When you resurrect a language, how confident can you be that the pronunciation is like the original?

Question

Like would a Roman, ancient Greek or Viking understand the spoken Latin, ancient Greek or Norse taught in universities today, and how close is the Hebrew spoken in modern Israel to the language spoken before the Dispersion?

Answer 1

I don't think you can know. In some cases with an ancient language, e.g., Latin, there is some contemporary description by linguists of how the mouth forms the different vowels, etc., but we can never know for sure. For Norse the closest thing we have is Icelandic, but even then that must have changed a lot over the centuries. English is very different now to what it was 500 years ago.

Answer 2

I know nothing about Norse but Latin and Greek haven't really been "resurrected" - various people have been talking in those languages continuously since they were linguae francae (academics and clerics for example). It's true that Church Latin is pronounced quite differently from classical Latin in the way that all languages morph over time, and modern Greek is quite different from Ancient Greek. But you can tell a lot by comparing similar words in related languages - that's the essence of philology - and there are many other ways of resolving questions. For example, even poetic metre can provide clues as to how a word was pronounced at the time the work was written.

As far as Hebrew is concerned, it has again been spoken continuously by "learned men" alongside Yiddish, Arabic and European languages, and pronunciation over the centuries will probably have been influenced by those other languages. The Hebrew spoken in Israel today is based on an amalgam of rabbinical knowledge and habit even though pronunciation may have been mainly influenced by immigrants from central and eastern Europe - for example Ashkenazis use an S where Sephardis use a T, an O instead of an A - but it boils down to accent.

Answer 3

With Latin there are many clues, especially because the language of the educated at the time was Greek, so we can tell from spelling mistakes, and comparison of Greek and Latin versions of the same word. The same is true for Hebrew, but I think it's a moot point for any dead language, after all, who is there to convincingly correct you, as long as most (new) speakers agree?

And take modern English, pronunciation especially of vowels is fairly diverse in the different areas where the language is spoken, but once you get clued in there is no real problem, is there ? (except in Cork and East London ;-)).

Answer 4

i'd have to say, yes, those you mentioned would probably understand those being taught today, because they are not dead languages. if you were asking about 1 that is dead, i'd have to say probably not. have you seen the orriginal stargate movie? there's an example of a dead language + the probable outcome of resurrecting it.

Answer 5

don t tnhink you can be