Hey folks, Fireside this week! The new semester is starting up next week, so things may be a little more fireside-y than usual over the next few weeks, but I do promise we will get to the end of “Life, Work, Death and the Peasant” eventually. That said, since I am teaching Latin rather than history this semester, I thought it might be fun this week to talk briefly about Latin pronunciation (at least in the English-speaking world). I’m going to try to keep this simple-ish and I am sure some of those simplifications will draw the ire of more skilled philologists, but mostly here I am interested in the fact of multiple pronunciation systems, rather than their precise differences. There are already any number of guides online, ranging from the simple to the very, very complex, on the precise differences between these systems.
There are a lot of pronunciation systems for Latin. This is a product of the language surviving as the language of education and diplomacy across much of Europe long after its living component had fragmented into the Romance languages. In a sense, we could even argue that the topic of ‘Latin pronunciation’ ought to include phonetic shifts between Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and so on, since those languages are, in a very real sense, ‘modern Latin’ as it is lived and breathed today. But as Latin lived on as an undead language, its local pronunciation in each part of Europe acquired the quirks of local pronunciation, such that by the modern period Latin was pronounced slightly differently in each.
As a result, the modern resident of an English-speaking country is likely to encounter three different pronunciation systems for Latin. ‘Three’ will also be the number for most speakers of other European languages, except for Italians, for whom there will largely be only two. But I am most familiar with the Anglophone Latin triplet, so that is where we will focus.
In the Anglophone countries, we term these systems ecclesiastical, traditional and classical. I’m not going to go through all of the differences between the systems here, just some of them, but we can exemplify them by picking a single Latin phrase and walking through how its pronunciation changes based on systems. A good one, because it has a lot of shifting sounds, is the legal principle stare decisis (which we ought to write stāre dēcīsīs to capture vowel length, that’s long-short, long-long-long), with the added benefit that we may educate a great many lawyers, many of whom seem to have adopted a pronunciation for the phrase which is – somehow – not correct in any of these systems.
We can start with what is generally called ecclesiastical Latin. Ecclesiastical Latin formed a standard pronunciation during the Carolingian Renaissance, but in practice its modern form is basically the globalization of the traditional Italian pronunciation of Latin that developed in the centuries since then. Other regions had diverged from that Caroline foundation in other directions, but for the last century or so the Catholic Church has held the traditional Italian version to be the ‘official’ pronunciation of the Church. As a result, ecclesiastical Latin’s pronunciation is essentially a simplified form of the original (‘classical’) Latin, with an admixture of Italian pronunciation elements.
The main simplification is vowels: whereas classical Latin vowels can be either short or long and change their pronunciation accordingly, in ecclesiastical Latin, each vowel gets one sound. In effect, I’d say that (compared to Classical), a, i, o, and u are always long, while e is always short. Thus filii, which in Classical Latin is long-short-long (fee-li-ee)1 in ecclesiastical Latin each vowel has the same length, fee-lee-ee. Likewise, classical Latin unus is long-short (oon-uhs)2 but in ecclesiastical Latin pronounced oon-oos.3
Meanwhile, the consonants get more complicated; where classical Latin has one sound per consonant (no hard or soft letters), ecclesiastical Latin has some letters carrying double-duty. The most immediately audible example is c: before e, i, y, ae, and oe it is pronounced ‘ch’ but in all other cases maintains the hard Latin c (like an English k in all cases); likewise ‘g’ is soft (like a ‘j’ sound or the ‘g’ in ‘gel’) before that same set of vowels but other wise hard (like ‘gap’). Thus ecclesiastical Latin says for genus jee-noos (cf. classical geh-nuhs) but for galea ‘gah-lay-ah.’ ‘V’ has a ‘v’ sound. There are other differences (see this handy guide), but you can see how Italian has influenced the pronunciation in ecclesiastical Latin.
Returning to our pattern phase, stāre dēcīsīs, none of those vowel length markers matter because the sounds are all the same in ecclesiastical Latin. But that ‘c’ proceeds an ‘i’ and so is going to be a ‘ch’ sound. So we’ll get stah-reh deh-chee-sees. The cheese stands (alone) indeed. Likewise che-sar for Caesar with that simple short e for the Latin ae-dipthong.
Next, there is traditional English Latin pronunciation, which in an Anglophone country is just going to get called ‘traditional Latin.’ No one learns this is school anymore, but it persists in common Latin words, phrases and especially names that entered the English lexicon prior to the reconstruction of Classical Latin in the late 19th and early 20th century. There is an irony that on the one hand these pronunciations are the most familiar to folks, but that no one actually uses this system anymore (we don’t teach it) and it is insanely complex and idiosyncratic, far more so than actual classical Latin, made yet more difficult because we still use these pronunciations, but don’t train anyone in them. It is, of course, complex and idiosyncratic because the basic rule here is to pronounce Latin as if it was English (with some exceptions) and English pronunciation is already a mess of exceptions and strange conventions, even before it is layered over another language.
Vowel lengths vary and do not necessarily follow classical vowel lengths, but they do generate different sounds. Quite a few consonants differ their sounds based on the letters around them and the overall syllable structure. Mostly these pronunciations feel intuitive to English speakers – this is, after all, mostly just “Latin pronounced like it was English” – but the moment you step off of the intuitive pronunciation being right, folks are out to sea because of how many letters shift sounds is odd ways. So you get that soft ‘c’ in Lucius, Caesar or Cicero, but a hard ‘c’ in Marcus and Caecus (both of them – kae-kus).
What makes this lingering traditional pronunciation a pain is that even in classics we generally hold on to it for names, for the obvious reason that if I talk to my students about ki-keh-roh they are going to be very confused, as opposed to Si-ser-oh, a figure they are vaguely aware of. For the most part, no one learns the entire traditional system (I sure didn’t), but instead learns each persisting traditional pronunciation individually. It is striking to me that while there is a movement among Hellenists to move away from traditional spellings and pronunciations of ancient Greek works to closer to their original (thus Seleukos (sel-e-ooh-kos) instead of Seleucus (seh-lou-kuss or even sometimes seh-lou-suss)) there doesn’t seem to be much of the same among Latinists, probably because everything thinks Ki-keh-roh sounds silly and doesn’t want to have to say it.
In any case, for stare decisis, traditional Latin pronunciation says stah-ray dee-sise-is (first ‘i’ is long, making an ‘eye’ sound, second is short, so decisis rhymes with ‘crisis’). Gaius Julius Caesar is pronounced Geye-uhs Jool-e-uhs See-zer.
Finally, there is classical Latin pronunciation. This is our best guess at how Latin would have sounded in the city of Rome during the first centuries (both of them) or so. This did not come down to us through a living tradition – you can see what a mess the living traditions are – but instead had to be reconstructed. We use a mix of methods to parse this out: poetry gives us a window into correct vowel length, while phonetic values can be revealed through things like how Latin was transliterated into other languages (e.g. Latin ‘c’ always becoming Greek kappa, never sigma), the misspellings Romans frequently made (which signal which letters might be confused for each other) and comments by ancient authors (especially grammarians) on proper pronunciation. While some uncertainty must always remain we are pretty confident that classical Latin pronunciation is very close approximation to how Latin was actually spoken in antiquity, in Rome and Latium. Of course there must have been (and in many cases we can know there were) a mountain of regional accents in antiquity.
I have to admit, I really admire classical Latin pronunciation’s directness and simplicity. There are no silent letters (also true in ecclesiastical Latin), the consonants all have one-to-one letter-to-sound relationships (so long as we’re not putting two letters together) and word stress (‘accent’) follows really nice predictable rules (unlike Greek). I find this handout guide, designed for use with Wheelock’s Latin remarkably handy for understanding the rules.
One tricky quirk for Classical Latin is vowel length: vowels can be long or short and vary their pronunciation accordingly. In practice, learning the language, you just have to memorize these lengths. While textbooks and other student texts will dutifully print long-marks over long vowels, Latin was not written with these marks in antiquity and most academic texts do not include them. This can be tricky because vowel length can be grammatically important: amīca is in the nominative (the subject of a sentence), but amīcā is in the ablative and doing all sorts of fun ablative things. But in practice in most Latin texts, you are going to see amica (as a Roman, reading, would) and have to figure out from context if that final a is long or short and thus what case the word is in.
