What Ancient Latin Sounded Like, And How We Know It

That famed dit­ty isn’t like­ly to res­onate with many mod­ern school chil­dren, but inter­est in ancient Rome remains fair­ly robust. We’ve come to accept that those state­ly ruins were once cov­ered in graf­fi­ti. We can recre­ate their meals from hors d’oeuvres (Boiled Eggs with Pine Nut Sauce) to dessert (Pear Pati­na).

Ther­mae Romae, a pop­u­lar Japan­ese man­ga-cum-fea­ture-film, took us inside Emper­or Hadri­an’s bath­house. Kirk Dou­glas’ Spar­ta­cus? Or Lau­rence Olivier’s Cras­sus?

The HBO series Rome upheld the tra­di­tion of British accents. Ani­ma­tor Josh Rud­der of NativLang did a fair amount of dig­ging in ser­vice of find­ing out What Latin Sound­ed Like, above. (And he seems to have done so with­out the help of Derek Jarman’s NSFW Sebas­tiane, the only fea­ture film to be filmed entire­ly in ser­mo vul­garis or vul­gar Latin.) Instead, he draws from ancient rhetori­cian Quin­til­ian and Virgil’s poet­ic meter. Scroll back­ward through the Romance lan­guages, and you’ll see Ger­man­ic tribes trad­ing with and fight­ing ancient Roman troops.

The result is not so much a recon­struc­tive pro­nun­ci­a­tion guide as a lin­guis­tic detec­tive sto­ry. Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016. The Sto­ry of Lorem Ipsum: How Scram­bled Text by Cicero Became Used by Type­set­ters Every­where Can Mod­ern-Day Ital­ians Under­stand Latin?

A YouTu­ber Puts It to the Test on the Streets of Rome Hear Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Per­formed in Clas­si­cal Latin Dis­cov­er the World’s Old­est Sur­viv­ing Cook­book, De Re Coquinar­ia, from Ancient Rome Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist in NYC. We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion.

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