And lo on Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:35:24 +0100, Doctor John  
<doc### [at] gmailcom> did spake, saying:

> Mike Raiford wrote:
>> Warp wrote:
>>> Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>>>> Wait... people *know* how to pronounce Latin now? I thought it was a
>>>> dead language, and hence we'll never "really" know what the "correct"
>>>> way is.
>>>
> <snip>
>>
>> Further Latin is used in taxonomy and pretty heavily in the medical  
>> field.
>
> IIRC there's a bunch of guys living in the centre of Rome who speak it
> pretty well ;-)

To be precise they're speaking Ecclesiastical Latin not Classical Latin,  
as I said we know (guess) on the pronunciation of Classical Latin from  
foreign renderings. If English became extinct but German was still spoken  
then we could guess how the word category was pronounced from the German  
kategorie. Note that in this example someone trying to speak 'extinct'  
English from this would be likely to pronounce the e and full 'gorie'  
rather then vowel switch the e to a and slur to -gry. IOW you could  
probably make yourself understood, but you'd be considered to have an odd  
accent or most likely a non-native speaker.

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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