Actually, JD, I disagree with you on your assessment of English. I think that the recent changes have made it more exciting, and more useful. The changes in the English language reflect the changes in society. Science, technology, social mores, economics, politics. Never in human history has there been such an exciting time with so much change going on. And the changes in the English language reflect the wider changes.
The changes in the language when it comes to formal usage -- the scientific study of such things -- is, indeed, a gain. This goes to the point I made about precision above. The point I was making is that because of the laxity of standards in teaching such matters in general, the use of the language even among writers has degenerated to the degree where, in place of ambiguity you have vagueness, instead of rhetorical effect you have sheer pedestrianism, in place of the precise use of terms which have a wealth of associational qualities, you now have to have paragraph on paragraph to get an even approximate idea of the same concept. The language is all too often bald, featureless, journalistic, and plebeian (in the worst sense of that term). Again, all due to the idea that it only in the skeletal frame of a sentence (action-oriented verbs as opposed to descriptive adjectives, for instance) that the message lies -- which could not be farther from the truth. It is the whole, and being aware of its various associations
and sonic properties (which, like music, if skillfully used can evoke particular emotional responses in the reader/listener), which matters.
However, this is a side issue... related, but not entirely germane to the issue at hand.
And I think you may have misunderstood when I said we do not know how Latin was pronounced. There are some rules that have survived. I actually studied Latin many decades back at High School. Two years wasted. Our Latin teacher taught us the basic rules, but emphasized that the accent and subtleties were all lost.
So, I am aware that the famous phrase by Julius Caesar : "Vini, Vidi, Vici" is actually pronounced something like Weeny, weedy, weechy. However, if the very best Latin scholar of the 20th century were transported by a time machine to ancient Rome, he would struggle like hell to understand the Romans, and they would struggle like hell to understand him. Reason - the accent. Though I am sure he would adapt quickly and learn their means of pronunciation.
Again, there is a degree of truth to this, but it is by no means correct in the broader sense. If you mean by "accent" the modulation of the sound of a particular letter, that was dealt with above -- variants of that sort were even around in ancient Greece or the various parts of the Roman Empire... in fact, they led in large part to the differences which various regions adopted in both their use of Latin and their own indigenous tongues, while the different city-states of Greece could be compared to, say, the difference in sound between a New Yorker (with their rapid, clipped, often nasal or flattened vowels) and a Texan "twang", or the often more drawled pronunciation of the Deep South, etc. All these variants still lie within certain parameters which allow them to be recognized as within acceptable limits of pronunciation for the same words.
If by "accent" you mean stress -- that one is even less tenable, as the verse of these languages, plus the various scholastic guides which have surfaced over the years, give a fairly good approximation on that point. Granted, stress would sometimes be altered in a particular word for purposes of versification, but we still can gather a heck of a lot about such matters from comparing various sources like this... and have done so.
As for the "subtleties" -- I'm no sure to what you refer there, as that term, in this context, could cover a lot of ground. Suffice to say, though, that the comment made by the teacher was a gross oversimplification, and we have had a good knowledge of the differences in pronunciation for a very, very long time (to get us back to sff, L. Sprague de Camp makes a point of this in his early novel,
Lest Darkness Fall, where just such an understanding is crucial to the protagonist). Again, this has been refined over the years, but the major points haven't really changed....
When I was first taught Latin, the teacher insisted that its v should be pronounced as an English w, to the extent of railing against what he saw as the prevailing fashion. Subsequent teachers - none of whom managed to get the language to stick in my brain - preferred what was then the orthodox pronunciation (or so I believed at the time; and still do, not having researched the matter since).
Can anyone tell me what today's view on this is?
Big Bear: From all I have read or heard from people in the field, yes the Latin
v should (generally) be pronounced like an English
w, though there are some exceptions depending on the period. Again, some Latin dictionaries I have come across make quite a bit point of this, along with the particular instances of difference between the uses of
i (whether for
j or
i, etc.)
(That sound you can probably hear is me shrieking in horror...)