On top of this, of course, classical Latin has no ‘j’ but instead ‘i’ can be either a vowel or a consonant (thus Iulius, not Julius), where it has a ‘y’ sound like ‘yikes.’ Meanwhile, the Romans often merged ‘v’ and ‘u,’ writing them as the same letter (‘v,’ thus VNVS, ‘one’), where the consonantal form (by tradition written as ‘v’ in modern texts) gets a ‘w’ sound. Once you realize that ‘v’ has the phonetic value of ‘w’ (double-u) the fact that it shares a letter with ‘u’ actually makes a lot of sense, they are similar sounds.
In any case if you take Latin today, you will be taught classical pronunciation.
Returning to our paradigm phrase stāre dēcīsīs – back with our long marks because we need them – the long ‘a’ reads as in father, the short ‘e’ as in pet, the long ‘e’ as in ‘they’ and the two long ‘i’s as the i in machine. The ‘c’ is hard and the ‘r’ should be lightly trilled, giving us stah-reh dey-kee-sees. Gaius Julius Caesar is rendered as Geye-uhs Yoo-lee-uhs Keye-sar.
So there you have it. In Latin pronunciation, the oldest system is also the youngest and we use it in scholarly contexts, except when we don’t in order to avoid sounding silly.
On to Recommendations:
I want to start with this remarkable piece by fellow classicist Clifford Ando on the financial and quite frankly moral crisis at the University of Chicago, which just announced the pause – and likely closure – of basically all of its graduate language programs. As Ando notes, the sins of U-Chicago may be unusual in scale but they are not rare in presence: the basic pattern of universities making massive, largely speculative investments in expensive (mostly STEM) fields that put otherwise economically stable institutions at risk has shown up again and again as higher education crumbles. The current administration’s decision to slash medical and science grants has turned this ulcer into a bleeding wound, but the practice was not viable in the long-term even before last year. Yet, driven by an ideological bias that favors fields with direct and narrow ‘job application’ – even when those fields now have worse job outcomes – universities continue to double down into this error, pillaging humanities departments that, because they teach more cheaply, run at a ‘profit’ for the university, in order to invest more heavily into business and STEM, which they can no longer afford.
Unfortunately I see no signs this self-destructive ideological behavior will stop. Instead if anything, as a recent, remarkably foolish, short-sighted piece in The Dispatch suggests, critics of the university will continue to double-down on a STEM-first, business-and-law-second, humanities-never strategy even as the current administration burns down the last thin supports holding up even the empty suggestion of its plausibility. It is going to be a dark few years in academia, for everyone.
Meanwhile, there is a new Pasts Imperfect (note they have moved off of substack), the main essay of which (by Lauren Donovan Ginsberg) tackles exactly this theme. Ginsberg notes that humanities departments are regularly bring in more than they cost, despite the absence of grant funds, because we’re relatively cheap to run and teach more per year, while at the same time humanities degrees remain in substantially higher demand on the job market than conventional wisdom would suggest, often outpacing students with degrees in ‘professional’ subjects more directly tied to a specific career path. As always, Pasts Imperfect, now that it is back from hiatus, is a great regular read to keep track of what is going on in the world of Classics.
Meanwhile on the historical, enthusiast side, I should note that Tod Todeschini is running a kickstarter fundraiser in an effort to fund another edition of testing medieval bows and arrows against medieval armor to suss out the limits of protection and penetration. Tod’s first two videos (and the supplemental videos he did around them) are honestly some of the most rigorous research work on this question I have seen, rivaling and in some cases decidedly surpassing scholarly efforts over the past several decades. Right now the project looks to be fully funded, but there are stretch goals. Students often ask why more of this sort of research isn’t done and the answer is generally “the funding doesn’t exist” – at least, not for this kind of experimental work in the humanities (which get a tiny fraction of the research funding of other fields). So if you want to see more rigorous testing of weapons and arrows banging off of or through medieval armor, now is your chance.
And for this week’s book recommendation, I am going to recommend E. Alyagon, Inked: Tattooed Soldiers and the Song Empire’s Penal Military Complex (2023), which in turn was recommended to me by James Palmer and is well worth the read. The book’s ‘hook’ is the remarkable Song dynasty practice of tattooing their soldiers (typically with unit assignments) as a means of exerting control, but Inked goes beyond just the question of tattoos to present a fairly complete vision of the Song military system from the soldier’s eye view. The book covers the emergence of the Song military system and then follows it from recruitment, through training and unit assignment, looks at the families and social status of soldiers and then continues all the way to discharge or revolt. The reader thus gets a vision of the whole system from an organizational and institutional culture perspective (though not arms or tactics) and that overview is delivered remarkably well. The book is remarkably well written and very readable, even for the lay reader (as indeed, when it comes to Chinese history, I am effectively the lay reader).
Alyagon notes in the introduction on older strain in the historical reception of the Song dynasty in which Song soldiers took the blame for the decline and eventual destruction of the Song dynasty (at the hands of the Mongols), despite the Song dynasty itself having a reputation as a period of technological advancement and renaissance, overseen by Confucian scholar-officials. That judgement on Song dynasty soldiers themselves is almost certainly unfair, but one thing that struck me reading Alyagon is that the Song military system does not beat the rap. Emerging out of a desire by the early Song emperors and their bureaucracy administration to bring the army under firm control, the Song military system in Alyagon’s telling emerges as an aggressively dehumanizing institution. Military service was often a legal penalty (and so the status of prisoner-conscripts very low) but at the same time men were also conscripted from the civilian populace or dragooned from soldiers’ families to serve. They were tattooed in an effort to prevent desertion (which created problems for men who served honorably and were discharged – discharge papers could be lost, tattoos were forever) and sorted and assigned based on bureaucratic metrics with few connections to actual performance.
One of the most striking practices that comes up frequently was ‘rotation’ – like the Romans, the Song recognized leaving a commander in charge of a specific army on the frontier long-term was dangerous. But rather than doing the Roman thing and rotating commanders, the Song rotated soldiers, marching their common soldiery long distances, often in difficult conditions away from their home to facilitate rotating armies. It is such a staggeringly inefficient, brutal system of control that, to me, it served well as a summary of the entire system of intense top-down control where every aspect was engineered to suit the whims of the ‘enlightened’ scholar-officials running the system, quite regardless of military effectiveness or basic humanity. Reading, I found I was no longer surprised that, once the power of the Song began to break, these armies swiftly collapsed or switched sides.
Nevertheless, Alyagon’s book is a valuable read for anyone interested in military history, because it is such a complete portrait of the institutional culture of a military system, useful both in itself but also as a comparison point to think about other military systems. I found in reading that I was struck by how the Song system felt like a mirror image of the early Roman imperial military system, but with the status of the soldiers being much lower and as a result the balance of coercion and incentive was far more tilted towards coercion. It is, of course, striking then that the Roman imperial military system, when it faced fragmentation in the context of intense security challenges in its third century survived, whereas the Song system, when it met the same challenge (at about the same point in its ‘life cycle’) collapsed. I did not find myself, by the end of the book, mystified by the difference in performance.
- ‘ee’ as in the ‘i’ in machine, but ‘i’ as in the ‘i’ in pin.
- The first ‘u’ as the u in rude, the second ‘u’ as the u in put
- Attentive Latin students will note this obliterates an important pronunciation distinction in the fourth declension between the nominative singular and the genitive, so that gradus and gradūs would both sound the same – grah-doos – whereas in classical Latin you’d have the slight difference between grah-duhs and grah-doos.
Gosh – this has reminded me of a much-loved former Fellow at my College, the great botanist, ecologist and historian Oliver Rackham (I guess he must have passed away over 10 years ago now!) – I’ll always remember his very very particular way of speaking Latin. He’d always use the full ‘traditional English’ pronunciation of any Latin he was called upon to speak, which combined with his own somewhat distinct voice, made him quite inimitable.
