The Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c.1563 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria).Īttitudes to local and non-native accents: an impressionistic overview I want to end this piece with some comments on what today’s students of Latin should focus on when learning to pronounce Latin. Next, I will turn to the question why people have local or foreign accents in the first place how do they come about, and why do they typically persist? Once we have this background information, we will look at how ancient authors felt about local and foreign accents and compare their attitudes with modern ones. I could make similar observations for speakers of German or Flemish, but my awareness of such issues was sharpened when I moved to Britain as a graduate student to devote myself fully to the study of the noble art of linguistics nothing makes you notice people’s attitudes as clearly as the combination of being a new arrival in a country and being given the powerful tools of linguistic analysis. What did speakers of Latin think of those who spoke a local dialect, or of those who had a foreign accent? How similar were their attitudes to modern ones? In what follows, I use ʻdialect’ for variation in words and in pronunciation, but ʻaccent’ for variation that is restricted to the latter.Īs it is instructive to compare ancient views with current ones, I want to start my piece with my own observations of the highly diverse opinions on accent variation held by native speakers of British English. But this piece is not about the reconstruction of pronunciation per se, although we shall occasionally touch on that topic rather, this piece is about ancient attitudes to different kinds of accents. Even though our evidence for non-elite varieties is often more limited, there is a reasonable amount of material that can teach us how local accents differed from the dialect of Rome and what second-language learners sounded like. Thankfully, these days we take a broader view and examine variation in speech. Traditionally, scholars have asked themselves what Cicero and Caesar, Virgil and Ovid sounded like, not the man who sold scriblitae, a type of pastry, on the streets of Pompeii, or the midwife living in an insula, a block of apartments, in the poorer parts of Rome. Condition: B+ A dark impression with several light stains near the center and top of the sheet.When reconstructing the pronunciation of Latin, Classicists have predominately focused on the speech of the educated elite in the first century BC. A key at bottom identifies the important sites including five great mosques.
A figure at bottom, dressed in turban and kaftan, symbolizes that this once important port of the Kingdom of Aragon is now ruled by the Ottoman Empire. A superb and detailed plan of the city of Algiers with its surrounding fortifications and estates. The plates provide an impression of the economy and prominent occupations, and illustrate local costumes, manners and customs. adorned with the splendor of cities and fortresses and, by looking at pictures and reading the texts accompanying them, to acquire knowledge which could scarcely be had but by long and difficult journeys?" Braun and Hogenberg incorporated an astonishing wealth of information into each scene beyond the city layout and important buildings. Braun wrote in the preface to the third book, "What could be more pleasant than, in one's own home far from all danger, to gaze in these books at the universal form of the earth. Within the six volumes, 531 towns and cities were depicted on 363 plates, providing the reader with the pleasures of travel without the attendant discomforts. Braun & Hogenberg's Civitates Orbis Terrarum or "Cities of the World" was published between 15.
0 kommentar(er)
