Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jbay 2250 days ago
Even for Latin, apparently Ecclesiastical (Church) Latin, which is more familiar to most people today, differs in pronunciation from Classical Latin. For example, Ecclesiastical Latin uses a soft 'c', where the ancient Romans would have used a hard 'c' -- Cicero's name would have been pronounced like "keekero" in his day, whereas most people now think of him as "Sissero". Although the Roman empire was large and diverse enough that Latin probably had quite a variety of dialects and maybe Ecclesiastical Latin was one of them.

Hebrew is an unusual case because, like Latin, it was mostly a dead language that for centuries only continued to be used in religious and a few other contexts. It was revived in the 19th century. Because of its long period of cryostasis the parts that were preserved probably haven't changed that much, although necessarily it's expanded greatly into a living language.