I also encountered Oliver Rackham at Cambridge (and his Latin); interestingly, he’d worked on botany in Crete so defaulted to a generally-modern pronunciation of Greek which was an interesting contrast with his traditional English Latin. (Of course the rare medieval students of Greek in Western Europe (before the Erasmian pronunciation reset) would have generally used the contemporary Greek pronunciation of the time, so I suppose you could sell this as an even greater archaism).
about the latin pronunciation guide, the link seems to be dead, but the PDF is still available at :
https://web.archive.org/web/20211202165109/https://www.wheelockslatin.com/tutorials/TeachingMethods/alphabet/PronunciationGuide.pdf
Thanks! You are right, the link in the article doesn’t work, or rather the download isn’t available there. Your correction fixes this.
I have been saying ‘stare decisis’ as stah-reh dey-sii-sis ever since I first encountered the phrase in law school a long time ago. It’s how everyone else said it! I actually feel a bit emotionally bruised on reading this. I acknowledge that is a completely ridiculous reaction, but still. I think I need to do something to go clear my head.
Ditto, but also, have you heard about Law French? We are equal opportunity butchers 🙂
Not to worry! I worked for years at the Texas Legislative Council in Austin, and every legislative session ended on “Sine Die”; the last day before adjournment sine die (without day), and it was universally pronounced by lawmakers and staffers alike as “Sigh-nee Dye”. I think Law School mangles Latin as freely as any other corrupting source!
“but for galea ‘gah-lay-ah.’”
I don’t think ecclesiastical Latin uses a diphthong in this word.
Probably correct, but in the “standard American” accent there is no long E sound, so that diphthong is the closest people get to it.
In other English accents (Caribbean, the North of England, South Asia, probably others but those are the ones I know about) they do have the long E monophthong sound.
The standard American accent certainly has a sound we *call* the long e sound. E as in “feet”, “teeth”, etc., or i as in “machine”. What sound were you talking about?
@Bullseye,
It’s the vowel that native Anglophones in the Caribbean, or many in the north of England, but not most Americans, would use in “pay”, or “day”, or “same”.
The presenter here differentiates them at about 3:30:
In the fifteenth century, English went through a vowel shift, where the pronunciation of various especially long front vowels moved higher in the mouth. This was no doubt part of the Conspiracy to make English Spelling Impossible to Learn (CESIL).
If you think about where your tongue is when you pronounce the e in ‘feet’ you’ll find it’s about where you have it when you pronounce i in ‘fit’ (assuming your accent is the same as mine, which it may not be). Technically, the ‘ee’ sound is a long i, not a long e. That’s because the pronunciation changed but the CESIL kept the old spelling. E is pronounced with the tongue rather lower in the mouth.
“This was no doubt part of the Conspiracy to make English Spelling Impossible to Learn (CESIL).”
Ah, that’s a common mistake. The acronym is actually BRDLS.
I’m curious, how do people who pronounce the long e the contemporary European (ie, non-American) way pronounce the name of the letter? Because I was taught (as an American) that the name of the letter is “EE”, the same sound as in “Feet.”
What’s the story there? Did the name change somewhen?
That was my first thought too! I get that some sounds like monophthong /e/ doesn’t exist in most American dialects, but when specifically discussing different pronunciations I don’t think an Americanised rendering is justified….
The trick here is that the monophthomg /e/ is used, all over the place, but it’s not distinguished from the diphthong /eI/ by most English speakers. (For that matter, most English speakers don’t even recognize modern long A is pronounced as a diphthong.)
for a word like lay I don’t think anybody would pick up the difference between /le/ and /leI/ because it’s an open syllable. It’s mostly in a closed syllable where the difference between /e/ and /eI/ are noticed (the name Beto comes to mind), feeling to English speakers as a sort of “clipped” elong A, giving the word a Latin-meaning-Hispanic feel.
I always feel *most* english vowels are diphtongs: Ay, Ey, Ai, Ou, Yo.
As opposed to the swedish Ah, Eh, Ii, Ooh, Yh, Åh, Äh, Öh.
That’s what the great vowel shift is about isn’t it?
Ok, bizzaro time. I always assumed, since childhood, that the long version of a vowel is same as the name of the vowel. Long A is as in “Lay”, long E and in “Tree.” Pretty simple and logical.
Surely the extra sound at the end is accounted for by the “Y”? How do you guys pronounce “Asynchronous”? I pronounce it Long A (say) -chronous, with no y in there. Or “Able”? It’s a dipthong? What?
@Demarquis,
if you pay closely attention to how your mouth ‘feels’ (and if you have a standard American accent), you can perceive your tongue moving, just a little bit, forward and toward the roof of your mouth as you say the vowel in “Able”. That’s how you know it’s a diphthong- there are two distinct sounds, the vowel is realized as a sort of transition between them.
I love the metaphor of Latin as an “undead language,” especially given the trope of having demons speak Latin in horror movies & such. My unprovable-but-fun theory is that Vatican II happened because the Catholic clergy didn’t want their conversations to be audible to demons
The alternative might be A. Z. Foreman’s characterisation of Latin as a language that is not dead, but happens to lack native speakers.
Yes, it’s not dead. It’s still alive as a liturgical language, the official language still of the Roman Catholic Church. (Hebrew was a “dead”/liturgical language until its revival in modern Israel.) And I’m sure ecclesiastical Latin is still taught in seminaries to Catholic clergy and scholars and you hear it in the traditional “Tridentine” Mass or the new rite when Latin is still sometimes used. I like these, it’s a solemn language and dignified.
One definition of ‘dead language’ is “no living native speakers”. Latin survives as an educated second language, but there are no communities of children growing up with Latin as a language of the home. (There’s a decent chance someone tries to raise their own kids with Latin, I’ve known a ‘native’ Esperanto speaker, but that’s not enough.)
Montaigne was raised strictly in Latin, according to his own account. His father employed a series of Latin teachers, while servants and other visitors had to make do with a few words of Latin when speaking to him. He considered Ovid’s Metamorphoses the easiest kind of book, and only learned French as a teenager.
The irony is that he is not known for any works in Latin, but for his essays in rather rambling, semi-colloquial French, which contributed a lot to establishing French as literary language.
That also because roman catholic priests are bound by a vow of celibacy and _usually_ do not have children…
Right. I’d say that to the extent that Latin “belongs” to anyone these days it’s to the Roman Catholic Church rather than to classical scholars, and partly for that reason I prefer the ecclesiastical Latin pronunciations. Classical just seems….off, even though that’s what I was taught.
I personally think Elizabethan English (or “Faux-Elizabethan”) is the best compromise for English-language church services, between being “easily comprehensible” and “not the language that you use for everyday purposes”, but I definitely get the appeal of Latin (or of other liturgical languages that are used by other religions around the world).
I agree with the notion that having a liturgical language, a “sacred” language, helps focus the mind in a different sphere, away from the mundane. Lots of cultures recognize this, but the “West” seems to have moved away in the past century or so.
Back in the day, when I tried to teach myself Latin (not very successfully), I’d get a few primers/instruction books. They usually start with an introductory paragraph explaining that Latin isn’t a dead language. I tend to think: “If you have to protest that the language you’re teaching isn’t dead, then it’s dead.”
But like you, I like the “undead” metaphor, too, even if it’s a bit ghoulish.
I genuinely do not understand what about the Classical pronunciation of “Cicero” is silly. Granted, that might be because I learnt Latin pronunciation before I learnt Roman history, so I never got accustomed to the traditional pronunciations in the first place.
With these sorts of things, I’d say what makes it silly is in fact mostly the unfamiliarity, except in a few cases where similarity to English words brings it in.
There is a scene in “Goodbye Mister Chips” in which Chipping complains, circa 1912 or so, that the new headmaster wants him to use Classical Latin and to refer to that famous lawyer and orator as “Kickeroh.” Chipping had started teaching in 1872, so the timing fits.
“Kickeroh” It sounds like what the bullies at school taunted Siseroh with. “Sissyeroh” would have been worse, but “Kick-er-oh” isn’t bad, so far as bully’s taunts go.
I get it, it does sound silly to most, almost as silly as “Weenie Weedy Wicky” compared to Church Latin.
I actually prefer the ecclesiastical pronunciation to the other two. It’s easy to learn and you don’t sound pretentious when talking to Italians about Rome.
Just how close was the Song army to the US Army 1942-1980?
“folks are out to see” -> out to sea
Pretty sure he did that on porpoise.
