Evertjan. wrote:
> Ed Cryer wrote on 06 mei 2008 in alt.language.latin:
>
>> There's a vast difference between Keeh-keh-roh and Seeh-ser-oh. It's a
>> bit like the gap between Caesar (CǸsar etc.) in the Romance
>> languages; and Kaiser in the Germanic ones.
>> OK, so I guess the soldiers abroad didn't spread the best Latin, but
>> was there really such a vast gap between patrician and plebeian spoken
>> Latin in Rome? And if there was, why this particular one with Kee and
>> See?
>>
>
> I think that in Caesar's time,
> he himself pronounced something like "Kaisar",
> because that is not only the Germanic,
> but also the Greek transliteration.
>
> I cannot see any other reason of having the word for "Emperor"
> transliterated with a K if it was not pronounced that way for the Caesar
> family.
>
> So the C was pronounced K, and the AE not jet the same as E.
Yes.
> Then before 70 ce, a boy [or girl] in Pompei wrote on the wall:
> "Sesar", meaning old murdered Julius.
I think I would like to see a reference for that claim. A pronunciation
of
C as [s] by 70 AD sounds far too early. W. Sidney Allen in his "Vox
Latina" states that there is no evidence of any "softening" of C before E
or I before the 5th century AD. (And by "softening" is meant a departure
from its original velar quality, not necessarily a full transition to
[s].)
> Perhaps the change originated outside the walls of Rome, in the Neapolis
> region, to me it seems more logical it originated or at least got
> momentum in the slang of the large m***** of the Roman pleps.
>
> I have no proof of all that, ofcourse.
>
> Such things do not change in a day, so stipulating that the pleps slang
> preceded the universal change seems not that strange, Ed.
It may very well be that the change originated with the plebs, but that is
still a big change to accept without considerable evidence. C is
certainly
translitterated quite regularly as kappa in Greek.
--
Will
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