We do now… You have heard words all your life, even before you were born. I recommend Julian Jaynes on THE BICAMERAL MIND. I do not advance or defend everything in there, but it is important that we not project ourselves on the past if we wish to understand the past in its own terms.
I’m glad you mentioned Julian Jaynes, I often think of his work when dealing with classical language. I think almost everyone here would find his work valuable and interesting. Link here http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0618057072/qid=1122995147/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_sbs_1/104-3064251-5907923?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
It’s actually not a mystery as to how Classical Latin was pronounced. [Edit:
if that reads kinda snotty, sorry 
] The modern authority on Latin pronunciation is W. Sydney Allen’s Vox Latina.
Briefly, there’s numerous ways to identify pronunciation. Ancient grammarians shed quite a bit of light on the subject. Epigraphical studies also contribute immensely. Stonecutters (and not all were apparently literate) could make spelling mistakes just as easily as we do. Often they (mis)spelled a word by writing it phonetically. Greek loan words often provide clues too. Even though we pronounce “philosophy” with an initial f sound, the Latin speaker pronounced “philosophia” (a transliteration of the Greek) with an emphatic p (puh) in imitation of the Greek pronunciation.
We’ll never know precisely how Cicero might have sounded in the Forum or how Ovid rehearsed his poetry way over in Tomis: Think of all the regional variations in American English. But we do have a good idea at how Latin was pronounced that’s not likely far off.
It’s actually a modern misconception that the ancient Latin reader read primarily aloud and avoided silent reading. Sorry I don’t have a bibliography handy at the moment, but a number of scholars have exploded the belief that silent reading was atypical. If memory serves me well, it was traced to a scholar of the early 20th cent. and became the undisputed communis opinio when nobody apparently challenged his thesis. It rests on very, very shaky ground. After all, consider that we can read Bill Shakespeare silently and still “hear” it mentally. The same would hold true for the ancient Latin reader. (The argument for oral reading was immensely more developed and supported than the preceding.)
OT…just discovered this site. Lovely. But I was disappointed by the etexts. D/l’d Allen and Greenough NLG, of which I have a hard copy. It was really lo-res and without bookmarks to navigate, so it can’t replace the book. If they had inserted bookmarks so you could jump about easier, it would have splendid, even if lo-res. That’s the problem with scanning as images and being stingy with the file size. OCR software such as ABBYY is really, really time-consuming when the text format is complex, but it can shrink even a big book down to a ridiculously small size that preserves perfect quality. Small size is understandable though. HQ would easily quadruple the size.
Vale,
Ulixes
Welcome to Textkit! The default resolution for the big documents is lowered now, but you can still get the higher resolution type by opening the online document in your browser and removing the “AR5” from the end of the URL.
Hi Ulysses, I’m glad you found us. We have scanned the books at my scanner’s maximum resolution which is 300 dpi. It’s not a flatbed scanner, but a sheet feed production scanner designed for archiving documents. I wish too it had slighty higher resolution, but the scanners which scan bother hi rez and at hi speed cost big, big bucks.
Bookmarks would have made the file a nicer navigation experience.
kindly,
jeff
I read somewhere that some wealthy Romans had a special room where they could read (out loud) without disturbing anyone. Don’t know, though.
Also, it seems unlikely that a civilization which was relatively new to the written word would not read out loud. I mean, there was still a strong oral (aural?) tradition.
I cannot believe there was no such thing as proper pronunciation, although it’s likely that each dialect and region had it’s own version of what was proper.
Of course, I’m not an expert, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express once.
Rusticus