Latin is a language
As dead as dead can be;
It killed the Romans long ago,
And now it’s killing me.
That famed ditty isn’t likely to resonate with many modern school children, but interest in ancient Rome remains fairly robust.
We’ve come to accept that those stately ruins were once covered in graffiti.
We can recreate their meals from hors d’oeuvres (Boiled Eggs with Pine Nut Sauce) to dessert (Pear Patina).
Thermae Romae, a popular Japanese manga-cum-feature-film, took us inside Emperor Hadrian’s bathhouse.
But what did the Romans sound like?
Kirk Douglas’ Spartacus? Or Laurence Olivier’s Crassus?
The HBO series Rome upheld the tradition of British accents.
Animator Josh Rudder of NativLang did a fair amount of digging in service of finding out What Latin Sounded Like, above.
(And he seems to have done so without the help of Derek Jarman’s NSFW Sebastiane, the only feature film to be filmed entirely in sermo vulgaris or vulgar Latin.)
Instead, he draws from ancient rhetorician Quintilian and Virgil’s poetic meter. Scroll backward through the Romance languages, and you’ll see Germanic tribes trading with and fighting ancient Roman troops.
The result is not so much a reconstructive pronunciation guide as a linguistic detective story.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
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Hear Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Performed in Classical Latin
Discover the World’s Oldest Surviving Cookbook, De Re Coquinaria, from Ancient Rome
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist in NYC.