Now, the german word Kaiser suddenly makes a lot of sense
+ Keyser-i-Rum for the Turks
+ Khazar for the Pontic steppe
Weren’t the Khazars an ethnic group, not a ruler’s title?
Or the Bulgarian Car, Russian Czar/Tsar, Dutch Keizer, Ottoman kayser-I Rum. I always found it interesting how French and English derived their word for Emperor/Empereur from Imperator, while other languages took their title from Ceasar.
Russia has both- Peter the “Great” and his successors were officialy titled “Imperator”, i believe?
You are right. Nicholas II, for example, titled himself as “By the Grace of God, We Nicholas, Imperator and Autocrat of All Russia, of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod; Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan, Tsar of Poland, Tsar of Siberia, Tsar of Tauric Chersonesus, Tsar of Georgia; Lord of Pskov, and Grand Prince of Smolensk, Lithuania, Volhynia, Podolia, and Finland; Prince of Estonia, Livonia, Courland and Semigalia, Samogitia, Bielostok, Karelia, Tver, Yugor, Perm, Vyatka, Bogar and others; Sovereign and Grand Prince of Nizhni Novgorod, Chernigov, Ryazan, Polotsk, Rostov, Jaroslavl, Beloozero, Udoria, Obdoria, Kondia, Vitebsk, Mstislav, and Ruler of all the Severian country; Sovereign and Lord of Iveria, Kartalinia, the Kabardian lands and Armenian province: hereditary Sovereign and Possessor of the Circassian and Mountain Princes and of others; Sovereign of Turkestan, Heir to Norway, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, Stormarn, Dithmarschen, and Oldenburg, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth.”
Sending him a birthday card must have taken all day!
I can just roll my eyes at the claims to legitimate rulership of countries that the Czars just rolled over by force (Livonia, Turkestan, Poland, Finland etc.) but what’s up with “Heir to Norway” and the Schleswig Holstein thing? Did the Western European monarchs of the time not care that Nicky was officially claiming territories that were actually ruled by other royal dynasties?
Hector, how do you think the American government acquired “legitimate rulership” of Hawaii? Or California? Or New York, for that matter? Force was required every time.
Why should the Russian governments use of force be seen by contemporaries as different to anyone else’s?
@ad9,
I’m not a defender of America, either.
@ad9,
That said, I think it’s the “by the grace of God” thing that annoys me, it’s assuming divine legitimation for what was in reality a very amoral and sordid process of imperial land grabs.
@Hector: Not really. British monarchs kept callin themselves Kings of France until *at least* George III. The Austrian emperors still had the “King of Jerusalem” stuck somewhere in their titles, etc.
The Holstein-Gottorp claim is a bit more complicated but has to do with 18th century domestic politics. And I think that (and the connection to the Oldenburg dynasty) is where the “Heir to Norway” comes from as well.
The Holstein-Gottorp claim, and even “Heir to Norway”, are perfectly legitimate and acknowledged as such in the West.
The Romanov family is extinct since 1730 in male line, and 1762 in female line. The Russian emperors since 1762 were Oldenburgs.
Basically the direct male line ancestors of Peter III descended from a King of Denmark who died in 1533. His younger (third) son inherited the Duchy of Holstein-Gottorp.
Two centuries later, one Duke of Holstein-Gottorp married the eldest daughter of Peter the Great and Catherine the Little. The bride died a few weeks after bearing her only son, the boy survived.
Some years later, the younger daughter of Peter the Great and Catherine the Little became Empress Elizabeth by coup (overthrowing and jailing the descendants of Peter the Great´s nieces) but stayed an old maid herself. Which made the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp – by that point his father had died as well – the only male descendant (outside prison) through female line of Romanovs, as well as a male line descendant of Oldenburgs as always.
Peter III actually held Holstein-Gottorp when he travelled to Russia to inherit it and then be overthrown and killed.
After Peter III, Russian rulers continued to treat the titles like “Holstein-Gottorp” and “Heir to Norway” as titles which adhered to all legitimate male line descendants, even younger sons, no matter how remote from actually inheriting. Other Oldenburg cadet lines did the same and accepted Russian rulers doing so.
Are the Greek Oldenburgs “Heir of Norway”? Are the Ukogbani Oldenburgs?
“Caesar” as a Germanic loan survived into early Middle English as casere, but emperour won out as the general term, possibly because it was a more generic term whereas casere only referred to the Roman or Holy Roman emperors.
Caesar enters languages as a loanword from Latin and from Greek. In most cases of Latin origin, Caesar references the man; in most cases of Greek origin, Caesar references the Imperial Roman title (which was not an equivalent of Shah/King but became used in some cases by the Romans in place of King because Romans thought they uniquely weren’t supposed to have Kings). This is a simplification, but you see the effect in the tendency of Catholic countries to treat Caesar as an ultimate title and Orthodox countries to treat it as a sub-title (as in, the Kaiser is one Kaiser, but the Czar is many (many many) Czars).
In the well-known Greek passage:
En ekeinais tais hemerais, exelthen dogma para Kaisaros Augoustou, epigraphesthai pasan ten oikoumenen…
In those days, an order went out from Caesar Augustus for all the world to be registered..
Caesar wasn’t a title for that guy, though; that was one of Emperors who was actually named Caesar.
Originally the name Caesar was the name of the family that became the Emperor or the Roman Empire. As time went on and people from families unrelated to the Caesars became the Emperor, they adopted the name Caesar. This was in an effort to make it seem as though the original family was still in power and everything continued as normal.
Yes, Luther rendered that passage “von dem Kaiser Augustus” (from the emperor Augustus”, but at the time the gospel was written, “Caesar” was probably still in transition from a family name to a title. Note the Greek has no article before “Kaisaros”.
I actually cited this only because of the kappa in “Kaisaros”.
So whilst the introduction to the ‘marvels’ of Latin (I’m an Australian English-speaker who recently decided to learn more Japanese than the minimal amount I remembered from school) was definitely interesting to me and got me to open the site, I have to admit?
Your Book Recommendation description actually grabbed my attention. Because what you described there? To me it resonated with Gallipoli and Anzac Day. Namely the way you called out that it mentioned there was a difference between what the Song Soldiers did, and what Song Society but more specifically, the Song Military System did in the context of war.
Because just… Every now and then I hear about or see people encountering that and basically going “Wait, what? Why the heck are you celebrating a major loss like that as your most important military day?” (because we do have Remembrance Day in November, but its basically ‘poppies and a minute’s silence’ compared to Anzac Day) and that is just. Well, it really shows just how different the culture is about what is honoured and how things are handled.
Because we don’t really care about *what* was being fought for in that regard, we care far more about *how* it was fought and in particular by *who*. We don’t really learn about the daring plans that the Gallipoli landings and others across the Dardanelles were all about.
We learn about how, despite landing on the wrong damn beach, in the face of serious cliffs, the troops waded ashore, scaled those cliffs and pushed back the enemy enough to make an effective, if not safe, landing beach until they managed to capture the intended landing beach and push further out so that it was only long range artillery that could endanger their supplies. We learn about Simpson and his donkey taking the wounded down through the still dangerous gullies (one picked up the name Shrapnel Gully after all) to the beach until he was shot dead.
We learn about the fact there was an element of honour between the Ottoman troops and the Anzacs. We learn about, at least in part, how awful the supply situation was along with such things as the ‘jam tin grenades’. We learn about the fact the evacuation was so well done it was practically without casualties and the Ottoman’s didn’t even realise it was going on until they’d left thanks to, in part, things like the drip guns.
The British leadership may have completely messed up that entire campaign, from preparation through planning, and more. But the ANZACs landed, did the job they were given as best as they could and triumphed even in failure.
So that resonance I mentioned? It felt to me like it was a very similar situation, except the differences in culture around those situations saw a very different result. For we could hold up the individuals that did what was asked of them and more despite the failures of above, whilst they clearly couldn’t have the system be the failure for the system was all, thus it must have been those who were a part of the system which failed.
… As for the issues with the literature not picking that up, well. We can probably put that down to some of the historical biases ‘tainting’ impressions of the soldiers as ‘clearly even if the system was good, *that lot* wouldn’t be able to perform to our expectations upholding it as they were ___’. Not to mention the fact that, in the eyes of those scholars, as the creators and rulers of the system were learned scholar-bureaucrats, obviously any flaws in the system must have come from who the system was being applied to and a lack of knowledge about how best to create the system.
