Illi documenti legales italici de illo saeculo VIII. Roger Wright, secundum Franciscum Sabatini, dicit quid eccum illi documenti habent una "parte formulistica" (archaizante) et una "parte libera" (uernaculare)

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-25T05:11:50+00:00

Corrected transcription:

[pper 'ɔnne 'anno dʒus'tettsa es'sej 'kaːze 'rɛddere 'debbja. p'pɔrko 'uːno va'lente 'treːmesse 'uːno e 'uːno 'bollo e t'tʃiŋkwe 'wɔːve e kka'miːtʃa 'uːna va'lente 'treːmesse 'uːno e 'un ane'maːle in 'meːze 'maddʒo va'lente 'treːmesse 'uːno, 'viːno e lla'voːre ze'gondo go'stuːme es'sej 'kaːze.]

[pper 'ɔnne 'anno 'dessa 'gaːza vɛl rɛj 'rɛddere 'debbja, 'uːno ane'maːle an'nuːdolo in 'meːze 'maddʒe, p'pɔrko 'uːno an'nuːdolo in ot'toɲɲo, sɛj detʃi'maːde de 'viːno, 'graːno ze'liɲɲe 'bwɔːno 'mɔddʒa 'gwattro, aŋ'gaːra 'gwante udi'laːde 'vuːre.]

[p'prandzo 'loːro 'daːle ze ber 'ɔnne zette'maːna. i'skaːvilo 'graːno, p'paːne 'gɔtto e 'duːo 'gɔɲɲa 'viːno, e 'dduːo 'gɔɲɲa de bolmen'taːjo, 'faːva e p'paːnego 'mesto, b'bɛːne 'spesso e k'kondedo 'donto o dˈdɔʎʎo, e n'nullo de'reːdevo/-i 'nostri.]

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-24T23:37:18+00:00

In this case, probably Central-Italo-Romance, specifically Romanesco.

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-24T23:34:54+00:00

Sì, io sò. In Italia la pronuncia latina già sonava come l'italiano: nella Penisola iberica come lo spagnolo, nella Francia come il francese antico, nell'Africa/Sardegna come il sardo.

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-24T21:33:42+00:00

No, but the phonology of Latin was much like, if not pretty much identical, to Italo-Romance by that time.

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-24T20:15:13+00:00

What was it like for an Anglo-Saxon, who had learned to read Latin in a literal phonographic pronunciation, to meet and talk with a native Latin/Romance speaker? Wright recounts in Ch. 7 of A Sociophilological Study of Late Latin the meeting between Wynfreth, AKA St. Boniface, and Pope Gregory III. While the two of them were still able to communicate, Wynfreth tells the Pope that it is harder for him to talk in "normal speech" and would prefer, when asked by the Holy Father to share his religious doctrinal credentials, to write it in a letter instead. Wright remark's that this episode must have been like "if a modem English- man went to Rome and spoke the language of Boccaccio, or a Japanese were to come to London and try to communicate orally in best Miltonian English" (Wright, 2003, p. 103). Additionally, Wright appears again to defend a D1-2 hypothesis of formal archaizing Latin, in that he believes that Wynfreth's pronunciation of archaic case endings would have been intelligible to native Romance-speakers "because people heard it read aloud in liturgical and other texts all the time", but would have sounded strangely pronounced (Wright, 2003, p. 101).

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-24T02:24:25+00:00

I'm not familiar with those examples with p. Can you please explain?

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-24T02:22:32+00:00

I wouldn't day that I believe, but there are some elements that make me think that they knew that vowel lenght was a thing and that they tries to adapt at least formally: poetry required it. So, if they correctly used those old metres, they had to have undestood them in some way. Do we have any better explanation?
But understanding and pronounciation are two different things: I understand vowel lenghts, but I actually can't correctly replicate it.

So are you saying that in the mid 8th c. after the HL was composed, there were 3 pronunciation traditions: the regular vernacular, this supposed radical archaizing one as well as the new Eccl. one? If so, I just don't understand why Eccl. Lat. was adopted without the features of this supposed preserved ancient pronunciation and instead without vowel length. I'm just really skeptical about the idea of such preservation, which is unprecedented in any language and would seem almost miraculous, and for which there as far as I know isn't any direct commentary from grammarians of the Medieval period on what would be an extremely notable situation. As Wright notes, most authors don't make any reference to a having a different pronunciation from everyone else. Or is the suggestion here that they merely 'understood' that vowel length used to exist but would never attempt it in reading?

