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July 7

Latin question

Would a modern-day speaker of Latin, such as from the Vatican City, be able to fluently speak with Medieval Latin-speakers in the purely hypothetical event that they time travelled back to Medieval times? 68.4.99.100 (talk) 19:59, 7 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think medieval speakers of Latin probably tended to pronounce words more or less in accordance with the pronunciation of their native tongues, so a modern Vatican priest could probably communicate with a medieval Italian priest fairly easily. With a medieval English or Polish priest, it might be harder. (I seem to recall that even in relatively recent times, Latin speakers from different countries have often had difficulty understanding one another.) Deor (talk) 20:41, 7 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Before the reforms of Alcuin, local parish priests in Romance-speaking areas tended to pronounce Latin texts in their local vernacular dialect, and many of them had no idea that there was any different pronunciation in ancient Roman times. After Alcuin, there came to be some degree of standardization, but national pronunciations were often still distinct from each other. In the Vatican City, the Italian pronunciation of Latin is used, and I'm not sure that this has changed very much since medieval times... AnonMoos (talk) 21:35, 7 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Alcuin lived in the 8th century, a while back. 68.4.99.100 (talk) 22:19, 7 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

How much would dialectal pronunciation matter, if the speech was slow, clearly pronounced and formally standard otherwise? Palatilization and such should be fairly easy to interpret, as long as it's regular. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 01:32, 8 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, they could! Latin has been pretty static. People have been referring back to Cicero and Caesar and trying to write how they did ever since their time. I haven't experienced or heard of anyone having problems understanding today's spoken Latin across the two main pronunciation styles and the accents of every nation. I'm confident that a Latin speaker of today and any medieval Latinist would be able to communicate just fine, as long as they got used to each other's accents and didn't talk too fast. Temerarius (talk) 05:37, 11 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]