal llamadas lenguas neo-latinas ... ... ... face-blue-smiling ... que es obvio que las oleadas de los hablantes en Proto-Romance pasaron primero por Dacia (hoy Rumanía) dejando a su paso la semilla del Rumano y luego por el resto de los territorios mal llamados neo-latinos ... y no al revés ... ... ... lo que se ve no se pregunta ... no se puede tapar el sol con un dedo ... la verdad siempre sale a relucir ... !!!
1:25 Many German philologists died to bring us this information.
No matter how the supposed Classical Latin pronunciation is defended - I don’t find these contentions convincing. I appreciate that many people have their hearts set on this hypothesis - it can only be called that at best- I think it is best to contend that there are a number of theories. Each to their own! Interesting video though.
A i u e o ❤
The secret is the word "educated" in the expression "educated guess": it doesn't mean what academics want us to believe it means. Educated means only that there is an institutional political frame around a certain problem, not that there is any kind of super-partes authority implied in it. It's just a guess, and, frankly a waste of time (nothing against wasting time in ways that are entertaining) that has become an industry and a political industry at that. About Latin: guesses are guesses, but the only people still speaking Latin are the clergy of the Catholic Church (not as much as they used to), so Latin pronunciation is presently, definitely, the Ecclesiastical one. The rest is just fun and games.
OK so where can we see all that evidence for ourselves?
(I'm not asking it to disagree with you, I'm asking because I'd like to know more.)
written sources closerto the time, or more likely writings derived from those sources
@@indieWellie Sure, but WHERE can I find them?
Yeah in modern German the word for Emperor is "Kaiser"
"ai" is pronounced like I from I Am
In my dialect in Spanish, Some words when I shorten them they get more of long vowel sound like in NADA I say NAA, Which means NOTHING, I'm from Mexico
Like andalusians do...
I tried to explain exactly this to my father about Old East Slavic. Still he believes it's bs.
probably all true more or less but still we have no idea what "vulgar-latin" sounded like and that must be spoken by the vast majority of uneducated ( hence just by hearing , not meaning the misspelling grafitis! ) people in the roman empire...
Wasn't Latin kept alive through the centuries by being taught to priests and the wealthier or educated classes? Either way, fascinating subject.
The pronunciation can change drastically even over a person's lifetime, and most people cannot assess or describe how they pronounce their sounds.
I like the way Metatron speaks it. It sounds so alive. In my head, I've always thought of it as a very stilted sounding language. Which is my own ignorance. All languages change over time. I doubt if I would be able to understand someone speaking English from 500 years ago very well.
caesar in dutch has no dipthong though xd
Name Gnaeus. That one you cannot pronounce with a-e. But you can with eye
Also emperor claudius wrote his name as caisar
The Romans really didn’t shut up about Latin 😂
Is it true ancient Chinese was not tonal and sounded like Tibetan? Confucius would have talked like the Dalai Lama?
Hasn't the Church been using Latin for thousands of years? That would be a direct connection from the time of the Roman Empire till now.
Ecclesiastical Latin.
He listed those vowels with a distinctly Japanese accent. lol
Not really though.
Not really, is the way that nowadays romances languages do it.. Italian specifically
Only Romans had a great preserved and documented history
Not any other civilisation did
The Greeks somehow preserved a lot and again thanks to Romans
Viva la Latina
Romanes eunt domus!
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When people use the ecclesiastical pronunciation I get offended on behalf of Roma
My roots are Serbian and Croatian but i was born in Romania,,,,,,,,,, when i was young/child i hated school😂😂😂😂 in my first 4 years of school we had to learn Russian and Latin language 🤣🤣🤣🤣 they removed Russian from year 5 and introduced french and English 😁😁😁😁 i hated and still hate school, i hate school because of how education brainwashing sistem works
Slava Srbija
A slavic point here
Could you please expaine, for all English speaking astronomers out there, how to pronounce Uranus properly. Because they are stuck in their urine/anus problem for a while now. Thank you in advance 😀
I think the most annoying thing I keep seeing is the "different regional pronunciations" fallacy. Yes, Rome was big and had many regions, languages, and socioeconomics causing people to pronounce things differently. However, this doesn't mean there were different pronunciations. Their different pronunciations were the result of them trying to pronounce Latin with their native sounds. That doesn't mean those were the sounds of the language...Latin sounds were always Latin sounds.