Couldn’t possibly be a flaw with the fact ‘wise and learned scholar-bureaucrats’ were creating the systems being applied, whilst not listening to those with practical experience or expertise for the fact they were ‘unlearned fools’. Now could it?
Okay, that last bit’s mostly a joke. Sorry, had to make it. Hope the rest of what I said here stands up to scrutiny at least!
From what I’ve read, despite the many foul-ups, the Gallipoli campaign came damn near to being a success (in which case all would have been forgiven) — a lot of things had to go wrong, and did, and then the Empire troops had the bad luck to run into an Ataturk on the other side. The troops did all and more than could be expected of them, but fate and poor decisions at key moments denied them victory in favor of the Turks (who also fought well under harsh conditions).
Our host has before written essays on the ways armies may maintain cohesion in battle. On the face of it, most of the armies of the Great War used all of them at once. No doubt that explains why trying to rout one of them proved such a singularly unrewarding task.
That would seem to be almost the exact opposite of the armies of the Song.
As an Australian, I am of course deeply familiar with the Gallipoli and the place it has in our shared culture. As a Russian-Australian, though, I can’t help but think how much your middle paragraphs (conveying what is often called the ANZAC Spirit/the “Digger” Spirit here) echo the Great Patriotic War narratives where I was born. All too often, both seek to recast some of the absolute worst meat grinders to have ever been seen in world history into monuments of national honour – rather than as testaments to political decisions which should never have been made, the full price for which was paid by just about anyone other than those who made them. After all, Gallipoli cost the Entente >60,000 dead (“only” a fifth of that ANZAC) – the toll which was at least matched (and likely exceeded), by the notorious Neva Bridgehead (“Nevsky Pyatachok”) – a somewhat comparable military theater, and a place where the location and reburial of the fallen still wasn’t finished as of 2010s. (It also happened to be where a certain Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin had fought – whose son is all-too-familiar to us nowadays.)
https://apimagesblog.com/blog/2016/05/06/the-remains-of-russian-soldiers-of-wwii
While the latter at least had the goal of relieving a siege literally intended to starve an entire multi-million city to death, the focus on its sacrifices (and those of the civilians supplying the war effort, particularly from inside the city) tends to surrender the premise that fighting this particular battle in this particular manner was inevitable – in spite of the USSR possessing by far the largest and in most respects, the best technologically-equipped military on the continent just years earlier (and that’s just the operational level, without (re)litigating foreign policy options alternative to ones pursued at the time.) Likewise, the honour of “the ANZAC Spirit” tacitly assumes it was necessary for Australia (and New Zealand, where the same narrative is mirrored) to throw tens of thousands of young men to die and get maimed in a conflict which had next to nothing to do with the country’s own interests in order to emerge as the nation it is now, with the unspoken assumption the country today would somehow be lesser had all of them stayed and worked to actually build up the country further in the prime of their life – an assumption which, to me at least, beggars belief, and only seems to make sense as a post-traumatic rationalization.
The worst part is that in both countries, we can draw a clear line between “hold[ing] up the individuals that did what was asked of them and more” in the past – and individuals in the present thinking they “need” to match those and be equally held up. For Australia, Gallipoli was followed by Kokoda, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq – only the former of which could be fairly described as worthwhile. And of course, online reflections on the ideological continuity between the narrative of the Great Patriotic War and that of the present-day War in Ukraine are effectively dime-a-dozen nowadays. (In fact, reading your comment, I get the rather eerie feeling we might well live to see the anniversary of something like the Battle of Bakhmut (renamed to Artemovsk in that case) becoming yet another public holiday in Russia, and getting described in the same terms you used – almost regardless of how the war as whole ends.)
On the other hand, I now wonder if the Song’s apparent refusal to honor their soldiers had also been more responsible for the comparatively isolationist subsequent Chinese foreign policy than is commonly appreciated – and if we would have had seen significantly more attempts at territorial expansion relative to present had the country also chosen to emphasize “how it was fought and by who.” It’s a disturbing trail of thought, but it seems to make sense to me.
Australia in 1914 was, in the minds of its white inhabitants, an outpost of the British Empire. Of course they leapt to defend the Empire, just as someone from, say, Moesia or Coele Syria would have defended the Roman Empire. Gallipoli and the Western Front were part of the weaning process (not really complete until the 60s).
“Likewise, the honour of “the ANZAC Spirit” tacitly assumes it was necessary for Australia (and New Zealand, where the same narrative is mirrored) to throw tens of thousands of young men to die and get maimed in a conflict which had next to nothing to do with the country’s own interests in order to emerge as the nation it is now, with the unspoken assumption the country today would somehow be lesser had all of them stayed and worked to actually build up the country further in the prime of their life – an assumption which, to me at least, beggars belief”
I think you might find this easier to believe if you rephrased it as “Australians somehow managed to persuade themselves that it would be a bad thing if the country which was a) their largest export market b) their largest source of finance and c) the sole guarantor of their national defence was defeated and subjugated by an anti-semitic military dictatorship, and therefore decided to send a small all-voliunteer military expeditionary force to a key theatre of the war to help make sure that didn’t happen”.
For Australia, France was neither of these things. As for the UK, WWII-era “Operation Sealion” is a well-known benchmark in alt-history circles as a basic indication of whether the author is remotely serious or just wants their preferred side to win – purely because of how totally militarily and logistically infeasible even attempting it was. Kaiser Germany was, if anything, in an even worse position to attempt it – even if they did ever manage to conquer the entire France. After all, the entire German Revolution began with the Kiel Mutiny – with the German sailors who would rather reject their oaths than try fighting the British Grand Fleet.
That “small” force you are talking about numbered over 300,000 people – out of ~400,000 who volunteered, and out of the total (non-Indigenous) population of less than 5 million! Out of those, ~60,000 have died – representing ~20% of the volunteer force, and 1.2% of the (non-Indigenous) population of Australia! For New Zealand, the fractional casualties were even worse, at 1.5%. Those numbers are only somewhat smaller than those of the actual European countries – 1.6-1.9% for the Russian Empire (with a substantial fraction from hunger and related illnesses due to a drop in agricultural output), ~1.9% for the UK specifically (with the Scottish figure said to be double of that), and 3-5% for France and the Central Powers. (Ottoman figures reach 11-15% if it’s assumed that the Armenian Genocide would not have happened in the absence of war, but we can probably set that interpretation aside for now.)
Moreover, if you consider the wounded, it looks even worse. It appears that the median Australian soldier had been hospitalized multiple times throughout their deployment.
https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/why-the-numbers-of-our-wwi-dead-are-wrong-20140428-zr0v5.html
Both you and Peter T are correct that those forces were volunteers, whose decision to enlist made sense to themselves knowing what they knew then. Knowing what we know now, we do not have to venerate the circumstances which led to them making that decision – or to ever imply that their sacrifices were worth more than their civilian lives would have been.
I said “subjugated” and not “invaded and occupied” for a reason. If you think Australia had no interest in which side won WW1 – “interest” in the sense that it wouldn’t have made any difference to Australia – well, we disagree, and the Australian government of the day thought the same way I do.
And Australia’s contribution to the war was small, compared to the contribution of many other combatants, and it was all-volunteer, so the use of “sic” is unnecessary.
” the German sailors who would rather reject their oaths than try fighting the British Grand Fleet” – this is a slightly deceptive way to put it; the German sailors in question had been quite happy to fight the Grand Fleet in 1914-1916, after all. But in 1918 they knew that the planned sortie was a) intentionally suicidal b) certainly pointless and, probably, c) a rogue operation by naval leadership that was unauthorised by the actual government of Germany.
My understanding is that [sic] is commonly used to draw attention to typos. Since you appear to have a habit of pointing them out in others’ comments, I suggest you take another look at how you wrote the word “volunteer” in the comment I quoted.
