To j.d.
It is possible to be a pronunciation purist, but how far do you keep it going?
We have words in English that are spelt according to a long-lost pronunciation, but are currently pronounced very differently.
Think of all the words starting with 'k' which is now silent.
e.g. know, knife, knapp etc. Are you purist enough to pronounce the 'k'? After all, that was the original pronunciation.
Reality is that the way words are spoken changes over time. Purists rail about the changes, and often the verbal academic generation have to die off before the new pronunciations are accepted. However, English is a dynamic language and every generation speaks it just a little differently to the previous. We can fight the changes tooth and nail, but are doomed to fail, if only because we die.
Personally, I regard change as healthy. Anything that does not change is static, and probably already dead. Latin does not change. And which nation speaks it?
Granted, there is change in language (even Latin went through such changes for many centuries, as did Greek). But such is a gradual change, following fairly well recognized "rules" of phonology and dialectical interchange, and is a vastly different thing from ignoring correct pronunciation which is still very much in effect, or (worse yet) saying that correct pronunciation is a null concept. Again, that is simply nonsense, and taking the natural evolution of a language as a license for the sort of orthographic and phonetic chaos which one sees in many earlier ages following the fall of Rome. (Look at the books of the 15th to 17th centuries, for example, where spelling
even by the same author often varied
on the same page!)
Latin continued to change, and isn't actually a dead language (save for the purest classical forms), but engendered (with cross-pollination) all the romance languages which became many of the modern languages of today; much as some of the dinosaurs evolved to become various species of birds which are still with us.
So, again, what I object to is not the normal sort of change language goes through over time, but rather the arbitrary disregarding of those rules of pronunciation which are still very much in existence, and one of the main reasons for such objection is that that sort of thing does cut down on clear communication. Look at how bastardized modern English is in comparison to, say, what it was a century and a half ago (or even less). Compare the writing of someone like John Collier or Shirley Jackson -- both popular writers, remember, published in some of the nation's major popular magazines -- to analogous writers today. There is less precision, and therefore less nuance, subtlety, and hence a coarsening of the layers of emotional response, association, complexity and ambiguity of impression, let alone all the stylistic niceties which were so common throughout most of the history of Western literature.
So with ignoring the proper pronunciation of words which are well-established: try a subtle change in pronouncing homoousian and homoiousian, and see what sort of chaos ensues in trying to communicate!
As for the point with scientific terminology which comes from classical Greek and Latin... as these are well-established pronunciations, and as the language isn't changing, the problems with such an idea is all the more evident.
Precision is the very essence of scientific communication, or, when it come to that, genuine communication of any kind....