This. It's a bit like saying that English spoken by people from India is its own "dialect" of English...it's not. It's just non-native speakers using their own native sound sets to approximate English sounds. Just because a German might pronounce "thick" as "sick" doesn't mean that "sick" is a valid/alternative pronunciation of "thick", it just means that German fellow needs to practice his dental fricatives to make his English sound more natural.
@@thethrashyone Agreed. There is a growing problem with the polarization between phonetic purism and phonetic chaos. Both extremes are equally incorrect and should be stopped at all costs. A purist will say that a language has these sounds, and only these pronunciations are correct. This is nonsense. Even natives, speaking their own languages, will have small differences in their sounds and pronunciations. Chaos lovers will say all sounds are a matter of perspective. For example, let's say that there is a small group of native speakers that don't say the "ch" (tʃ) sound like everyone else, but instead use the "sh" (ʃ) sound. Chaos lovers will try to argue that this is proof we don't know the correct sounds of the language because we have an example of a minority doing something different from the majority. This is nonsense. If it was a 50/50 split I would say OK we need to examine what is happening. If we have a 60/40...or...70/30 split I would say perhaps there's a phonetic transition in play, or maybe a phonetic exchange happening between neighboring languages, or something else which needs to be examined. But this is a rarity. The majority of the time we find like a 80/20 or a 90/10 split. And it's almost always the phonetics of a foreign language being used for pronunciation of target language.
From what I understand, people in rural 1st century Italy did pronounce things slightly differently (ae and oe were both pronounced kind of like e, while palatalization started to appear at around that time). Still, when learning a language, it's generally the best bet to learn either the standard language or a specific dialect (eg picking either Mexican or European Spanish when learning that language).
@@akl2k7 It's a question of how fine we want to split the hairs. Yes, there are going to be differences in pronunciation for a number of reasons. However, there is a difference between saying "...there are differences in pronunciation because of socioeconomics or foreign language influences..." and saying something like "...a language has multiple possible pronunciations because different pronunciations were being observed..." Which is the what the groups I was talking about like to do. For example, they will say things like "I found a reference with Julius complaining they pronounce the 'c' like an 's' therefore we have to accept that the 's' was pronounced for a 'c'." No, I'm sorry that's not how real world academics work. We need to know a lot of information here in order to say this type of thing....like...who said it, when did they say it, were there any contributing factors to them saying it? That type of thing.
The Romans were diglossic: they spoke Vulgar Latin (Proto-Romance) in their daily lives, but wrote and used in official purposes another dead language which we call 'Latin' today.
Ofcours i pronounce the 'i' in fruit. How barbarian not to :-D
(I know, I have strong bad habits i learnt from my english teachers)
you say there are a myriad of examples, but everyone seems to only use the Caesar and Cicero examples. Seems odd
Same as what they call English! Is it really English? Most can't even speak it clearly, even one's who are suppose to be English!
Did ancient greeks have the "ch" sound? Otherwise the fact that they used "k" for Caesar doesn't say much
says much because the fact of language preferring hard sounds also mix of hard sound with I like KI in KIKERO won't change KI into softened version which "Ch" can be example of
this is very popular in my language with quite a variety of such sounds to that ci is spelled
getting as confusing as Korean with it's English like j and ch both hard to differentiate
or in English
karakter into character
this hardness was power of Latin because makes it easier to learn and keeps things simple and reading exactly as written
@@Szymek25 your writing is very incoherent and hard to understand, I guess english is not your strength. So what's your point?
You should study Greek before saying nonsense
but but but there never were any Latins they all spoke Greekish
Answer: we don't. Those are unfounded hypotheses and conjectures which do not give enough data to reconstruct the phonetics and phonotactics of Latin.
Also, the (educated) Romans spoke Latin with a Romance accent, but the Romance (aka Vulgar Latin) was not written or reproduced in literary works, so we have ZERO idea how 90% of illiterate second-language speakers pronounced the official Latin.
latin is dead, stop trying to resurrect it!
it's alive and kicking
stop killing living things while promoting zombies
@@Szymek25 that's it, i'm gonna burn a latin book!
Latin is so alive that in a Germanic language like English there is more Latin than anything else. Not to mention the alphabet.