Previous chapter: 1. Introduction.
Well, the main problem is, plainly, that those language are old and usually dead, i.e., they have not been spoken for several centuries as living languages. This gives us the problem that we just can not know how these languages were pronounced -- and anybody telling you the contrary is either overly conceited, or a fraud. We don't know, e.g., how classical Latin was spoken; except for the strong hint that the Latin "c" was spoken like a modern "k" in high Latin, we have little to go on; classical Latin has been extinct completely for at least 1200 years by now, and probably far longer.
To make it even harder, most Latin-derived languages of today have derived from vulgar, not high Latin (like French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and so on)... especially Church Latin is highly suspect to have changed a lot in pronunciation, as it was heavily influenced by the development of Italian, as well as vice versa.
Then there is the other problem, which can be expressed in an analogy to the modern languages... Latin has had an evolution of language of roundabout 1400 years... and if you know even a few late middle English texts (about 600 years old, that is!), you'll know just how much a language changes in time... so there is, again, not a chance at all to know how those old languages like Latin, Old Greek, Old Persian, Egyptian, and so on and so on were spoken.
But... we have a couple of hints; the laws by which a language will develop over time are by now pretty well established, and while one can never know for sure, one can at least guess at how things would have been pronounced... and that's what we will give here; while we don't know for sure that it's right, we will at least have some evidence behind us in all of our hints concerning languages, especially pronunciation, and there are a couple of surprises in there, too.
Pronunciation, though, is only half the trouble, because there are so many "alphabets" around that have been used, it is hard to even find out how things were written originally. Take, e.g., Greek... you will find no "f" there, and no "j"... while both sound-equivalents exist in the Greek language, they are expressed in different letters, the "f" particularly being represented by "phi", while the "j" sound-equivalent is unlike the English pronunciation "dsh", but more like the Nordic idea of it, a sort of open-mouthed "g" (pronounce this: "yot"), and represented by the "iota" character under certain conditions.
I hope you see our point here... these are only two examples from a single language and writing system... but most writing systems have the same troubles to offer if you try, like we have to, to translate the spoken word (which you, see above, don't even know how to pronounce!) into modern latin-based English characters... and this is why we are trying to add as many of the original spellings in the original letters/glyphs as possible. If, that is, we can actually hit on the original writing system at all... which in many cases would be pure luck.
As elaborated upon ad nauseam above, there are many problems with many languages, which concern our entries in the Liber Paganum, and the way they are spelled. Here, now, follow our ideas as far as we can be even halfway sure about them concerning individual languages.
Mark you: We are largely giving our own conclusions here, based on all that we know. We are no learned authorities on language, but we are trying to do our best. Please don't stone us if we err... please share your knowledge with us so we can make these chapters more useful.
Latin has developed over roundabout 1,400 years; the split into High and Vulgar Latin can not be conclusively placed in time; as High Latin was the language of most notable literature until about 300 CE, we will keep to that language.
In High Latin, it is almost certain that the Latin "c" was pronounced hard, like a modern English "k"; High Latin was in large parts influenced by Greek, which knew no soft "c" phoneme, and by the Sabinic and Etruscan languages (which may have been dialects of the language spoken in Latium at the time). There may also have been some Celtic influence in there after about 250 BCE, but the evidence for that is a bit thin and chaotic.
Still, while the Latin alphabet knew most of the modern English characters, it did not include the "j", "k" or "w"... and the "y" (which was included in Latin-derived French as the "ygrec", the "Greek 'i'!") was rather different from the Greek idea of it. Therefore, there can certainly not be any entries in the Liber Paganum using these letters for Roman gods... even though it has become common use to spell them with, especially, a "j", like Jupiter, Juno, Janus, and so on. In Latin, they have to be spelled with an "i", because the "j" letter just plain did not exist at the time, in that place. The "k" was not used; the Latin "c" was the phonetic equivalent of the Greek "kappa" and in Vulgar Latin, often of the Greek "zeta". The "w" is a bit of a split thing, which we will come to in the part on the Nordic and Celtic languages; it is a letter and sound the mediterranian superforces of the time seem never to have employed. The "y", while present in Greek as "ypsilon" or "epsilon" seems not to have had a different phonetic value and use in Latin; the Greek one was often represented by the "e" character in Latin, and in the places where you find an "y", it is highly probably pronounced differently from the Greek sound.
Concerning pronunciation, just let us add that the current method of teaching Latin in most countries seems to be to tell the pupils to just "pronounce it like you would if it were your own language"... which is a dead giveaway that nobody knows how it was actually pronounced. Since the convention of pronouncing the "c" as an English "k" seems to be universally accepted, we advise strongly that this be done so. There actually are some documents from the early middle ages that hint at a split in the pronunciation of "Latin" in the churches between Italy/France and England/Ireland; the clerics of the time (roundabout 9th to 11th century CE), though in writing using the same language, seem to have had severe trouble communicating verbally due to differences in pronunciation.
The recent language that has probably developed most directly from Latin is Raetian, a language spoken in southern Switzerland (it is derived from vulgar Latin, though). Other languages having evolved without too much interference by other languages are Italian, French, and Portuguese, as well as some of the Spanish languages. Many other languages have accepted "foreign" words that are Latin or Latin-derived. Romanian, while also derived from (late and probably vulgar) Latin as spoken in Byzanz, has strong Greek and Turkish influences and has developped a different grammatical system, though the roots of the vocabulary are the same.
