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Do we actually know how the ancient Romans pronounced Latin words?
Eric Kvaalen
Les Essarts-le-Roi, France
We have three sources of information: languages that are descended from Latin; the Proto-Indo-European language, from which most languages in Europe and southern Asia descended; and transliterations (phonetic spellings) of Latin words in other languages of its time.
In the Romance languages, which descended from Latin, many letters are pronounced identically, or almost, such as b, d, f, k, l, m, n, p, t and x, and we can be pretty sure that these letters were pronounced the same in Latin. Some of these…
