It is sometimes imagined that the modern English way of pronouncing
Latin was a deliberate invention of the Protestant reformers. For this
view there is no foundation in fact. It may be conceded that English
ecclesiastics and scholars who had frequent occasion to converse in
Latin with Italians would learn to pronounce it in the Italian way;
and no doubt the Reformation must have operated to arrest the growing
tendency to the Italianization of English Latin. But there is no
evidence that before the Reformation the un-English pronunciation was
taught in the schools. The grammar-school pronunciation of the early
nineteenth century was the lineal descendant of the grammar-school
pronunciation of the fourteenth century.
This traditional system of pronunciation is now rapidly becoming
obsolete, and for very good reasons. But it is the basis of the
pronunciation of the many classical derivatives in English; and
therefore it is highly important that we should understand precisely
what it was before it began to be sophisticated (as in our own early
days) by sporadic and inconsistent attempts to restore the classical
quantities. In the following paper Mr. Sargeaunt describes, with a
minuteness not before attempted, the genuine English tradition of
Latin pronunciation, and points out its significance as a factor in
the development of modern English.
H.B.]
* * * * *
It seems not to be generally known that there is a real principle
in the English pronunciation of words borrowed from Latin and Greek,
whether directly or through French.
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