THE PRONUNCIATION OF LATIN.
rro THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR."
SIR,—In reading the article on "The Pronunciation of Latin" in last week's Spectator I was deeply touched by the ambitious- ness of the reformers' vision. You, Sir, although you decline to lead troops over the Aufidus, are yet confident that it is possible to hear the sound, or something like the sound, of the actual words spoken when Caesar addressed his legions, and on other stirring occasions. With this confidence I can feel no sympathy. I regard it as merely pathetic. Jam convinced that the existence of a certain amount of confessedly inadequate evidence for the proper pronunciation of the great majority of letters and combinations of letters in Latin will never enable Englishmen or any Continental people to repeat Caesar's speeches so as to make them even recognisable to Caesar, were he alive to-day. The word "correct" is used somewhat loosely by the reformers. I doubt whether many vowel-sounds in any language, ancient or modern, correspond exactly to any sound in English. But granted that this is a comparatively trivial point, fancy trying to make an English boy speak a foreign language in any sense correctly, and having him taught in this case not even by Italians, but by Englishmen, possibly less competent to speak Latin like Caesar than their pupil! And even if we did know how to pronounce all the letters and their combinations, we should still be little more than half-way on the road to a really correct pronuncia- tion. These reformers seem to take into no account the unnumbered differences in languages of intonation and of that manner of speech for which we have no adequate expression Perhaps you want your boy taught to speak French perfectly and like a Frenchman. Do you teach him the correct pro- nunciation of consonant- and vowel-sounds and then think you have realised your ambition P No; you are aware that until he has lived a long unbroken time in the company of French people, imitating consciously and unconsciously their particular fashion and mode of speech, he can never hope to talk French like a Frenchman ; that is, correctly. And if he attain that hard-won honour, he will be as one among a hundred English public-school boys. And yet, Sir, we are solemnly invited to believe that by a simple process of changing consonant- and vowel-sounds—a process, mark you, built up on admittedly incomplete evidence—we can suddenly start talking correctly a language which was last heard so spoken hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And even if we Englishmen could perform this feat, we should be alone among the nations. Racial characteristics of speech, which are in most cases ineradicable, compel different peoples to pronounce foreign languages differently. On this point the reformers might receive enlightenment from hearing an Englishman and a Frenchman trying to understand one another in Esperanto. One word more. The reformers bolster up their case by an attack on the present condition of things. That our present pronuncia- tion is wrong, certainly and hopelessly, I know. But believing correct pronunciation to be impossible of general achievement, I submit that a system based on pronouncing consonants and vowels (long and short) just as they would be pronounced in English is a system not only consistent and simple, but also instructive and impressive as regards spelling and quantity. And lastly, we are asked to lament the splendour of the Latin tongue as a banished, buried thing. We are told we have little or no conception of the phonetic beauty and grandeur of the final chapters of the "Agricola," still less of the lovely tenderness of Catalina' lyre. It is, Sir, the merest humbug to suggest that, because of the inevitable short- comings of a workable modern system, the Latin tongue, prose and poetry of all kinds, does not delight and thrill our ears. Again, in short, the reformers can only realise their ideal, which as an ideal is admirable, to a small and ridiculous extent. The old way of pronunciation, carried out with the simplicity and consistency explained above, is workable and instructive ; nor is it by any means destructive of the original magnificence of the Latin tongue.—I am, Sir, &c.,
A. W. C.
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