Latin Pronunciation: A Short Exposition of the Roman Method

NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1894
Copyright, 1890, BY HENRY HOLT & Co.
INTRODUCTORY.
THIS short manual is primarily intended for those who, being interested in the study of Latin, have accepted the Roman method of pronunciation upon the authority of the Grammars, but have either not been able to command the time to make themselves familiar with the arguments upon which this system is based, or have been repelled by the technicalities employed in treating the question from the standpoint of the specialist. It is believed that the following pages will be found to give in simple form the main facts bearing upon this interesting question; and that nothing has been introduced that is either unnecessary or obscure. For those who may wish to pursue their investigations farther after mastering these facts, a bibliography of the subject is given at the end.
SOURCES OF OUR INFORMATION.
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.