Old Greek did not contain the letters "f", "j", "c", "w" and "v"... but it had "ph", "th", and "ch" and two different "e" and "o" characters each, which are not part of the Latin-derived English alphabet. Pronunciation should be based on modern Greek, as that is the only known language to have evolved directly from old Greek... but probably things sounded a bit harder around the edges back when. Since Greek was the language of the educated in the Roman empire since before the times of Augustus, one may also assume that in this time, it was pronounced similarly to Latin, with the same reservations.
Specifically, the Greek "th" should probably be pronounced just like the English combination "th" (theta), as should the "ph" (phi), while the "ch" (chi) is probably a bit like the Mexican "x"... not "tchai", but "xee", without any hard sound. The epsilon is a special case, as it seems to represent the latin "u" as well as a more "i"-like sound; for this reason, we have a few names that were written with an epsilon in the U section.
In Greek names, we have often used accent marks like the trema (those two dots above a vowel) and the circumflex, which are to be interpreted like their French equivalent: The trema meaning that the vowel is to be pronounced as if standing alone or at the beginning of a word, and the circumflex indicating a slight-to-medium stressing of the vowel.
As for pronunciation, we hope the following table will help (we list only those letters where the pronunciation is different from most English dialects):
| alpha | a | "-ah," as in alArm, or Army |
| zeta | z | "tsetta," spoken really sharp and crisp |
| iota | i/j | "eeota" |
| chi | ch | "chee," with no hard sound at the beginning |
| upsilon | y | Also named as "Epsilon," our best guess is that the sound should be like a German u-Umlaut (ü). To get the sound of that, first say "eeeee," then "oooooh," and then try to find the middle between those two sounds. |
| eta | e | "aeh" -- English has no close sound-equivalent to this; those who know French should try pronouncing it as in "Bourrée." |
Old Hebrew is a Semitic language, which had its roots in the then-contemporary Babylonian and Persian languages. The pronunciation should be similar to modern Hebrew. The Alefbet of old Hebrew had no vowel marks, so only consonants were actually written down. This has, in time, led to many wrong readings of names; e.g., when vowel marks came into everyday use, the name JHWH used to be written with the consonants of the name Yahweh (the name of God according to most current authorities), but with the vowel marks of the word Adonai ("Master") so as not to have to spell out the actual name, to do which, at the time, was thought to be blasphemy of the worst sort. Later writers thought the name of God to be "Jehova(i)h"...
Again, the "j" letter is dissimilar to the English idea, it is more like an English "y". The "h" is very probably spoken with a touch of tongue; try pronouncing a "j" with lots of air bypassing your tongue, and less forcefully.
The Nordic Futhark was the alphabet of runes which was used originally only by the priests, but during the 8th to 11th centuries CE came into use for everyday writing purposes. The older Futhark contained 24 signs, leaving out the modern "x", "c", "z" and "v", but supplying "th", "ng" and the word-endings "r" [-r] and "ss" [-z], which were different from their companions used within the words, and pronounced differently (even today, you can find public transportation services in Scandinavia by looking for a "Taksi" sign...).
For pronunciation, one can turn to Old Norse, or Gamal-Norsk, as it is still spoken in large parts of Norway; Nynorsk will also help with the pronunciation, even though it has a modernized spelling. The Nordic language, in the form of Old Norse, is still in everyday use -- with a few changes in pronunciation, of course. Other languages having derived from Old Norse are Swedish, Danish, Frisian, Dutch, Low German, and in part High German and English. Finnish (Suomi), though a Scandinavian language, is derived from Hunnish, as is Hungarian.
Generally, Old Norse (as well as the older derivations of the language) has a somewhat musical sound, with lots of unwritten vowels being put into the words to make a beautiful flow of the tongue; to give an example, the written "Thrufnir" would be pronounced more like "Thaerufaniura;" as general rules, though, the end-"r" was most likely pronounced with a touch of an e or an i before it, making the [-r] either "-ir" or "-er", and sometimes, "-ur".
This could have been a regional difference in pronunciation. The end-"ss" was close to the modern English "z", and also probably pronounced with a short "i" or "e" sound before it. The Nordic "Thorn" (th) was used and pronounced just like the English "th" (that's where English got it from originally!), and the Ing[waz] was just like the letters "ng" if following any vowel; the famous word "ThINg" only had three runes in it; Thorn [th], Is [i], and Ingwaz [ng] (the word stands for the congregation of the people of the tribe, or the area; this congregation had legislative powers; the secondary meanings of the runes in this word accurately describe a meeting of such a body).
The slavic languages were common for a very large group of tribes; the Prussians as well as the Bohemians, and the Russians and Slovakians (and so on) all used slavic languages, and the sacral vocabulary seems to have been very similar for all of them, especially as some of the tribes had the same names for their deities.
The slavic languages, while by now using differing writing systems (some use Cyrillic, and some Latin-derived systems), are similar in pronunciation -- the description of which we will have to delay for the time being as we are lacking data on this. Sorry...
Celtic, while around 250 BCE probably the most widely-spread language of Europe, was not uniform even then. Since western Celtic culture influenced Nordic beliefs and cultures, some of the same concepts can be found in both areas; the "dh" and "th" characters are similar, for example (the "dh" is a sort of very soft "th"). Celtic languages are still spoken; Gaelic is the current form of the Celtic languages of Scotland, Ireland and Wales. We may assume that "classic" Celtic was similar to Gaelic, including the pronunciation.
Egyptian nowadays is an Arabic dialect; the closest living language to Old Egyptian is Koptic, which is alive as a conversational language as well as (pry. closer to the original) a liturgic language of the Koptic churches. Which part-language and dialect fits best is open to discusson.
Next chapter: 3. Technical notes.