The Seventh Day of Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar did not speak in Ecclesiastical Latin (also known as Italianate Latin).
This is a misconception close to my heart because I actually got banned from TikTok because of it!
Basically, I was scrolling through the comment section of a TikTok video when I saw someone wrote a comment saying that Classical Latin pronunciation is artificial and fake and that Ecclesiastical Latin is actually the real, natural pronunciation of Latin that every single ancient Roman spoke in.
I replied to them, saying no, Ecclesiastical Latin is the artificial one, because it is pronouncing Latin with modern Standard Italian phonology. Languages evolve and there is no reason why every single Latin-speaking ancient Roman should have pronounced it as if it was Standard Italian. Latin was a living language for a long time and was spoken in a very large area, of course there would be tons of accents and dialects, changing and evolving over hundreds of years, and none of them should be identical to Ecclesiastical Latin, which is based on a modern language.
When linguists use clues to get a good idea of how educated people in Rome spoke Latin around the time of Julius Caesar, it's called Classical Latin pronunciation. It's not artificial; it's our best guess. And we have a lot of clues!
By the way, it's so annoying to write anything intelligent on TikTok because the character limit on comments is so restrictive!
What happened next was an insane back and forth argument that took place over 5 hours, and I now realise that I should've never interacted with them in the first place because nothing good would've come out from that.
It was a very amusing but very frustrating argument. My favourite part was when they kept saying I should read Vox Latina by Sydney Allen, which by the way, I had already read. They must've bought their copy of the book from the Dollar Store because I do not know how they read the book and believed that the ancient Romans spoke Ecclesiastical Latin. The entire book is pretty much about how the ancient Romans did not speak Ecclesiastical Latin! The Classical Latin pronunciation that person hates so much is exactly what Sydney Allen wrote in support of in Vox Latina!
Though I wish less people treated Vox Latina like the gospel. It's great but pretty old and outdated. I especially disagree with what he said about the vowels.
Anyway, one very long very amusing very frustrating argument later, they reported me for being underage, which I'm not. Proving I wasn't underage was too obnoxious for me, so I just quit using TikTok. The End.
I'm so sorry for anyone who isn't interested in the pronunciation of Latin; this must be so boring for you. But what I'm trying to get at is that we have a pretty good idea of how Julius Caesar would've pronounced Latin, and it's not Ecclesiastical Latin.
For example, veni vidi vici in Ecclesiastical Latin is pronounced similar to veh-nee vee-dee vee-chee (oh I hate writing things out phonetically like that but the IPA isn't working for me for some reason). But it most likely would've been pronounced similar to weh-nee wee-dee wee-kee (except the e in veni is pronounced a little bit more closed than in Ecclesiastical Latin).