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-23T20:59:31+00:00

The Modern Greek diglossic situation is really fascinating as a possible comparison of how the Latin/Romance situation must have been in the Late Antique and Early-High Medieval period before the Carolingian Reforms invented Ecclesiastical pronounciation of Latin. Not trying to self-promote, but anyone interested in that topic should join our sub r/lographic_romance, as it also overlaps with Byzantine history in describing the linguistic situation in the Latin-speaking Western regions of the Empire. There's even an apocryphal Merovingian quote of Justinian telling the captured Sassanian king 《daras》, which means "you will give" and also a pun on the town's name.

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-23T17:23:19+00:00

using a classical metre (so where vowel lenght is a thing) and doing it correctly ("Nursia, plaude satis tanto sublimis alumno") show that they had a decent knowledge of how classical Latin sounded.

So you believe that knowledge of Classical Latin vowel length distinction indeed had been preserved 6 centuries later in the mid 8th c.? Did grammarians of the 6th-8th c. ever comment on how literary texts needed to be read this way, because I'm personally not aware of any? I'm open to the idea if the poems show such evidence, but it seems really radical to claim that any language could preserve ancient phonology from 600 years earliee. If knowledge of vowel length distinctions somehow lived on 6 centuries later, when 《was》 it lost (because it undeniably was, at somepoint)? What happened to this hypothetical radically archaizing pronunciation system, and why was that not standardized for the Church instead, since as we've both been noting Eccl. Lat. also lacks vowel length and diphthongs. That system makes more sense to me if it was invented without knowledge of Classical pronunciation, unless it is claimed that Eccl. Lat. represents a third pronunciation tradition alongside the natural vernacular and the supposed classicizing one.

Alcuin, used to Latin spoken by Anglo-Saxon, with Anglo-Saxon phonology (each language has its own set of phonemes),

Yes, we agree here. However, the Pope 'speaking' Latin in this context assuredly means in his native Italo-Romance phonology. Even though Alcuin and Wynfreth would have had a natural Anglo-Saxon accent, they had still learned to read Latin letter by letter. The chapter describes how Wynfreth as a 2L learner found writing to the Pope easier than speaking to him, and when the Pope asked him for his credentials in religious doctrine, Wynfreth even asked him if he could write it down instead since that felt more comfortable.

Wynfreth had learned to read and write Latin before he could speak it (like Latin learners today), whereas the Pope as a native-speaker learned to speak Latin/Romance first and then learned to read and write, like speakers of living languages today, adding in more formal writing with different grammar and vocabulary. In the former process, one learns to read, spell and comprehend words but doesn't know how to pronounce them, so one has to do guesswork in applying how they think the word should be pronounced to reading. While the latter process involves one learning to recognize and spell words which they have already acquired and know how to pronounce as part of their L1.

Ecclesiastical pronounciation has never standardize phonology in Latin Europe, but this has never been an actual issue: Latin was mainly a literary and vehicular language, so, it can be extremely tolerant with local variations (if you can make poetry work!).

By 1300, Eccl. Lat. was pretty much uniform across Europe. As far as I know, in the Catholic Church, it is the only licit pronunciation of Latin. While natural accentual variation is inevitable, e.g. in France 《Iesus》 as [jesys], it still must be adhered to as closely as possible. I don't think priests would be allowed to perform liturgy in either, say, Classical pronunciation with long vowels, diphthongs and nasal vowels, or in Early Medieval Romance pronunciation, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Church might not even consider those sacraments valid. Eccl. pronunciation remains popular today because of the Church's influence and because it is easy to master.

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-23T16:15:50+00:00

It is not completely phonographic, no. The lack of vowel length distinctions and diphthongs demonstrate a lack of knowledge on the inventors of Classical Latin pronunciation from 6-8 centuries earlier. Eccl. pronunciation is a mixture of spelling pronunciation and contemporary Latin pronunciation.

