Chapter II: Sources of Our Information

A QUESTION of much interest to the student of Latin, and one that does not always receive a satisfactory answer, relates to the sources of our information.

What knowledge have we of how the Romans pronounced their own language nineteen hundred years ago? How is it possible after so long an interval to reconstruct the laws of a pronunciation which prevailed at a given period of the remote past?

Briefly summarized, the sources of our information are six in number.

(1) _Statements of the Roman writers themselves,_ which modern scholarship has laboriously collected. These are of different degrees of explicitness, and of different degrees of value. It is evident that a statement of Cicero, however brief, is more trustworthy and more convincing, with regard to the usage of his own time, than whole pages of testimony in a writer like Priscian who wrote in the sixth century, by which period the language had become corrupt.

We may, then, broadly divide the ancient authorities on this subject into two groups,--the first consisting of those writers who themselves belonged to the classical age; the second, of those grammarians and commentators who have left us very full statements, though the date at which they wrote somewhat impairs the value of their testimony.

The chief classical authorities to whom appeal can be made are M. Terentius Varro, a contemporary of Cicero, whose treatise on the Latin language has in part come down to us; Cicero himself, from whose rhetorical works one can gather many valuable facts; and M. Fabius Quintilianus, the author of the treatise _Institutio Oratorio,_ in twelve books. It is not merely when these authors speak of definite points of language and pronunciation that they are valuable; sometimes a casual remark, an anecdote, or a pun, may be of very great importance, as will be seen from time to time in the following pages.

Of the other writers on language who treat the subject very minutely, a great number might be cited. [1] The most important are Terentianus Maurus, who wrote, perhaps about the third century, a poem on letters, syllables, feet, and metres, which is twice quoted by St. Augustine; Verrius Flaccus, the tutor to the grandchildren of the Emperor Augustus and author of a work on the meaning of words which has come down to us in a later abridgment; Aulus Gellius, who, toward the end of the second century, compiled a huge scrap-book on a variety of subjects, many of them of great linguistic interest, and, with the exception of a few chapters, still extant; Priscianus Caesariensis, who wrote under Justinian at Constantinople eighteen books of grammatical commentaries which form the most complete grammar of antiquity; and Aelius Donatus (A.D. 333), whose elementary treatise was so highly thought of in the Middle Ages that the name "donat" (Chaucer) was used as a generic term for a grammar.

From these and many other writers one gathers a great mass of instructive facts; and their very silence is sometimes as significant as what they say.

(2) _The orthography of the language itself_ as seen in the inscriptions. Latin orthography was in the main phonetic (Quintilian, I. 7. 11). The language was pronounced as it was spelled. But as is always the case, changes in orthography lagged a little behind changes in the pronunciation. Hence even the blunders made by an ignorant lapidary in cutting an inscription are often a source of information to us.

(3) _The representation in Greek letters of Roman sounds._ A number of Greek writers treated of Roman history, Roman biography, and Roman geography. In so doing they were obliged to represent many Latin names and words in Greek characters. But many of these writers had no particular knowledge of the Latin language, and hence spelled these Latin names and words phonetically. Their method of doing this is both interesting and instructive. The writers of this sort who are oftenest cited are Polybius (B.C. 175), the friend of the younger Scipio and the author of a General History of Rome from the Second Punic War down to the conquest of Macedonia; Strabo the geographer (24 B.C.); Diodorus Siculus, the contemporary of Julius Caesar and author of an Historical Library in forty books; and Plutarch (A.D. 80), the best known of the Greek writers on Roman subjects. [2]

(4) _A critical comparison of all the modern languages of Europe that are derived from the Latin_ (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese) with reference to those points wherein they all agree. This source of information is of less importance than one would think, because these languages are not derived directly from the classical Latin, but from Latin that was either provincial or modified by foreign influences. Still, this comparison is useful in corroborating facts that are elsewhere learned, and is of positive value when not contradicted by other evidence.

(5) _The traditions of scholars,_ and especially of the Roman Catholic Church, which in its rites has employed Latin continuously from the first century down to the present time. The rhymes of the early Christian hymns also have a bearing on this subject.

(6) _The general principles of the science of phonology,_ which are now well established and understood, and are of great value in detecting erroneous assumptions which would otherwise pass unchallenged.

From these six sources can be gained a very accurate understanding of how Latin was pronounced in the days of Cicero and Caesar. It is not too much to claim that the system of pronunciation upon which scholars are now agreed, differs less from that of the Romans of the Augustan Age than does our modern pronunciation of English differ from that of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

[It is not always remembered that only very gradually was the true pronunciation of Latin lost in Europe. Scholars long retained the essential features of it, and by the fact of their constant intercourse long prevented the growth of local and national variations from the established method. Great teachers like Erasmus passed from country to country, lecturing in Latin at the universities of Italy, Germany, Holland, Trance, and England, teaching pupils of all nationalities, and being everywhere understood without any difficulty, for Latin was the _lingua franca_ of the educated, and one general pronunciation of it prevailed. Even in England, it was only after that country's isolation, political and religious, in the sixteenth century, that an "English pronunciation" arose, and this was long protested against, e.g. by Cardinal Wolsey, by Milton, and as late as the last century by Ainsworth (1746) and Philipps (1750). For the Continental traditions, see Justus Lipsius in his _Dialogus de Recta Pronunciatione Linguae Latinae;_ and Erasmus, _De Recta Latini Graecique Sermonis Pronunciatione_ (Basic, 1528). In Scotland, the Continental sound of the vowels was long retained, on which see the incident imagined by Sir Walter Scott in his novel _The Fortunes of Nigel,_ ch. ix.]

[1] Schneider in his _Elementarlehre der Lateinischen Sprache_ cites more than fifty ancient authors. Besides those mentioned above, reference is often made to Velius Longus, Servius, Marius Victorinus, Macrobius, and Martianus Capella.

[2] Others are Josephus, the Jewish historian; Dionysius of Halicarnassus; Appian; and Dio Cassius,--the last a Roman who wrote in Greek.