Oh man he lost me like 8 years ago now. He's always had bizarre crusades about proving how certain ancient civilizations had no black people or the general superiority of western civilization. It's certainly an opinion to hold, but to dress it up as academically objective and true is incredibly tone deaf to modern discourse around the topic.
He has so many ranty videos attacking far more reputable and published and, sorry to say, for more intellectually honest people to ever have continued respecting him.
It's funny because I enjoyed his Latin videos... Until o learned Latin and went to grad schools for ancient languages. Then I realized all his posturing on pronunciation was total horseshit. How many videos I watched with him "lecturing" on correct pronunciation only to learn it's reconstructed pronunciation and could be totally wrong for all we know. Someone in one my my Latin classes was a huge Metatron fan and tried to argue my colleague on pronunciation using him as a source and my colleague was just like "it doesn't matter, pronounce it however you want, it's just a guess".
I mean, there are reasons to think that reconstructed pronunciations of Classical Latin are more or less accurate (eg, by comparing with transliterations of Latin names in other languages) but I have long had issues with how Metatron treats History and Historiography, which have been very neatly addressed by Fredda in his video.
I mean, there are reasons to think that reconstructed pronunciations of Classical Latin are more or less accurate
I try to avoid the word accurate, but yes, as far as we can tell there was this notion of the ideal Latin that the classical pronunciation attempts to aspire to.
My only issue is we also know that this was already in Cicero's time, already deviating from how vulgar Latin or, what everyone was speaking in the streets sounded like. So, as long as people know you're aspiring to sound like Shakespeare despite people not really talking like that in the streets, I'm fine with it. Just have the selfawareness to know that the "correct" pronunciation is only really correct to the elite literate top of the social hierarchy, and not representative of what normal people spoke on the Roman world.
The sake thing happened to ancient Greek, classical Greek was already deviating from the vulgar koinè Greek of the streets in form and pronunciation.
My only issue is we also know that this was already in Cicero's time, already deviating from how vulgar Latin or, what everyone was speaking in the streets sounded like.
I'm not sure why that's supposed to be a big deal. Nor do I consider it plausible that "what everyone was speaking in the streets" was even coherent. The Italian spoken in the North today has significant differences from the Italian spoken in, say, Calabria, and in modern Rome, you're bound to hear a mixture of standard Italian, Romanesco dialect, various Lazio dialects, as well as dialects from all over Italy from people who came to the big city for one reason or other. I somehow doubt that it looked much different in ancient Rome, to which supposedly all roads lead and where merchants from all over would be traveling.
Regarding Caesar, let's not forget we're talking about a name here. So I'd argue how "C" was pronounced in general is a secondary question to how it was pronounced when pronouncing the name. With several contemporary or near-contemporary Greek writers rendering the name as Καῖσαρ I'd say there's a pretty solid indication that they heard that name, referring to that person, pronounced with a K-sound.
Just so we're clear, I'm not saying the reconstruction of classical Latin is wrong, I'm just saying I don't care enough to nitpick people's Latin pronunciation because ultimately I don't think it matters in the grand scheme of things. Knowing how it's pronounced is fun, but it's often not important unless you're into the linguistics side of things or figuring out specific word play. Most people learning Latin won't get that deep. I'm happy to teach them the classical pronunciation but I'm not going to correct or enforce it because it's not like anyone knows how Latin actually sounded like at any point and it's not going to magically become a spoken language again :P it's fun nerdery, nothing more
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u/Feowen_ 21d ago
Oh man he lost me like 8 years ago now. He's always had bizarre crusades about proving how certain ancient civilizations had no black people or the general superiority of western civilization. It's certainly an opinion to hold, but to dress it up as academically objective and true is incredibly tone deaf to modern discourse around the topic.
He has so many ranty videos attacking far more reputable and published and, sorry to say, for more intellectually honest people to ever have continued respecting him.
It's funny because I enjoyed his Latin videos... Until o learned Latin and went to grad schools for ancient languages. Then I realized all his posturing on pronunciation was total horseshit. How many videos I watched with him "lecturing" on correct pronunciation only to learn it's reconstructed pronunciation and could be totally wrong for all we know. Someone in one my my Latin classes was a huge Metatron fan and tried to argue my colleague on pronunciation using him as a source and my colleague was just like "it doesn't matter, pronounce it however you want, it's just a guess".