[twic]

One of my Latin teachers (the one who was under 60) did try to teach us a proper pronuncation once, but quickly gave up.

But i wonder, what is the point? I think the use cases for Latin are, from most to least important:

1. reading Latin texts

2. casually dropping Latin phrases to impress your friends and intimidate your enemies

3. writing Latin mottoes, naming species, etc

4. listening to that Finnish radio station that is in Latin

5. work conversations at the Vatican

I think that none of these require historically correct Latin pronunciation. I assume that at the Vatican they speak some derivative of mediaeval Latin, and the signalling function of using Latin tags actually requires that you use the incorrect "classically educated Englishman" pronunciation.

[teataster]

Correct pronunciation is rather relevant for your first point, if you are trying to read poetry.

Both latin and classical greek poetry has a "rhythm" based on the pronunciation of each syllable. In latin you won't get the rhythm unless you are very knowledgeable of the poetic forms or the correct pronunciation of words, since vowel spelling is overloaded: there are 10 latin vowels (excluding diphthongs) and 5 ways to write them traditionally.

Same goes if you are interested in following a christian mass in latin. Songs make little sense without medieval/vatican pronunciation. I can read an ecclesiastic text, but I get nothing of what they are singing, since I was educated in classical latin.

[thaumasiotes]

> I think that none of these require historically correct Latin pronunciation.

That is true, but there are questions for which you want to know what the historical pronunciation was. For example, it's much easier to make sense of ancient misspellings if you can recognize that the misspelling and the target word would have sounded the same. Something similar holds for ancient jokes.

> I assume that at the Vatican they speak some derivative of mediaeval Latin

This is vague; the syntax and pronunciation of Latin change continuously into Italian. The rest of Italy has a better claim to be speaking "some derivative of medieval Latin" than the Vatican does; the Vatican's version presumably reflects mostly-arrested development after a certain point, as far as syntax goes.

As for pronunciation, I tend to assume (without any relevant knowledge) that the Vatican's Latin pronunciation is just how the same written words would be pronounced in standard Italian. You can find similar conventions for other dead languages -- it's the only option available for Chinese where we just plain don't know what the pronunciation was in 600 BC, and it's "Reuchlinian pronunciation" in Greek. This approach has quite a bit to recommend it, most prominently that it's easy to find fluent models of the pronunciation of a living language.

[mudita]

When you're learning latin, it's usually not mainly about the practical application, anyway, and aesthetically it feels somehow so much more pleasing to use the “correct” pronunciation - to me at least.

Furthermore it can help to understand historic and linguistic relationships in unexpected ways:

For example the German word for emperor “Kaiser” looks very different to the Latin “Caesar” and the relationship between those words remains obscured by the way most Germans pronounce Caesar. But it was a revelation to me, when I learned that “c” and “ae”are actually pronounced the same way as the “k” and “ai” in the German “Kaiser”. We literally still call emperors Caesar in German!

[thaumasiotes]

Aren't the "s" and the "s" different, though? And the "r" and the "r"?

[QuercusMax]

It's pretty dang close for 2100 years!

[mmmmmbop]

The Russian 'tsar' is similarly derived from Caesar.

[jthnews]

You might be surprised at the size of the community of Latin speakers (outside the Vatican). It gets some attention from time to time on HN. For this community a shared pronunciation is crucial to being mutually intelligible. And I suppose it makes sense to use the one with the most support from the experts, even if it will always remain somewhat speculative. I take your point - it is possible to study and ready Latin without much regard for pronunciation. But I also feel that if you approach it this way you miss out on the fun of trying to recreate the speech of an ancient culture.

[ferkad]

ad 4. If you are referring to Nuntii Latini then it is no longer broadcasted. The final news service was emitted in 2019.

[chrononaut]

Not knowing Latin myself, I would imagine that learning Latin could also be a stepping stone to more thoroughly understand other related languages?

[wenc]

The written form, maybe, but the spoken form not likely.

