…of yore.
I’ve always wondered how anyone can think they know what an accent from before Edison would have sounded like. How do we know that Romans would have spoken the Latin of the modern Church?
[Update a few minutes later]
That second video on the how Shakespeare would have been performed in the day is quite interesting.
Linguists often use other languages from the same time period to glean information. For example, we know that Cicero was pronounced with a hard C because the Greek writing at the time spelled Cicero with a K, as in, Kikero.
Scholars are pretty sure on the pronunciation of Latin throughout its different periods. I don’t know how they figured it all out. If you want to hear some of Ovid’s Metamorphosis in the original Latin, try out Evan der Millner’s YouTube video. It sounds pretty cool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_aScn6nSB4
You can infer a lot about pronunciation from written texts. The rhyming scheme for a poem, a pun, etc. may require a certain pronunciation.
Spelling is also a clue. Nonsense like “silent letters” didn’t start until after the advent of printed dictionaries, which couldn’t keep up with changes in pronunciation. Prior to that, people spelled words any way they wanted to, which was usually the way the word sounded.
How do we know that Romans would have spoken the Latin of the modern Church?
Church Latin is not pronounced the same as Classical Roman Latin. My daughter studied Latin for a while and pointed out some of the differences after Mass one day.