Latin pronunciation

[iacobusdu]

About one year ago, I learned from Wheelock classical pronunciation. (Including nasalization of vowels before m at the end of words, but I don't hear it in Mr. Hans Oerberg's reading of his book Lingua Latina.) Recently I'm trying to pick up Adler's latin grammar, I have found both soft and hard sound of the letter C, but only the latter is mentioned in Wheelock, is it ok to skip the pronunciation part of Adler's grammar? (And what is the reason of the differences? Is there any sources from which I can know more about how latin pronunciation changes over time? )

[Barry Hofstetter]

About one year ago, I learned from Wheelock classical pronunciation. (Including nasalization of vowels before m at the end of words, but I don't hear it in Mr. Hans Oerberg's reading of his book Lingua Latina.) Recently I'm trying to pick up Adler's latin grammar, I have found both soft and hard sound of the letter C, but only the latter is mentioned in Wheelock, is it ok to skip the pronunciation part of Adler's grammar? (And what is the reason of the differences? Is there any sources from which I can know more about how latin pronunciation changes over time? )

Here is a fun video on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_enn7NIo-S0

Trust Wheelock, he knew what he was about. This is something we actually know a great deal about, thanks to having lots of ancient transliteration of Latin into Greek, and through comparative historical linguistics.

Blackwell's History of the Latin Language actually has quite a bit of material on this, though not altogether concentrated into one place.

[metrodorus]

I would largely ignore Adler's section on pronunciation, and use WS Allen instead. When I made my audio recording of Adler, I systematically went through the entire book, and checked the quantity of every single word - the printed text is not reliable in this regard.