Antique Speech in Modern Mouths: A Comedy of Verbal Imperialism

Raymond Sokolov: Antique Speech in Modern Mouths: A Comedy of Verbal Imperialism

October 16, 2021, 12pm EDT

We know how Romans and Greeks pronounced their languages, more or less, but every modern language has evolved its own way of coming to terms with its inheritance of the language of antiquity. Our speaker, Raymond Sokolov, will not be talking about the immense linguistic evolution that extended our inheritance from Rome and Athens into the family of modern European languages. His still immodest hope is to deal with our continuing attempts to manage verbal borrowings from antiquity that survive, inevitably modified, but still treated, by a special system of pronunciation, as classical survivals in our daily parlance.

N.B. - You can view a recording of this, and other past events on Paideia's Youtube Channel.