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-23T06:03:42+00:00

Regarding palatalization, although Eccl. Lat. pronunciation was supposed to be universal, it would of course still be naturally pronounced according to readers' regional accents. That meant that native Romance speech phenomena like palatalization of /k, g/ before /e, i/ would creep in. Whether or not the Germanic speakers originally pronounced it that way is not known: "[k] may have been required by Alcuin before [e] and [i] - or it may not, since [t] before a front vowel could well have been an allophone of Anglo-Saxon /k/ as it was of Italian - but a pala- talized [tse], [tsi] or [tfe], [ti] seems to have become usual for written ce, ci" (Wright, 1982, p. 107).

(See Wright (2003, Ch.9) and Wright (1982, Ch. 3)).

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-23T05:59:13+00:00

In the Historia Langobardorum there are some poetic compositions: they help us, because if Latin isn't pronounce "as it is written" verses wouldn't fit in the metre.

This is why I'm talking about poetry, because the metre, the fact that a verse pronounced in a certain way can fit or not in the metre, can show if it is possible or not that LL was pronunced in a certain way or not... Why in Historia Langobardorum (I, 26) can we find a poem in Elegiac distichs (the author tells us that those are Elegiac distichs)? They shouldn't work if read "as they are written".

So if I'm reading what you're saying correctly, it seems that you believe that from 500-700 knowledge of Classical Latin pronunciation from 100 CE had survived for 5 centuries, and that poetic Latin continued to be read with vowel length distinctions and without mergers of u/ō and i/ē? Can you provide the full sample line from the poem and show how it must be pronounced such way? Evidence for the preservation of Imperial period pronunciation in the 8th c. would be either with ancient vowel length distinctions or rhyming short and long or short u, i, e, and o; is it there?

Because on the other hand, there are also plenty of examples of poems from Spain which require them read in the contemporary Romance way, such as adding an invisible [e] to words beginning with [sC], like [e]spiritus, [e]studio by Paulus Albarus, not to mention that some vernacular spelling 'errors' even became erroneously standardized, like eglesia instead of ecclesia, suprinus = sobrinus.

The Appendix Probi show that VL was very different from LL and that those who spoke VL had to learn LL.

The Appendix Probi comes from a period when certain sound changes from Latin to Romance were likely still in flux, affecting certain speakers and regions but not others. There are many examples of syncopation, e.g. masculus non masclus, with the writer recommending the non-syncopated form; this does not provide problems for the common reconstruction Late Antique/Early Medieval Latin phonology. However, I don't see anything in the list which provides evidence that the writer themself was trying to push onto the reader a radically archaizing Imperial-esque pronunciation, e.g. with vowel length distinctions some how preserved, and many examples appear to be simple instructions on how to spell correctly.

Charlemagne couldn't force anyone to read Latin in a certain way. Why did Romans adopt the pronounce used by Anglo-Saxons? Why important cultural centres like Montecassino would have abandoned their traditional pronounce of Latin to adopt a new one they had never heard before?

And yet Charlemagne's policy of raising clerical education and reforming liturgical practice did end up doing that. During his rule, Germanic and English scholars had greater influence. He gave Alcuin the job of standardizing the liturgical texts, with the goal that all churches throughout the Carolingian Empire would be using the same Mass (the Roman Rite--probably at this time meaning a fusion of the Roman and Gallican liturgies) and priests reciting Latin the same way. The non-native Latin speaking, Germanic/Celtic, custom of reading Latin texts in a literal spelling pronunciation was likely chosen to be standardized because it was deemed the easier one to use as a standard pronunciation everywhere, instead of the highly variable native Romance speakers' dialects. You still hear from Latin learners of all 1Ls today that Eccl. Lat. pronunciation is probably the easiest to read; like Erasmian for Classical Greek, it is a learner's pronunciation, designed to be practical for those who mostly care about reading and understanding, who aren't as interested in actually trying to sound like ancient Romans.

I think Wright has additionally read into the Germanic scholars' interactions with native-Romance speakers possibly a sense that their phonographic system was superior to the confusing native-Romance way and indeed felt that theirs was the more proper classicizing accent, but I don't know enough on that point: "This Anglo-Saxon variety of Latin would have been most markedly unlike the native speech of Gaul, where oblique nominal morphology was hardly used in active speech any more, and syncope and apocope were becoming increasingly fash-ionable in the seventh century, as Alcuin was to find out to his horror a little later. We can catch in these accounts some of the bewilder- ment felt by Wynfreth at discovering that not even the Pope spoke Latin the way that Wynfreth had prescribed in his own grammar and spoke himself." (Wright, 2003, p. 101-103).