Not enough interest to lose more than 1% of our population over it, and leave an even larger fraction scarred on the outside and the inside. For comparison, we all know that there are conflicts going on today which the EU countries have a clear “interest” in – and none are willing to take on a sacrifice even remotely commensurate to one Australia did ~110 years ago. I.e. it would likely take just one or two of the major EU members being willing to risk ~1% of their population in order to expel Israeli troops from the Palestinian territory (and this is after accounting for the risk of intervention by CENTCOM and/or Israeli nuclear retaliation), yet we certainly do not see any moves to that effect. Like me, Peter T here has also written that in his view, the contemporary Australian government’s decisions were done for reasons that were anything but pragmatic in nature.
I also find the idea the self-proclaimed “Empire Where the Sun Doesn’t Set” was going to be “subjugated” by a defeat of its continental ally and an expeditionary force sent to support it deeply questionable. Though, at least this confirms you were talking about the right conflict: for a moment, I suspected that the “anti-semitic military dictatorship” part meant you were under the impression we discussed WWII – after all, Kaiser Germany was a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament, and I don’t know if it makes sense to emphasize antisemitism as a reason why Australia might have made the right decision at the time. Not when considering both the active participation of German Jews in that war (more than any other ethnicity in Germany, apparently, as described below) and the fact it was the nation Australia was defending which had the Dreyfus Affair. This is just using the contemporary knowledge – in hindsight, we also have the very obvious counterfactual that the German Empire winning the war would have most likely averted the Holocaust entirely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Germany#World_War_I
Lastly, we also seem to agree that it would have been suicidal for the contemporary German fleet to attempt a naval invasion of Britain, which was my point.
There is a very fine line, perhaps too fine to detect, between “celebrating the sacrifices of brave individuals” and “denouncing the systemic mistakes that make those unnecessary sacrifices happen.” American popular culture treatment of the Vietnam War comes to mind.
There’s an exception to the one-letter-one-sound rule: There’s a K, which shows up e.g. in _kalends_. How did that originate?
wikipedia on kalends/calends:
“The Latin term is traditionally written with initial K: this is a relic of traditional Latin orthography, which wrote K (instead of C or Q) before the vowel A. Later, most Latin words adopted C, instead. It is sometimes claimed that the kalends was frequently used in formal or high-register contexts, and that that is why it retained its traditional spelling, but there seems to be no source for this. “
The Latin alphabet came from the Etruscan, which came from (western) Greek. Greek had gamma and kappa for /g/ and /k/ sounds, but Etruscan did not use the /g/ sound, or perhaps didn’t distinguish voiced /g/ from unvoiced /k/, and ended up using the gamma glyph for /k/ and dropping the kappa glyph. The gamma glyph became the Roman “C”, still pronounced /k/. Then the Latin alphabet ended up reintroducing the kappa glyph, in its original position after iota/I, for Greek loanwords with kappa.
However, Latin did have a /g/ sound, so they derived “G” from “C” and stuck it in seventh position, kicking out the Etruscan glyph derived from Greek zeta, since Latin didn’t need the /z/ sound – and ended up re-introducing “Z” at the end of the alphabet for Greek loanwords with zeta.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_alphabet, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet
It’s not really an exception so long as you think of it as going only one way. It’s still one letter – one sound, but not one sound – one letter. While classical Latin spelling is a lot more consistent and logical than ours, it still bears the mark of its transmission through Etruscan, Greek and before that Phoenician spelling.
Do we know what Carolingian Ecclesiastical Latin would have sounded like?
That reminds me, when I’m watching broadcasts of events at the Vatican, I usually can’t tell whether clerics are speaking Italian or ecclesiastical Latin.
On a sidenote:
“during the first centuries (both of them)”
Shouldn’t the “first century BC” be called the *last* century BC?
They also use “second century BC”, “Fifth century BC”, etc., so “first century” for 100-1 BC fits the pattern.
If you count them that way, you’d have the last century, the second-to-last century, the third-from-last century, etc. You save yourself a lot of words if you just count backwards.
Wait why not have discharge tattoos then?? Am I missing something here or is the solution to this problem as simple as it sounds?
Wow, I’m surprised they never switched that to rotating commanders, that’s horrifically wasteful. Is there any succinct explanation of why? Is it just a case of “the commanders wouldn’t like that and they had more influence than the people in charge of supplies and logistics”?
I thought of the same thing for the discharge tattoos, but than wondered if those would be too easy to fake (Run away, find local tattoo person, get your “veteran” tattoo, home free.) May or may not be the case (I’m not that familiar with tattooing), but possibly could play into it.
Hm, that’s a good point. Is that really any easier than faked papers, though?
Probably depends what the audience is. The existence of “papers” (which may have just as easily been a badge or other material–I don’t know what they would’ve used in the period) implies that there are people, important enough to be able to read, who could verify them. The common soldier probably *doesn’t even know what they’re supposed to say*, and wouldn’t have the knowledge to fake the appropriate seal for the person who would be generating them, etc.
Keep in mind that one of the skills the scholar-elite–including the military–prided itself on was elegant calligraphy. Now imagine a semi-literate soldier trying to fake that, even if they had a valid copy to copy from…
Couldn’t all this be applied to tattoos as well, though? Unless maybe tattoo technology of the time was simply too low-resolution for this purpose, or something?
I suspect the point was priorities- the scholar-bureaucrats didn’t give a crap about the plight of the honourably discharged soldier that lost their discharge papers (in particular note there seems to not be a way for a claim of honoueable discharge to be checked if the soldier has lost their discharge papers, even though there almost certainly is a record somewhere) while they very much to care about deserters, so you get a system that would have a low rate of false negatives (not many alleged deserters would get away with it if they could be checked for the tatoo) at the cost of many false positives (honourably discharged soldiers that have lost their discharge papers)
I don’t think the Song culture of tattoo artists was as developed as the Song culture of calligraphers. Chinese calligraphic tradition is very developed.
More broadly, I think a lot of elements of a system like this have to be understood in terms of “Is it in any way inconvenient to the people who decide how the system is going to work? No? Then you’re out of luck.” As I understand it, the division in the Song army between who got to make relevant choices and who was actually going to have to go out and face the consequences of those choices was very sharp, because in practice the Song dynasty was more afraid of military coups than it was of losing a war. Invading armies could be bought off with a pile of gold; coup-happy generals would not settle for any less than your head on a pike.
Quite aside from the calligraphy, movable type printing was invented in the Song Dynasty and the Chinese had woodblock printing long before that, so I imagine the form would be printed and counterfeiting the form would be incredibly difficult for a random soldier.
You do have to suspect that the reason commanders were not rotated is that they had too much power to be forced to, do you not?
If so, that strikes me as being a pretty big issue in its own right.
Essentially. A commander almost certainly has a brother who is an official scholar, and a father or father-in-law who is too, and so on; a common soldier certainly has none of those.
It sounds more like you move the bullets to where the men are, not the men to the bullets.
If the ordinary troops are as expendable as bullets.
“Emerging out of a desire by the early Song emperors and their bureaucracy administration to bring the army under firm control […] entire system of intense top-down control where every aspect was engineered to suit the whims of the ‘enlightened’ scholar-officials running the system”
My friends/rivals/colleagues and I have the Confucian literature equivalent of an Ivy degree. Military camps, or military activity, are muddy and generally beneath our dignity. Lest my fellow scholars laugh at me for being enthusiastic about a topic they look down on, even though my job is to manage some aspect of the military, I want to make my job as easy as possible; I want it to take as little time and attention as possible. So I stay in
Isengardthe palace, sending commands and demanding reports by messenger to the field commander. More importantly, I have neither opportunity nor inclination to care about even field-grade officers (the illiterate brutes!), never mind enlisted men, as humans; contrariwise, I want them to be fungible little boxes so I can manage them easily.What, morale has tanked, soldiers are deserting in droves, and refuse to put down local disorder (from tax nonpayment to uprisings)? Oh well, for each army, even if we do need an army where it was raised, we shall deploy it a long way from there. That way, deserters have a longer journey to get home, and are less likely to find people willing to help them (with a meal, a bed, and saying to the police he is not there), and it is less likely that the disorder they have to put down contains their relatives, friends, or other people with whom they have fellow-feeling. Problem solved! (Also, figuring out a permutation of the standardized
boxesarmies that satisfies some minimum-distance constraint is exactly the kind of problem solving which makes me look good in front of my colleagues.)We would thus deploy armies far from where they were raised, even if for “maintenance” we rotated the commanders. But since armies and commanders are equally-sized boxes on my map, and every so often the commanders come to the palace in person to make a report (even if they are painfully ignorant of what makes for sublime art), and we shuffle the armies when they are raised anyway, we might as well rotate the armies rather than the commanders. There, military policy: done.
