Latin phonology and orthography

Latin phonology is the system of sounds used in various kinds of Latin. This article largely deals with what features can be deduced for Classical Latin as it was spoken by the educated from the late Roman Republic to the early Empire. Evidence comes in the form of comments from Roman grammarians, common spelling mistakes, transcriptions into other languages, and the outcomes of various sounds in Romance.^[1]

Latin orthography refers to the writing system used to spell Latin from its archaic stages down to the present. Latin was nearly always spelt in the Latin alphabet, but further details varied from period to period. The alphabet developed from Old Italic script, which had developed from a variant of the Greek alphabet, which had developed from a variant of the Phoenician alphabet. The Latin alphabet most resembles the Greek alphabet that can be seen on black-figure pottery dating to ca. 540 BC.

As the language continued to be used as a classical language, lingua franca and liturgical language long after it ceased being a native language, pronunciation and – to a lesser extent – spelling diverged significantly from the classical standard with Latin words being pronounced differently by native speakers of different languages. While nowadays a reconstructed classical pronuncation is usually employed in the teaching of Latin, the Italian-influenced ecclesiastical pronunciation as used by the Catholic church is still in common use. The Traditional English pronunciation of Latin has all but disappeared from classics education but continues to be used for Latin-based loanwords and use of Latin e.g. for binominal names in taxonomy.

During most of the time written Latin was in widespread use, authors variously complained about language change or attempted to "restore" an earlier standard. Such sources are of great value in reconstructing various stages of the spoken language (the Appendix Probi is an important source for the spoken variety in the 4th century CE, for example) and have in some cases indeed influenced the development of the language. The efforts of Renaissance Latin authors were to a large extent successful in removing innovations in grammar, spelling and vocabulary present in Medieval Latin but absent in both classical and contemporary Latin.