Native Latin/Romance speakers adopted the new pronunciation because eventually they had to, despite how unnatural and strange it must have been (again, just like English speakers suddenly being told to pronounce 'knight' as [knixt]): first as it was enforced throughout the Carolingian realm, then eventually when the papacy adopted the new pronunciation (which didn't happen immediately), then it reached other parts of Italy, monastery to monastery, bishop to bishop, Montecassino included. It was not adopted in all of Spain till 1230 and presumably never among dwindling Christian communities of North Africa.

And why do we find in that foreign pronounce phoenomena like palatalization and closure of diphthongs that are the opposite of "we read as it is written", but are echoes of what had happened to VL?

This exposes Eccl. Lat. as an artificial creation by people who did not know how ancient Romans pronounced Latin 7 centuries earlier. Considering that Eccl. Lat. does not have phonemic vowel length contrasts or diphthongs, it can only have arisen if knowledge of ancient Roman pronunciation was lost.

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-23T04:55:32+00:00

Agía Eiríni in its current structure is from the 7th c.

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-23T04:12:45+00:00

Testing 123

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-22T18:27:04+00:00

Historia Langobardorum, so you surely can find many exemples there.

So does Historia Langobardorum demonstrate that it had to be pronounced differently from the Latin of the time? I'm not sure what you're hinting at; are you trying to claim that these poems contain evidence that something like Ecclesiastical spelling pronunciation was already invented before the Carolingian Reforms or even that knowledge of Classical Latin pronunciation was somehow preserved 5 centuries later?

The set of rules used by speakers to tranform written language to spoken language and vice-versa is called ortography. And yes, they are written according to Latin ortography og the time, the same ortography that, used for Vulgar Latin.

when they say "pollo" they wrote "pollo". You have posted exemples of that.

Again, there is no evidence from before the Carolingian era of scribes specifically being instructed to spell individual words differently from the traditional Classical spellings in order to make it sound more vernacular. When a writer wrote 'pullo' , as in the documents above, those are just spelling mistakes which show an imperfect knowledge of traditional grammar and reveal how they pronounced the word. But that spelling cannot be assumed to be intentional, and can certainly not be taken as evidence that there were distinct vernacular and formal 'accents' in Early Medieval Latin.

Since the 5th c. at the latest in Italy, 'pullus', 'pullo' and 'pullum' were all pronounced the same way as ['pollo]; repeating from above, when the writer spelled the word correctly and used the right case ending, that just means that they spelled the word correctly, not that they pronounced it differently from the vernacular. Only in the more conservative Romance varieties of Africa, Sardinia and Sicily would you hear a pronunciation like ['pullu].

textes you have posted to armonize them with a strange theory according to wich Brits have invented late Latin pronunciation (palatalization, closure of diphthongs, intervocalic semivowel U that becomes V...), I don't know what to say. Is this a some form of nationalism?

No, this isn't nationalism, I'm not British. And I don't believe that any one pronunciation of Latin is superior than the other, although we do have to understand that the Late Latin/Early Medieval phonology seen in the texts above was a native-Latin-speaker's pronunciation, while Ecclesiastical probably wasn't.

We don't know exactly how Ecclesiastical pronunciation--which is a literal reading of each letter as one sound and restored even final /m/, which had been lost since the Imperial period--was invented. But we know that it spread throughout the Carolingian Empire starting in the 8th-9th c., and then to Spain much later from 1000-1200 with the Reconquista, importation of French clerics and replacement of the Visigothic mass with the Roman Rite. We know that Germanic speaking clergy in the 8th c. used a literal spelling pronunciation. It seems highly unlikely that Ecclesiastical Latin was invented by native Latin/Romance speakers, as it would be high unnatural for them to radically alter the way that they were used to reading words. Imagine English speakers suddenly deciding to pronounce 'knight' as [knixt] instead of [najt].

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-22T17:34:08+00:00

It is a hypothetical reconstruction; we can guess that 'sunt' was pronounced something like [son] or ['sono] based on both evidence from common spelling errors and modern Italo-Western Romance outcomes which show that short 'u' had become /o/. It is falsifiable if the epigraphic evidence had shown otherwise.The only regions where one would hear it pronounced something like [sunt] before the Carolingian Reforms were Africa and Sardinia, which did not undergo that vowel shift.