But you — or more likely not you, but rather some other official — does care about all the food and supplies that moving those people around requires, and how much of the budget you’re wasting on that. So the question becomes, why do the treasurers and such have sufficiently little influence that they are unable to effect a switch to a better system? Not out of a concern for the soldiers, out of a concern for the treasury!
Because, sir, a gentleman does not concern himself with expenses, but with important matters of art and culture.
The field commanders ensure the soldiers don’t just lie in bed when they are staying in one location, so they consume the same amount of food whether they are being marched around or not. Equipment broken or lost during redeployments is the soldiers’ fault and thus its cost is docked from their wage. Treasury is not opposed.
One, Song China was a very well-developed country with a lot of rice to throw at its problems, so while theoretically marching an army from A to B is more costly than leaving them in place, it is a category of problem that you will usually be well equipped to solve except during a famine.
Two, Song China generally did as much as possible to avoid supplying or paying the soldiers anyway, including forcing them to grow their own rice and going very long periods without paying them, as I understand it.
A marching soldier does not actually eat that much more than a garrisoned soldier. He may in fact ‘eat’ less, as while moving he will be less able to cultivate contacts who would trade with him for his official supplies.
Deploying soldiers far from their homes is not a purely Chinese invention. The Roman Principate did the same, deploying the auxilia far from their homes in order to deracinate them and have their identity as Roman soldiers (to be eventually given citizenship) supersede all others.
Which was also the approach of the most notorious of self-styled ideological “heirs” to the Roman Principate – the Third Reich. On D-Day, a substantial fraction of the troops waiting next to the beaches of Normandy were the Ostlegionen – and even more were carrying out occupation duties in the rear echelons throughout Western Europe. After all, the Wehrmacht quite reasonably did not trust them not to attempt defecting back to the USSR or simply melting in the Soviet countryside, but a place whose language they did not speak was another matter entirely.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/muslims-and-foreigners-reich.html
Having said that, such an approach also wasn’t foolproof – at least, not in the face of extremely obvious defeats. Amongst the other things, the article below recounts the case of the Tamar Battalion (Mepe Tamar or Konigin/Tsaritsa Tamara – after a legendary 12th century female ruler), which was stationed on Texel Island in the Netherlands, but ended up rebelling in early April. They killed 400 German soldiers almost immediately (often in their sleep), and the latter ended up deploying 2,000 more to put it down, with the fighting not ending until nearly two weeks after the official German surrender. (And which still didn’t earn the survivors a whole lot of clemency for defecting in the first place once they were repatriated to the USSR.)
I somehow failed to specify in the original comment that this Bataillon 822 “Königin Tamara” was a formation of the SS Georgian Legion – and since even in the year 2025, WordPress remains unable or unwilling to implement such basic comment functionality as a preview button or in-built text styling, never mind an edit button, I’ll have to do it here.
As a bonus, I’ll add that Tamar/Tamara was part of the Bagration dynasty – which could perhaps be described as the longest-running continuous royal dynasty. While the once-official legend of them being the literal descendants of Biblical David is just that, the reality of this line (often claimed to have Armenian roots) is impressive enough.
After all, they have first ascended to power somewhere around 800s as the rulers of Byzantine Iberia, then becoming the first to rule the entity known as Georgia, then retaining this under the Mongol occupation (though by that point, the line of Tamar’s descendants split into close to two dozen, only some of which retained the Bagration name), then successfully rebelling and then becoming one of the most important noble lines of Imperial Russia* (after Georgia itself split into three following late-1400s civil war) Finally, following their post-October Revolution exile, a member of this line, Leonida, had married one of the Romanovs – and their daughter is technically still one of the claimants to the Romanov throne (albeit a lesser one.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Duchess_Maria_Vladimirovna_of_Russia
*That is, the only Bagration most people outside of Georgia are likely to recall is the General who was the hero of the Battle of Borodino, which delayed Napoleon outside of Moscow – and whose name was then given to Operation Bagration, the 1944 summer offensive which effectively wiped out Wehrmacht’s Army Group Center, with the latter suffering even worse losses than at Stalingrad (or at Falaise, for that matter) – to the point a parade of 57,000 POWs was held in Moscow even before the operation was officially over.
Generals tend to be rich and upperclass, and can form alliances with the local aristocracy and civilian administration in whatever province they are assigned to. So among other reasons, yeah the generals won’t want to be moved away from their power base.
Sure, but the question isn’t “why are generals powerful”, it’s “why are they *more* powerful than the treasury officials who would be opposed to this”.
Why would the treasury officials be opposed to contracts to supply stuff to moving soldiers? They get a piece of them; bribery is more or less universal and an army where it’s minimized is the oddity.
Now, the thing they will oppose is any contract where they don’t get a piece of the action.
I suspect it wasn’t so much that the commanders personally wouldn’t like it, as that the commanders were drawn from the same general class as all other decision-making officials, and Song China was wealthy enough that “this is stupid and wasteful” was only one of several considerations involved in moving troops around. They had a lot of manpower and a lot of rice to throw at their problems.
As I’ve heard it, the Song Dynasty was much more preoccupied with the threat of military coups than they were with the threat of losing a war by not having soldiers capable of fighting off the enemy. From the point of view of the emperor or the people in the capital, all a typical invading army could do would be to sack a few cities before getting bought off with a pile of gold or maybe having one of the many imperial princesses promised to their khan or something. A general trying to stage a coup could straight-up kill you.
I think with the Song in particular there’s an interesting case of learning a lesson and then running headfirst into the opposite.
So you have the Tang: Military successful, expansionist. Falls because the government ultimately can’t control the military governors, result is coups, civil war, and eventual disintegration.
Cue 60-something years of upheaval. The Song then sets about to *absolutely prevent this* and… Largely succeeds! There’s still rebellions, but they manage to effectively suppress them, largely by avoiding centralization of power into the hands of powerful military governors… And this leaves them to weak to defend themselves from their northern neighbours.
It depends. For what it’s worth, the Chinese popular culture seems to suggest the shared pathologies of the two dynasties might have been more important than their differences.
By that, I’m referring to The Litchi/Lychee Road – a smash hit from the other month, which begins as more of a comedy about the hapless official from the Tang’s Bureau of Imperial Gardens struggling to fulfill the Emperor’s demand to deliver fresh lychees from Lingnan to the then-capital of Chang’an, in time for his consort’s birthday, and ultimately morphs into a drama about the downfall of the Tang Dynasty. The ultimate climax of the film is not the main character carrying out his seemingly impossible order (lychees generally spoil in 3 days, while that route typically lasts nearly three weeks) in the face of both logistical challenge and outright sabotage, but his final conversation with the Imperial Treasurer, where he realizes just how far gone the situation is.
That is, once the official’s plan for delivering lychees via the relay network is finalized, the treasurer offloads all the costs onto the villages tasked with providing the couriers, both imposing an additional tax on them, and forcing them to pay the existing relay dues six months in advance. This occurs at the same time as the Imperial Character vastly increases the scope of the delivery beyond what the main character had budgeted for: the initial plan was to provide 10 trees (literally full trees, with their roots inside boxes of soil – the only way they could think of to delay spoilage for over a week, after which the tree still dies and they place the fruits into double-layered ceramics, and move them in ice-refrigerated barges) for the Emperor and his favourite concubine – but then all the other major officials demand their share, and it skyrockets to 100 trees, then to 200, “to be safe”.
Hence, the system simply collapses under the strain, with villages around the halfway mark of the route literally depopulated, as the people opted to flee instead of trying to provide what they do not have. Not only are nearly all of the trees utterly wasted, but the discontent this would engender in people is obvious to the main character. He tries to tell just that to the Treasurer, but is dismissed and exiled to Lingnan with his family – and from there, he learns of the capture of Chang’an, and Tang’s impending downfall, just a year later.
