Hi all, an acquaintance told me that there were “three forms of Latin”: “high Latin,” which was extremely formal and used only for writing, “vulgar Latin,” which was spoken, and something in the middle which could be used for either writing or speaking.

Is there any truth to this claim?

Thanks! :slight_smile:

I am not a Latin scholar, but hopefully I’ll suffice until one shows up, probably literally.

We don’t know for certain much of anything about Latin, let alone if there were variations. I think we can agree on an alphabet and that’s about it, the rest is speculation.

That’s what I know of Latin. :stuck_out_tongue:

There were certainly different registers of the language, as with any language. And it’s true that there were, broadly speaking, a high literary Latin and also a Vulgar Latin, and presumably something in-between. Furthermore, it’s true that written language tends to be non-trivially different from spoken language – more formal in ways that would be difficult to maintain in conversation. And spoken language is full of nuances that are difficult to capture in writing.


The schema you describe doesn’t seem quite right. It over-simplifies the issue. Probably somebody like Cicero tried to make his speech as much like formal writing as possible – the idea that it’s okay for there to be a significant gap between written and spoken language is a fairly modern idea. If you were educated, you were indoctrinated into the high form of the language as part of learning to read and write, not because it was only there for the purpose of writing. And if you weren’t educated, your ability to read and write was limited and your particular vernacular was mostly passed on through scratchings on the walls of lavatories.

Covered_in_Bees, there’s a heck of a lot more than that known about Latin. Not only do we know the alphabet, but we know how to put the letters together into words, and the words into sentences, and the sentences into books. We even mostly know how to speak those words. You seem to be under the impression that Latin is a dead language, or something.

And we even know at least some about variations in the way Latin was spoken. Some of Catullus’ poems, for instance, scathingly mock the accent affected by some high-class (or just pretentious) folks, analogous to the modern “Hahvahd accent”.

There’s also Pig Latin. :stuck_out_tongue:

Serious question: Based on a recent thread, I decided to pick up the first volume of the Cambridge Latin course. (Grumio est coquus.)

Some of the words have a bar over the vowels, which in English denote a long vowel sound. Is this what the book means, that the vowel is long? Or is it being used for another purpose?

Exempli gratia:

mater, with a bar over the ‘a’. I would pronounce that ‘MAY-ter’.
atrio, with bars over the ‘a’ and the ‘o’. I would pronounce that ‘AY-tree-oh’.

But then there’s tablino, with bars over the ‘i’ and the ‘o’. Just looking at the word, I’d pronounce it ‘tab-LEE-no’. Is it actually ‘tab-LIE-no’? (And is ‘scribit’, ‘SCRIBE-it’?)

The bar (macron) over a vowel indicates a literal long vowel, not the poor excuse for long vowels we have in English. As in, the “shape” of the letter is the same, but you spend a longer time on saying it.

That said, bar or no bar, the vowels are for the most part pronounced differently than in English. “A” is pronounced “uh”, “E” is pronounced “ay”, “I” is pronounced for the most part as though it were an English “Y”, “O” is pronounced “oh”, and “U” is pronounced “oo”.

All that German in high school and college has ingrained the habit of pronouncing foreign words (and even many English words) with ‘ah’ for ‘a’ and ‘ee’ for ‘i’. Sounds like ‘ay’ for ‘e’, ‘oh’ for ‘o’, and ‘oo’ for ‘u’ are the same though.

Vowels with a macron are literally two vowels in a row. I wish I could think of some examples right now, but I can’t, so I’ll make one up: Socii could also be written as Soci with a macron on the i.

In english, the a in call is long, while the vowel in hat is short. If you say call carefully, you’ll notice that your pitch sorta rises and falls on that a. That’s how you should be pronouncing the macron.

Yes, “ee” for “i” is correct, in the contexts where it’s acting like a vowel. When I said it acts like English “Y”, I meant that it behaves like a vowel or consonant in the same places as English “Y”, and when it behaves like a vowel, it’s an “ee” sound, like in “happy” (pronounced “happee”).

