How loans from dead languages should be pronounced.

Here I have addressed in many ways the decline of our language.  In fact, that is largely the purpose of this blog.  However I do not believe I have directly addressed the topic of “learnëd borrowing”.

Learned borrowing is when a word is loaned from a dead language.  Typically, such a word is borrowed in written form, and then read as if it were native vocabulary, and this is understandable, often we didn’t know how words used to be probounced, so it made sense to do so.  However today we do.

However, the fact we have uncovered the way the Romans pronounced their latin doesn’t mean we should go and retroactively change the pronunciation of older loanwords.  Many of these loanwords entered during the renaissance and have gone through sound shifts with our native vocabulary, not to mention semantic shifts all along the way.  However, learned borrowing continues, and nowadays we do know how the romans pronounced their words.  To distinguish such new loans, I suggest using macrons.  

Macrons are somewhat standard when writing loanwords from Maori.  The other option is the usage of the acute accent, and this has some benefits, for instance people are likely to pronounce such vowels tense, which is how I suggest we translate latin’s length destinction into English.  However, this has all sorts of complexities, for instance, the apex was rarely, if ever, used in lowercase, because lowercase hadn’t been invented yet, and during the Roman Empire, only CAPITAL LETTERS existed.  I believe that latin should have apexes on capitals, but macrons on lowercase, and use “Vu” as s pair of uppercase and lowercase letters.  I think that for new latin loans, we should use macrons or apexes.  With regards to “v” being /w/, it isn’t as important as you may think.  It came to be pronounced as /v/ towards the end of the empire, it was a shift that happened during latin, and the pronunciation is different between classical and vulgar, the two main reconstructed pronunciations of latin.  Most important though is that “c” and “g” are always hard, since it was only very close to, if not after the fall of rome that they were ever soft.

Finally, when you loan a new word from latin, please put a footnote giving the correct classical or vulgar pronunciation.  Most enter through print, so you can’t rely on people pronouncing it properly because of how they come into contact with the word, but if you are giving a presentation, just pronounce it with vulgar or classical pronunciations.

CHANGE MY MIND!!!!!!!!!!!