The Youtuber Ecolinguist ran an experiment where he had Romance language speakers (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian) try to guess at riddles in Latin. Turns out Classical Latin is actually very different from most Romance languages, which descended more from "Vulgar Latin".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C77anb2DJGk

[yorwba]

But pronunciation is very variable, even living languages have multiple different pronunciations in use at any given time (a.k.a. accents) and for a language like Latin that has been in use for thousands of years, the possibilities are endless.

Being able to establish one-to-one correspondences between Latin words and their descendants in modern languages can be helpful, but it doesn't matter much whether you're using the "correct" Latin pronunciation, so long as whatever pronunciation you do use maintains those correspondences.

[tomcooks]

Give it a try, it's what people do on a daily basis when trying to communicate with English speakers.

[yorwba]

If you want to use Latin to talk to people, you should probably use whatever pronunciation they expect, even if it's not "correct".

[bmj]

I attend an Anglican church (in the U.S.). Our rector and deacon are both from England. They endlessly argue about the pronunciation of venite.

[tomcooks]

> One of my Latin teachers did try to teach us a proper pronuncation once, but quickly gave up.

Basically what happens in Europe when students need to learn English pronunciation, but no way to give up.

> But i wonder, what is the point?

By learning Latin you multiply the speed at which you learn romance languages, which will allow you to understand and communicate with a much larger share of the world.

Moreover, but this is a personal sidenote: why do people outside of the Anglosphere need to learn how to speak perfect English (and get the usual banter about pronunciation not being spotless), while the Anglosphere generally doesn't bother returning the favour (while at the same time complaining about being treated as uneducated, rude gringos)

[Grieving]

> By learning Latin you multiply the speed at which you learn romance languages, which will allow you to understand and communicate with a much larger share of the world.

As someone else said, you can just as well learn a Romance language and you'll have the same benefit when learning a second. My grandfather's first language was an obscure French dialect, and he's able to communicate with Mexican Spanish speakers without much trouble.

> Moreover, but this is a personal sidenote: why do people outside of the Anglosphere need to learn how to speak perfect English (and get the usual banter about pronunciation not being spotless), while the Anglosphere generally doesn't bother returning the favour (while at the same time complaining about being treated as uneducated, rude gringos)

I don't know if this holds true elsewhere in the Anglosphere, but in my experience Americans who are interested in learning foreign languages are generally eager to perfect their pronunciation (whether or not they succeed is another question entirely, though to be fair the same is true about most English learners). That "uneducated, rude gringos" are a long-standing negative trope in popular American media reflects this insecurity. And with regard to classical languages in particular, the Anglosphere has been mocked for reviving 'spotless' classical pronunciations instead of simply using, for example, modern Italian or Greek pronunciation.

[umanwizard]

I don’t think there’s any evidence that learning Latin helps you learn Romance languages any faster than learning a Romance language does. Why should learning Latin and then French be any faster than Spanish->French ?

[bshimmin]

I studied Latin and French from the age of 11. When I spent a year in Bologna as a student on the Erasmus scheme (studying Latin, in fact), I can assure you that my schoolboy French was the more useful of the two as a starting point for learning Italian.

[CaptArmchair]

I would like to add that that's not a coincidence either.

The Late-Roman republic and the Roman Empire saw the emergence of vulgar Latin next to classical Latin. Vulgar Latin developed first in Italy and was subsequently adopted throughout the Empire. Vulgar Latin also saw active evolution during late antiquity. It diverged from classical Latin to a point where both lost out being mutual intelligible (7th century). That's when classical Latin became a dead language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages#Vulgar_Latin

The decline of the Roman Empire coincided with an age of mass migrations. As Roman influenced waned, people across the European peninsula fragmented. As did language development. That's where you find the common root of modern romance languages. Over the course of several centuries, local changes and influences forged distinct languages.

For sure, classical Latin and modern romance language are all of the same family. But Cicero's Latin is further removed from French then modern day Italian.

[shakow]

> Why should learning Latin and then French be any faster than Spanish->French ?

Indeed. I'm French, and I can basically read (not too literary) Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Latin, not so much. I have been told by locutors of these languages that the Italian/Spanish gap is even narrower.