ANCIENT ROME BRAINROT

i like cicero

I can't find the post where I talked about this before, but basically there are two ways.

1) Because Latin transitioned from a living language (in the Roman Empire) to the language of scholars and clerics (in the Middle Ages) without a gap, the pronunciation was passed down from teacher to student. It almost definitely shifted a bit over time though, due to human error and the lack of recording devices. This handed-down version is called Ecclesiastical Pronunciation.

2) In the early 20th century (iirc) scholars attempted to compensate for shifting pronunciation by reconstructing how Latin might have been pronounced in Ancient Rome. The version they came up with is called Classical Pronunciation.

Sometimes the ancients tell us! We have grammatical texts that include phonetic descriptions. Granted the vocabulary used is often imprecise, or overly based on the Greek grammatical tradition, but it still gives us lots of useful information (this is the same way we know Greek used to have a pitch accent rather than a stress accent like it has today)

Similarly, the same way you get complaints or jokes about people pronouncing (or spelling) a word the "wrong" way

This leads into one of the other big ways: misspellings. For instance we have graffiti from Pompeii that replace Latin c with Greek kappa, a letter we know was always pronounced hard, even before i & e. We also do not have graffiti where Latin c is replaced with s. This suggests that the people of Pompeii did not pronounce the letter c the same as an s before e & i (like most modern Romance languages), but instead kept a hard k sound there

The structure of the alphabet also gives us some clues, although it is weaker evidence, as these sorts of quirks can stick around long after they cease to be accurate, and can even persist when the alphabet is borrowed into a new language. The fact we have words spelt with ci and words spelt with si, and which is which stays consistent for so long is suggestive of the fact they were pronounced differently (of course, this doesn't rule of ci being pronounced with a ch sound as in Italian, or a th sound like in some parts of Spain). Similarly, the fact that j & i are spelt with the same letter in Latin itself suggests that they were felt to be in some way similar sounds (the best candidate being that j was pronounced y) - likewise v & u (with v being pronounced w)

We also have evidence from poetry. In English, we're most familiar with poetic structure in terms of rhyme schemes, but in Latin it was mostly about rhythm. You have a metre which requires that syllables of certain "weight" fall in certain parts of the line. This allows us to determine things like vowel length, syllabification of consonant clusters between vowels, and that final -m was not actually a consonant, but instead marked nasalisation of the preceding vowel

We can also look at how words are borrowed between languages. We know that Ancient Greek gamma kappa chi were all stops for various reasons (chi and gamma later became fricatives) and that they were voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirates respectively, and we also know that in borrowings into Greek from Latin, Latin c is consistently rendered with kappa regardless of the following vowel. This again supports c always being hard in Latin, as well as it lacking aspiration (this is often difficult for English speakers to hear, but it means it would have sounded more like a Spanish c than an English k)

These are all classic philological methods, and were well established in the 19th century. What began in the 19th century though was the comparative method of historical linguistics, as well as widespread appreciation of dialectology

The comparative method relies on looking at a variety of languages and carefully comparing their structures to deduce facts about their common ancestor, based on a few principles (one of the main ones being that sound change is, as a rule, regular i.e. that a given sound in the mother language will have the same outcome in the daughter language, when it occurs in the same environment)

This lets us do things like observe that Sardinian always inherited Latin c with a k sound, rather than ever with a soft sound. A change from a soft sound to a k sound is much less common cross-linguistically than a change from a k sound to an s sound, so on comparative grounds we should reconstruct Latin as always have a hard k sound for the letter c

Then, especially in the 20th century, we started getting extensive dialect data, drawn from many more dialects than was previously practical. This allows us to do more powerful comparison and be more sure of our reconstructions

Attempts to reconstruct an original pronunciation actually far predate the 20th century. In 1528, for example, the writer Erasmus published a reconstruction of the original pronunciation of Latin and Ancient Greek, although I'm not sure just how close he got to the modern reconstruction

Quds News Network:

But oh, if they go for elections, there is a significant chance that Maduro’s party could win again, since they actually still have a strong local support.