So, for instance, “Julius” (J and I are the same letter in Latin, and completely interchangeable, though in practice J is usually used at the beginning of a word) is pronounced “Yooleeoos”. Also note that repeated vowels are always pronounced separately, so if you’re referring to more than one Julius, you have Julii, which is pronounced “Yoolee ee”.

The extent to which the long vowels in Latin were really pronounced twice as long as the short ones is questionable. Certainly even in English it takes longer to say long vowels than short ones because they’re more work for the articulatory apparatus to manifest. Mostly likely the difference in duration was greater for Latin at its height, but not so great as it was for Attic Greek.

What’s more important is that the macrons indicate the actual vowel you should enunciate. Your book will have a guide, though here is a nice resource to hear the differences:

I think they guy here over-nasalizes vowels that are followed by nasal consonants, without explaining why he’s doing it to begin with. There are a lot of things about Latin pronunciation that nobody comes out and explains. But again, worry about vowel quality before getting worked up about duration.

I haven’t found it.

I grew up with a boy (now a man) who started studying Latin when he was in the 6th grade. He studied it for three years (straight As) and then in high school studied it for four more years. In college in also studied it for four years. Towards the conclusion of our college years I asked him if he could speak Latin. No. I asked him if he could write Latin. No. So after eleven years of study, all he could do was read the classics. I didn’t, and I don’t, understand. When I asked why he couldn’t speak or write it, he said that Latin does not have words for all the things we have today: cars, tv, microwave, condos, etc. I said, Yes, but why can’t you say " I got up early this morning, ate a little morning mean, and then went for a walk. The birds were singing, the clouds were beautiful…" He never gave me an answer.

Which Latin is the one that sounds like Italian? You know, with the c’s making a ch sound and everything? And which version is older, that one, or the one that is almost phonetically perfect?

One thing I do know is that people still coin words in Latin, so the idea that there is no word for a particular modern concept is incorrect. I stumbled on this information in a website, but I can’t seem to find it now.

I think this mostly has to do with how Latin is usually taught nowadays. The focus is entirely on translating existing written Latin text, so the students never get any practice in speaking the language. I think some universities do have courses in Latin composition. But even then, it is still quite a leap from being able to write, where you can take your time and think about it first, to being able to speak in real time.

Church and Vulgar Latin are the ones that sound like Italian. They are newer than Classical Latin.

as for pronunciation in ‘classical Latin’… … link to a page on pronunciation I made for my freshmen Latin students. We have a lot of students who take Latin, but not enough money for books, so I put the first few chapters of the Latin textbook online for them…please don’t sue.
Long Pronunciation Short Pronunciation
ā as in father a idea
ē as in obey e bet
ī as in machine i sit
ō as in note o omit
ū as in rule u put
Dipthong As in…
ae aye
au nOW
ei neighbor
eu ay-oo (said as one syllable)
oe jOY
ui qUEEn
Letter(s) Pronunciation
bs ps
i (when a consonant) is like ‘y’ as in ‘young’
bt pt
ph philosophy
c hard, like CupCake (NOT soft, like City)
s like Sit, not buSy
ch as in CHaracter
su before a vowel (sometimes) SW (like ‘Suave’)
g hard, like Go Getter (not soft, like gem giant)
th like THick, not THis
gu before a vowel is pronounced like anGUish
v w
z dz, like adze

Multiple generations studied Latin in this way, but it’s changing, as I wrote about in a previous thread:

I took Latin Prose Composition in college, but it was an incredibly old-fashioned thing to take and had four students in it. Why would you want to write anything in Latin unless you’re working for the Pope? We were just there for the fun of it. Whereas the rest of the Latin I took was because I wanted to go to grad school in medieval studies, where you need it.

I think that there were multiple Vulgar Latins…basically V.L. was the local dialect whether in Dacia, Brittania, Gaul or Rome–all of them differed from Classical Latin which was a semi-constructed language. I don’t think anybody natively spoke Classical Latin. In the medieval period, Classical Latin was the “written standard” for educated communication, but pronunciation had shifted in some areas (such as Britain), that’s why Celtic is pronounced both Seltic and Keltic