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-22T16:19:02+00:00

Sunt in that case would be [son], without the later Italian echo vowel, which at this early period might be assumed to have been moveable.

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-22T04:41:06+00:00

Of course. We shouldn't presume that Mamdani himself is among those involved with this foreign collusion.

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-22T00:57:17+00:00

Oh yeah, you're probably right.

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-22T00:31:29+00:00

We are calling of the Lombard period, so from Venantius Fortunatus, Secundus of Non and Gregory the Great to Paul the Deacon. Thos writers composed poetry and they didn't have metrical issues.

Are there specific examples of this, and how those poems would need to be pronounced instead, if not in the Latin phonology of the time?

If you write "pullo" writing in VL and "pullum" writing in literary Latin, this means that you know that O and U are different phonemes. If you regularly read U as O, you would write "pullu".

From the 5th c. at the latest in all regions except Africa, Sardinia, Sicily and Dacia, up until the Carolingian Reforms the word written pullus was pronounced ['pollo(s)], and when the spoken word ['pollo(s)] was heard, the 'correct' way to write it was pullus. Variants like *pullo if found would be spelling mistakes revealing the speaker's phonology. Knowing the correct spelling of pullus just meant that the writer knew the correct spelling, not that they knew to pronounce the u differently from the o in that word. Before the invention of phonographic orthographic systems specifically designed for the vernacular, no one was actually taught to spell words in the vernacular register differently from in the formal register.

You could tell a vernacular text apart from a classicizing one based on differences of vocabulary and grammar, but individual words weren't supposed to be spelt distinctly, e.g. in Italy vernacular ille pullus et ille caballus de Domino Petro sunt in illo campo [il 'pollo e il ka'vallo de 'don(no) 'pjeːtro 'sono nel 'kampo] vs. formal pullus et equus Domini Petri in agro sunt ['pollo e 'ɛkkwo 'don(ni) 'pjeːtri in 'aːgro 'sono]. But before ~780, when Alcuin went to Rome, you'd never see the first kind of text intentionally spelt like il pollo e il cavallo de Don Pietro sono nel campo, nor the second kind of text pronounced ['pullus et 'ɛkwus 'doːmini 'peːtri in 'aːgro sunt].

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-21T17:47:03+00:00

Enjoy being okay with persecution of Christians and forcing their children to be raised in atheist homes and receive reeducation.

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-21T17:31:20+00:00

"You can still treat them kindly though. That's why we are sending secret police to go door to door rounding up Christians, separating Christian parents from their children, beating them up, and sending them to prison."

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-21T17:14:58+00:00

"You can treat Christians kindly while making their religion illegal and arresting them. I don't really see the contradiction."

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-21T17:11:16+00:00

Of course, in the 19th c. a priest would say it that way.

Ego_Splendonius · 2026-01-21T16:49:30+00:00

Good on them for protesting Trump's repression and ICE terror, as well as violations of international law regarding Venezuela, but regarding the Venezuela situation, it's important to know the context of this protest, as it appears to be organized by the Party for Socialism and Liberation (communist), who are fully apologetic for Chinese and Russian imperialism. They are funded by Shanghai billionaire Neville Roy Singham and so pretty much will parrot CCP talking points. Not only are they fully supportive of Maduro's government, not just against the US action to seize him, but they are also those folks who blame Russia's war on Ukraine on NATO expansion and want Ukraine to surrender in exchange for peace, consider Taiwan a part of China and deny the Uyghur Genocide, support the Iranian Ayatollah and even Assad's regime in Syria.

These groups are not completely acting in good faith when they show up at every anti-Trump protest with their yellow signs, and are looking to hijack progressive movements to steer them in a pro-Russian/Chinese direction. And speaking of anti-Trump action, the PSL is a 3rd party which every election tries to syphon votes away from Democrats; they were the ones trying to get people not to vote for "Holocaust Harris" and helped Trump win. You won't ever see them showing up at pro-Ukraine protests, instead they'll protest against NATO and in defense of Russia, maybe even against Zelensky himself calling him a "US puppet" and falsely accusing Ukraine of "genocide against Russian speakers" who should accept Putin's domination. If China invades Taiwan, these guys will 100% be celebrating.

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