Canterbury c. 600, Tours c. 800, Revisited

How did the Anglo-Saxons pronounce Latin?
Graham Scheper | 27 Jan. 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz2YeDcnlVo

Noting that the C in prinCipio is like Italian C before I, but in luCet, it's a K.

Probably correct. Italian missionaries in 600 would have used the "Italian" pronunciation, Old English had C pronounced the same in cyrice and cyning in dialects, but perhaps less of it after the main stress if not before a subsidiary stress.

6:41 "has no native speakers"

If you know katherevousa, but are not from Fanar, are you a native speaker of katharevousa because you are so of dhimotiki?

The point is, Old English Latin would have descended from the Latin of the missionaries of St. Gregory, ie Augustine of Canterbury and Paulinus of York.

Now, in Rome, Latin in the Biblical sense would have very probably had a similar pronunciation to "pre-proto-Italian" and differred from it as katharevousa from dhimotiki, which up to 1970 was a change in register, within the same speech of the same community.

Because this 600-ish Italian pronunciation was transmitted to non-native speakers (unlike what Augustine and Paulinus were), it got frozen in time, along with perhaps some simplifications (-um no longer nasal vowel or -o, but -u-m each letter pronounced, which they hadn't been since before Plautus among natives).

By c. 800, this is therefore doubly more classical and international than the vernacular Latin (yes) in what can now be called France or at least Frankish Kingdom (Frankenreich, if not Frankreich). a) It's two centuries older and b) Italy even in 600 was far more conservative than France in 600.

When this becomes the new standard of Latin in Tours, Latin is no longer vernacular, no longer comprehensible to the non-specialists, and the previous vernacular Latin in its lower registers is relabelled (813) "lingua romana rustica".

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Val Marsiglia

@valmarsiglia

I remember reading somewhere that Church officials in Rome had trouble understanding the Latin of visiting Anglo-Saxon clergy.

John Dorilag

@johndorilag4129

I believe that happened in the 8th century when the Pope and his officials and the visiting priests from England have a hard time understanding each other although these are both Latin.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@hglundahl

It was actually clergy in Gaul.

In prentsiff ert verp, e verp ert apt Dew, e verp ert Dews ...

One Italian had a visit in France and wondered if a child had been validly baptised in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost or invalidly replacing Daughter for Son. Obviously the guys pronounced "filii" and "filiae" pretty close to each other.

That's the background to importing a more intelligible Latin from England.