Latin phonology is the system of sounds used in Latin. Classical Latin was spoken from the late Roman Republic to the early Empire: evidence for its pronunciation is taken from comments by Roman grammarians, common spelling mistakes, transcriptions into other languages, and the outcomes of various sounds in the Romance languages.Covington, Michael. (2019). Latin Pronunciation Demystified.
Latin orthography is the writing system used to spell Latin from its archaic stages down to the present. Latin was nearly always spelt in the Latin alphabet, but further details varied from period to period. The alphabet developed from Old Italic script, which had developed from a variant of the Greek alphabet, which in turn had developed from a variant of the Phoenician alphabet. The Latin alphabet most resembles the Greek alphabet that can be seen on black-figure pottery dating to c. 540 BC, especially the Euboean regional variant.
As the language continued to be used as a classical language, lingua franca and liturgical language long after it ceased being a native language, pronunciation and – to a lesser extent – spelling diverged significantly from the classical standard with Latin words being pronounced differently by native speakers of different languages. While nowadays a reconstructed classical pronunciation aimed to be that of the 1st century ADLatin Accents. is usually employed in the teaching of Latin, the Italian-influenced ecclesiastical pronunciation as used by the Catholic church is still in common use. The Traditional English pronunciation of Latin has all but disappeared from classics education but continues to be used for Latin-based loanwords and use of Latin e.g. for binominal names in taxonomy.
During most of the time written Latin was in widespread use, authors variously complained about language change or attempted to "restore" an earlier standard. Such sources are of great value in reconstructing various stages of the spoken language (the is an important source for the spoken variety in the 4th century CE, for example) and have in some cases indeed influenced the development of the language. The efforts of Renaissance Latin authors were to a large extent successful in removing innovations in grammar, spelling and vocabulary present in Medieval Latin but absent in both classical and contemporary Latin.
Letterforms
In Classical times there was no modern-like distinction between upper case and lower case. Inscriptions typically use square capitals, in letterforms largely corresponding to modern upper-case, and handwritten text was generally in the form of cursive, which includes letterforms corresponding to modern lowercase.
Letters and phonemes In Classical spelling, individual letters mainly corresponded to individual phonemes (alphabetic principle). Exceptions include: The letters , , , , and , each of which could represent either a short vowel or a long one. The long vowels were sometimes marked with apices, as in , , , and , while long could be marked with long I . Since the 19th century, long vowels have been marked with macrons, as in , , , , and ; sometimes, breves may also be used to indicate short vowels, as in , , , , , and . The letters and , which could either indicate vowels (as mentioned) or the consonants and , respectively. In modern times, the letters and began to be used as distinct spellings for these consonants (now often pronounced very differently). Digraphs such as , and , which represented the diphthongs , and . In a few words, these could also stand for sequences of two adjacent vowels, which is sometimes marked by the use of a diaeresis in modern transcriptions, as in , and . The digraphs , and , standing for the aspirated consonants , and (initially written in loanwords from Greek, and subsequently in some native Latin words and loanwords from Italic languages which used the same sounds).
Consonants Below are the distinctive (i.e. phonemic) consonants that are assumed for Classical Latin.
Labial Coronal Palatal Velar Glottal Plosive () () () () () Fricative Nasal Rhotic Approximant
Phonetics Latin may have had the labialized velar stops and as opposed to the stop + semivowel sequences and (as in the English quick or penguin). The argument for is stronger than that for . The former could occur between vowels, where it always counted as a single consonant in Classical poetry, whereas the latter only occurred after , where it is impossible to tell whether it counted as one consonant or two. The labial element, whether or , appears to have been palatalised before a front vowel, resulting in or Voiced labial–palatal approximant (for instance would have sounded something like ). This palatalisation did not affect the independent consonant before front vowels. and before were not distinct from and , which were allophonically labialized to and by a following such that writing a double was unnecessary. This is suggested by the fact that and (from Old Latin and ) are also found spelt as and . , and were less aspirated than the corresponding English consonants, as implied by their usually being transliterated into Ancient Greek as , and , and their pronunciation in most Romance languages. In many cases, however, it was not the Latin and , but rather and , that were used to render Greek word-initial and in borrowings (as in , > , ), especially borrowings of a non-learned character. This might suggest that the Latin and had some degree of aspiration, making and more suitable to approximate the Greek sounds. , and were pronounced with notable aspiration, like the initial consonants of the English pot, top, and cot respectively. They are attested beginning c. 150 BC, in the spellings , and , at first only used to render the Greek , and in loanwords. (Previously these had been rendered in Latin as , and .) From c. 100 BC onward , and spread to a number of native Latin words as well, such as