OUR LATIN TRONUNCIATION. 65 



between the pronunciation of Latin by the Continental 

 scholar, guided by his own language, and the pronunciation 

 of Latin as scientific investigation has determined it for the 

 time of Cicero, is not great enough to cause embarrassment. 

 But in English, such great changes occurred in its phonetic 

 development after its spelling had become fixed, that the 

 divergence between sound and letter could be corrected only 

 by respelling thousands of words, or, as actually occurred, by 

 changing the sounds alphabetically associated with the letters. 

 Thus when the spelling of he was fixed, e had the sound now 

 given a and the word was so spelled because it was then pro- 

 nounced almost as hay. When the sound represented by e in 

 many words changed to ee, he could have been respelled hi 

 because i then represented the sound ee. But it was easier to 

 change our notion of the letter. The value of the letter fol- 

 lowed the phonetic change, so that now c as in he is its normal 

 Rnglish sound. Similar processes resulted in our now giving 

 the letter a its value in mate instead of its old value still pre- 

 served in father and the letter i its value in mite instead of its 

 old value shown in Dr. Johnson's pronunciation of oblige as 

 obleege. English is also peculiar in the sounds given to some 

 consonants such as j, 7v and // before a vowel, as in nation. 

 Hence our pronunciation of Latin, giving these changed 

 values to the letters, became still ,more different from what 

 must have been the Roman pronunciation. 



The consciousness of the artificiality of this pronunciation 

 produced its effect upon the writers and compilers of the books 

 from which we are taught what little Latin most of us know. 

 Then the schools began to teach the Continental method as 

 well as the English method. The Continental method, how- 

 ever, was an unsatisfactory attempt to consolidate and meth- 

 odize the modern Latin pronunciations of France, Spain and 

 Italy. It never was certain in all details, but it at least was 

 nearer the old Roman pronunciation than the English. Fin- 

 aHy came the scientific study of language, investigating com- 

 paratively and historically the use of the alphabet, and then 



