#41 ·
wiredraven82 said:Man, you’ve completely missed the mark here—no offense intended, brother, but this is a massive blunder on your part:
First off, during the era of the Western Roman Empire, people spoke CLASSICAL LATIN/used Classical pronunciation. Period.
That’s the version with: Kaiser (not Caesar), Lunae (not Lunae with a soft sound), Cicero (not Kicker-oh), etc.
This other way—this "Caesar," "Lunae" thing, with the diphthongs like ae, oe, io, and the "C" being soft instead of a "K"... that is: TRADITIONAL (ECCLESIASTICAL) LATIN/pronunciation. This is the version that developed once Latin was practically a dead language—not totally gone, but certainly on its last legs—evolving into ECCLESIASTICAL LATIN during the Middle Ages, long after the Western Roman Empire had fallen (leaving only the Byzantine Empire, which is a whole different story).
I have no idea where you got the idea that different social classes used different pronunciations during the Western Roman Empire (or the Republic). You’ve confused social status symbols—the distinction between Patricians and Plebeians within the Latin ethnicity—with linguistic variation. Those distinctions weren't about how they spoke Latin; everyone used the CLASSICAL dialect. It was about something else entirely. 🙂
Actually, no.
There was high-society Latin and then there was the slang used by the lower classes. For instance, the upper crust would look down on the "populares"—their own people who dressed and talked like the commoners. A good example is how a certain Claudia might have changed her name to Clodia to sound more like she belonged to the lower tiers. Her brother did the same. This is actually one of the main reasons why they hated Julius Caesar; he sided with the plebeians and spoke just like them.