So I guess the US will have to give the government straight to the “democratic” opposition and the pesky issue of elections will have to be addressed in a couple of decades, when people have the chance to learn how to vote to the correct candidate.

You don’t say? US oil companies are going to be involved in the nationalized oil industry in Venezuela? I guess venezuelans don’t get a say on this uh?

"WE are going to run the country. (untilthereisasafeandjudicioustransition) ... We are going to run it basically. And as you know the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust... the best oil companies in the United States will invest on its infrastructure."

immediately started seeing these kind of takes on twitter and I know they will reach here and you have to understand this isn't happening because the US is the country of cartoon villains who does things because it's evil. It's imperialism. The US has an empire and it wants to keep it and extend it. When it does not use diplomatic and political means it uses financial and economic control, when that does not work it tries to use intelligence operations and when that does not work it uses military action. Venezuela has gone and suffered through all the stages of this and now it's being struck with direct military action.

And again, the reason why the US does all this is not because "thirst for blood and chaos", it's because it's an empire. It wants the natural resources of Venezuela. It wants to keep its imperial dominion over Latin America, it wants to erase potential rivals on the region and keep it under their control. They have said it so. Explicitly.

US involvement in regime change in Latin America

My friend Abdu does what I do as a peer mutual aid advocate in more danger for much less stability.

He has treked from his home in Uganda, and fleed Kenya to South Sudan as a refugee among other queer survivors. The work he does for them invaluable and his patience and courage is immeasurable, truly.

Do you care about us? Or do you only care about us if we are white, cis passing or otherwise assimilated into western culture?

You have the opportunity to help someone in a foreign land, today, everyday. These refugees deserve this help and safett not because they are like us, but because they are human.

His campaign is below.

Do you understand? This is a group of displaced black queer folk. They are skin folk and kinfolk, starving to death every day people ignore what I and Nerve reblog.

I can make a new post, but I've known Abdu for some time. I really really should not have to watch my friends and their families die.

It's not about me either. I am busy fighting so many personal battles and still I find more time than those who follow me and claim communism in their urls. Socialist in bio. This is nuts!

I will donate 15 dollars I don't have to give and BEG any others to match me. I almost starved myself doing this for Abdu and others in June. Will anyone else follow him and buy 6 more months of life for these people?

In fact that's kind of my point here, we live in an extraordinarily secular age like never before (statement of fact, don't take this as a religious rant) and so we miss the fact that for virtually every historical society before well, I want to say vaguely 'pre-industrial times', everything was guided by religion. Both in practice as institutions and rituals you take part on, and also as a worldview that defined everything, the conception of a world without supernatural elements was nonsensical.

In worldbuilding, this is what so many 'pseudo-medieval' works get wrong, they project our current secularism back, leaving religion to be mostly a personal matter, when it was absolutely not the case in the European Middle Ages. The Church was powerful, many get this right (though sometimes not even that) but it was powerful because it had a faith people believed in. And you might say, it wasn't really Christian of them to do (X) atrocity, and I would agree, but everything, from the political makeup of society (and that includes war and feudalism) to the way nature worked was justified in faith, and it was that faith that kept the Church powerful beyond the material: excommunication and the damning of your soul was a real thing worth killing and be killed over, people sent their children to monasteries and built churches because they believed in God, the order of things was justified, from top to bottom, on faith, not law.

Many works (Game of Thrones is a very clear example but there are shades of this everywhere) which take the medieval aesthetics treat religion as an afterthought, as something that people believe in just because they're taught to, not something main characters care about, sometimes not even a concern for their quests or political intrigue. This is a big mistake. Even if you have a vague idea that Medieval people were religious and the Church was powerful, you should understand how it permeated everything, how it was a completely different cosmovision from what we're used to. I am being hyperbolic about this because I see it wrong again and again and again.

Ahem.

The rise of Greek and German nationalism are the most cookie cutter versions of white supremacy to exist and to look away from it is 1000 percent to condone it.

It affects everyone with a conscious and working brain.

I've never given a fuck about yalls blog themes even once.