Language Learners' Library

Pronunciation is always interesting. For several years now I’ve been interested in “Latin accents”, because the Roman Empire was huge and had so many different second-class languages inside it.

What was a Celtic accent? What was a German accent? What was a Hebrew accent? What was an Egyptian accent? What was a Berber accent? What was, even, a Basque accent? And the cool thing is, we could reconstruct those accents by looking at the way consonants and vowels are pronounced in those languages today. For instance, it’s thought that at one stage the Latin spoken in North Africa used only short vowels under the influence of native languages.

Augustine of Hippo: “African ears have no quick perception of the shortness or length of [Latin] vowels”

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