and . When this occurred it was nearly always in the vicinity of the consonant or , and the implication is that Latin , and had become aspirated in that context. was found as a rendering of the Greek in borrowings starting around the first century BC. (In earlier borrowings, the Greek sound had been rendered in Latin as .) In initial position, appears to have been pronounced , and between vowels it appears to have been doubled to (counted as two consonants in poetry). was unvoiced in all positions in Classical Latin. Previously, however, Old Latin written appears to have been voiced to between vowels (intervocalic), ultimately becoming written (rhotacism). Cicero reports the family-name being changed to in the fourth century BC, which may give some idea of the chronology. Afterward new instances of developed between vowels from sound-changes like the degemination of after long vowels and diphthongs (as in > ), which Quintilian reports to have happened a little after the time of Cicero and Virgil. In Old Latin, final after a short vowel was often lost, probably after first debuccalizing to , as in the inscriptional form for (Classical ). Often in the poetry of Plautus, Ennius, and Lucretius, final did not count as a consonant when followed by a word beginning with a consonant. By the Classical period this practice was described as characteristic of non-urban speech by Cicero. was labiodental in Classical Latin but may have been a bilabial in Old Latin, or perhaps in free variation with . Lloyd, Sturtevant, and Kent make this argument based on misspellings in early inscriptions, the fact that many instances of Latin descend from Proto-Indo-European , and the outcomes of the sound in Romance (particularly in Spain). In most cases was pronounced as a bilabial nasal. At the end of a word, however, it was generally lost beginning in Old Latin (except when another nasal or a plosive followed it), leaving compensatory lengthening and nasalization on the preceding vowel (such that may have sounded something like , i.e. ). In Old Latin inscriptions, final is often omitted, as in for (Classical ). It was frequently elided before a following vowel in poetry and lost without a trace (apart from perhaps lengthening) in the Romance languages, except in a number of monosyllabic words, where it often survives as or a further development thereof. and merged via assimilation before a following consonant, with the following consonant determining the resulting pronunciation: bilabial before a bilabial consonant (e.g. and ), coronal before a coronal consonant (e.g. and ) and velar before a velar consonant (e.g. , and ). This occurred both within words (e.g. may have sounded something like ) and across word-boundaries (for instance with , or ). assimilated to a velar nasal before . Allen and Greenough say that a vowel before is always long, but W. Sidney Allen says that is based on an interpolation in Priscian, and the vowel was actually long or short depending on the root, as for example from the root of but from the root of . probably did not assimilate to before . The cluster arose by syncope, as for example from . Original developed into in , from the root of . At the start of a word, original was reduced to , and this change was reflected in the orthography of later texts, as in , > , . In Classical Latin, the rhotic was most likely an alveolar trill , at least in some positions and when doubled. Gaius Lucilius likened it to the sound of a dog, and later writers described it as being produced with vibration. In Old Latin, written appearing between vowels (intervocalic) was initially pronounced , and developed into written (rhotacism); Allen says this is suggestive of a fricative similar to English in some pronunciations of the word draw (). Similarly, written in intervocalic position became written , possibly suggesting a tap (like the Spanish singular , such as in ; in some dialects of English, intervocalic also shifts to this sound, such as in pedal). was strongly velarized in syllable coda and probably somewhat palatalized when geminated or followed by . In intervocalic position, it appears to have been velarized before all vowels except .. In footnote 206, he adds: "The evidence has been thoroughly assessed in the diachronic literature; see Sen (2012: 472–3; 2015: 15 sqq.), Meiser (1998: 68–9), Leumann (1977: 85–7)." generally appeared only at the beginning of words, before a vowel, as in , except in compound words such as (pronounced something like ). Between vowels, it was generally as a geminate , as in (pronounced something like ) except in compound words such as . This is sometimes marked in modern editions by a circumflex on the preceding vowel, e.g. , , , etc. could also have varied with in the same morpheme, as in and , and in poetry one could be replaced with the other for metrical purpose. was pronounced as an approximant until the first century AD, when and intervocalic began to develop into fricatives. In poetry, and could be replaced with each other, as in ~ or ~. Unlike it remained a single consonant in most words, e.g. in , although it did represent a double in borrowings from Greek such as the name . was generally still pronounced in Classical Latin, at least by educated speakers, but in many cases it appears to have been lost early on between vowels, and sometimes in other contexts as well ( < * being a particularly early example). Where intervocalic survived, it was likely voiced (that is, ).
Notes on spelling Doubled consonant letters represented genuinely doubled consonants, as in for . In Old Latin, geminate consonants were written as if they were single until the middle of the second century BC, when orthographic doubling began to appear. Grammarians mention the marking of double consonants with the sicilicus, a diacritic in the shape of a sickle. It appears in a few inscriptions of the Augustan era.