While I’m ranting and raving about history, this might be a good opportunity for me to rant and rave about ancient languages for a while. Why is it that everybody seems to assume that all ancient languages had perfect orthographies?
Just for the record by “orthography” I mean how the spoken language is represented in writing. Hungarian, for example, has a perfect orthography. If you know how to pronounce it, you can spell it and vice versa.
English on the other hand has a notoriously lousy orthography cf. Bernard Shaw’s quip about spelling fish “ghoti” (gh as in “cough”, o as in “women”, ti as in “nation”).
There are lots of languages that don’t have perfect orthographies and, in the case of ancient languages, I think we should consider the possibility of literary languages that were never spoken at all. That may be the reason that generations of scholars have struggled in vain to identify the linguistic affinities of Sumerian with some relating it to Basque or Georgian languages or Dravidian languages or whatever. It’s possible that cuneiform-written Sumerian was never spoken and was the written form of a now unknown and unknowable language. That scholars have found Sumerian borrow-words in other ancient written languages proves nothing whatever other than that those who spoke those other languages (if any) could puzzle out the letters a little.
And that brings me to Latin. I refuse to believe that Caesar ever said “Way-nee wee-dee wee-kee”. The back formations that make language historians believe that he did are unscientific; they rely on assumptions for which there’s precious little proof and most especially that the Romans had a perfect orthography for which there is exactly zero evidence.
Additionally, I wouldn’t be surprised if there had been a sort of Greekified Latin that nobody ever really spoke somewhat similar to the Latinized English that scholars of the English Renaissance tried to construct, mostly succeeding in torturing generations of schoolboys for saying “ain’t” which, while it’s perfectly good English, is really lousy Latin.
On the other hand we have a current language spoken in the precise part of the world in which the Romans originated (Italian) and more than a millennium of ecclesiastical Latin continuing to be spoken right down to the present day. As best as I can tell the main reasons that scholars have decided that classical Latin was pronounced differently than allegedly Italianate ecclesiastical Latin are a) for some reason they think that classical Latin had a perfect orthography for which I wonder if there is any evidence and b) if it wasn’t it plays hob with their ideas about language development—backwards reasoning if I’ve ever heard it.
As far as I’m concerned I’ll always believe he said “Vay-nee vee-dee vee-chee”. So there.
There was quite a bit of anti-Catholicism in setting the pronunciation of Latin into English as well! You could always distinguish those who had learned Latin either formally from priests or nuns or informally through the Latin Mass and those who had learned it formally in non-Catholic classrooms.
The shibboleth was exactly veni, vidi, vici, with Catholics sticking to the Italianate ‘V’ and the non-Catholics using a ‘W’.
I guess my four years of Latin (plus five years as an altar boy during the period of the old Latin Tridentine Mass) are showing. It was rumored that the elderly Jebbie who taught my first year of Latin had spoken it at home as a kid.
Completely written languages never spoken? I guess I can understand that, although it strikes me as weird; language is usually such a verbal thing, that writing like that would be almost like doing all your writing in code, particularly since you’d have to translate all of it from the writing language to the spoken language every time you read a document. That’s quite a pain in the ass.
Sure. Classical Chinese writing was never spoken (at least not as it was written). We have good reason to believe that Sumerian cuneiform was never spoken as written. There’s all kinds of little grammatical marks in it which we have no reason to believe were part of the spoken language.
It’s just a step from that to a literary language that’s completely detached from spoken language.
To make a broad generalization, for most of its history, writing was the province of a select and elite class of clerics, priests, or their equivalent. Writing was something akin to magic. Very unlike our age of near-universal literacy. A written but not spoken language in that case is not all that unusual.