As such, according to this narrative at least, the disregard for common people by the Imperial officials and the desire to offload as many costs onto them as possible was already prevalent in the Tang era, and at least as key to their downfall as it was for the Song. The film also has a somewhat different take on the ” can’t control the military governors” point: as the main character walks through the celebrations to talk with the Imperial Treasurer, we briefly see the son of (I think) Zhu Wen being forced to dance to delight the Emperor and the Court in what was clearly seen as a humiliating manner – and of course, his father is then the one who decides to storm Chang’an.
https://variety.com/2025/film/box-office/china-box-office-the-lychee-road-local-titles-1236465661/
P.S. A number of comments have also remarked that the scholars of the Song bureaucracy were more interested in the fine arts like calligraphy than the grime of the logistics, and this is depicted in the film as being true about the late Tang court, too. That is, the main character receives his initial position due to his numerical abilities – but they mark him out as an unrefined black sheep in a bureaucratic culture which prioritizes poetry, calligraphy or drawing. (To the point that when he at first realizes he was only given his assignment to become a scapegoat, his colleagues gather under the roof he climbed onto, taking bets on whether or not he’s going to jump – and one of them already manages to sketch the scene, admiring its “dramatic intensity”. In the second half of the film, as he receives the full backing of the Treasurer, the same colleague draws him in a domineering position, giving orders to the rest of them – but as said above, that does not last.)
The Tang Dynasty fell in a very different manner to the Song: The Tang gradually lost power to local military governors, who formed the building blocks of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. There was a clear pattern of the tang Court devolving power to military administrators (including granting them larger-than-normal administrative divisions that they then used to basically make themselves into independent rulers) who eventually declared themselves emperors. Paralells have been made to the breakdown of post-carolingian europe.
Meanwhile the Song mostly remained intact despite suffering humiliating losses to the Jin, and were more or less conquered wholesale by the Yuan. They succeeded in avoiding the fate of the Tang… Only to become militarily unable to contest the mongols. (who to be fair, are kind of a big deal)
(there’s a further issue that IIRC; the Song had real trouble fielding cavalry in large numbers, I can’t remember why but there’s problems with raising horses in southern China and the loss of the north made that an even bigger problem)
@YARD I’d be cautious drawing conclusions about history you aren’t familiar with based on a film. Zhu Wen (852-912) definitely does not appear in this film set in the Tianbao era (742-756). The “Imperial Treasurer” is not in fact a treasurer but Right Chancellor Yang Guozhong, “Zhu Wen” is regional governor An Lushan, and the film does not take place in the “late Tang” any more than the Crisis of the Third Century takes place in the Late Roman Empire (the Tang dynasty actually falls roughly 1.5 centuries after the film takes place).
The “shared pathologies” of the Tang and Song are not in fact the common cause for their fall, and I would struggle to find that idea in a Chinese-language popular history book, which all seem to overtly portray the Song Dynasty as uniquely militarily weak. The key issue at play here is not how the dynasties treat the “common people” but how they treat their militaries, with the Song uniquely unwilling to give their already overly centralised military basically any command independence (works less badly when your emperor is a former general who came to power in a coup and actually understands how the army works, works very badly when your emperor is a sixth?-generation nepo baby who thinks that heavenly soldiers can be summoned by opening your city gates and throwing beans from the walls). While most states which controlled China (Qin, Han, Sui, Tang, Yuan, Ming, Qing) fell to some form of internal strife (whether from powerful military commanders or peasant revolts), the Song Dynasty fell to external conquest, arguably uniquely among states which had at some point controlled all of the Chinese heartland.
@Dawn: Point taken. I have nothing to respond to that. (I suppose it’s nice to encounter someone else here familiar with the film, at least, even if it happened in such a manner.)
@Arilou: As above. I would only like to pause here a little.
Our Gracious Host had actually touched on this very subject almost exactly five years ago.
https://acoup.blog/2020/09/04/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-addendum-rice/
@Arilou, all agricultural states have the problem that horses, especially the bigger horses you want for armoured cavalry, eat from the same fields that humans do. (Yes, pasture is not exactly the same and can be of lower quality.) More horses = less humans.
At the time of the Song, southern China, up to the Yellow River, was thoroughly filled up with farms. Which doesn’t mean there weren’t any horses, just that southern China couldn’t provide horses on the massive scale that their armies would have required to be cavalry based.
Northern China is better, especially a region called the Ordos which in current day China is west of Beijing and just south of the Great Wall. And northern China could and did buy horses from the steppe nomads.
Unfortunately for the Song the Manchurian Jurchen (not steppe nomads, but also with good cavalry) conquered the northern Song regions including the Ordos, pushing the Song behind the Yellow River and cutting them off from both sources of cavalry mounts.
(The Jurchen, now the Chin/Jin/Kin dynasty, having no idea how to run a state on this new scale, Sinicized themselves by keeping the existing Song bureaucracy. Who managed, in a generation or two, to introduce all the worst features of the Song military. By the time of the Mongol invasion the Jurchen frontier was manned by poorly treated conscripts from far away who frequently, with their commanders, switched sides and joined the Mongols.)
@Arilou, all agricultural states have the problem that horses, especially the bigger horses you want for armoured cavalry, eat from the same fields that humans do.
@scifihughf,
You can manage that tradeoff in some circumstances, by balancing between forage and food crops in different seasons. In parts of North America for example you could grow cold-adapted forages (for animals to forage) during the fall/winter/early spring and then a hot-weather species like corn or soybeans in the late spring/summer/early fall.
Song dynasty treated commanders with disdain, not much better than soldiers. And they surely didn’t have more influence than the scholar-officials.
The explanation is that they wanted to give soldiers something to suffer even in time of peace so they wouldn’t get lazy and think of things like making a coup or something.
I picked up the book thanks to OGH’s recommendation, and as far as I can tell the answer to “why not have discharge tattoos?” is that the bulk of Song Dynasty soldiers were effectively state-owned enslaved laborers who happened to be administered by the military and who could theoretically be used as combat troops in an emergency. Making it harder to leave the military than re-enter it was pretty much the system working as intended. They also knew how to remove tattoos, so they could fully remove you from the system if they really wanted to.
As for the rotation system… apparently it got phased out by reforms roughly a century into the Song Dynasty because of both the cost and mortality rate of marching an army over ridiculously long distances (we’re talking hundreds of kilometers in some cases). Those reforms were opposed by some officials who argued that the soldiers would get soft and lazy if they weren’t periodically subjected to death marches.
I cannot understand what about the Classical pronunciation of Cicero is especially ridiculous. Then again, I learnt Classical Latin pronunciation before I learnt Roman history, so I never became particularly accustomed to “traditional” pronunciation, and find many “traditional pronunciations” very unintuïtive: the usual English pronunciations of Cassius and Pontius Pilate are both confounding and frankly hideous.
Question about short vowels in Latin: in English, “short” vowels tend to be shifted towards a mid-central realization, but my understanding (as a general linguistic matter) is that this is *not* a safe assumption for other languages. It is definitely not a safe assumption for Arabic, which I am currently learning. Do Latin short vowels really match English ones?
AIUI Latin’s shorter vowels are understood to have been somewhat less peripheral than its long ones, which is a general trend crosslinguistically. They probably weren’t exactly the same as English’s, but that’s trivially true – no language’s vowels are exactly the same as any other language’s!
It’s not even a safe assumption for English. In English, only have a centralized realization of the short vowels, [ɪ ʊ]. In contrast,
* [æ] is peripheral in all common accents, and ongoing soundshifts tense it, to [ɑ] in Southern England, [eə̯ ~ ɪə̯] in most of the US in nasal and sometimes other contexts, and [æɪ̯ə̯] in Southern drawl.
* The short is [ɛ ~ e] depending on accent with both rather peripheral; ongoing soundshifts either push it to [ɪ] as in New Zealand or [æ] as in some Northern US accents, or [eɪ̯ə̯] in tensed Southern drawl.
* Short-o in British English is a very peripheral [ɒ], merging into tense but still peripheral [ɑ] in North America.
The real distinction is that short vowels in Germanic languages are lax whereas long ones are tense. This as you point out is not a safe assumption for other languages – you bring up Arabic, and I’ll add Finnish, in which the short/long vowel distinction is almost pure quantity, not quality. (However, Hindi works like Germanic languages, and also realizes short-a as [ə]. Amharic merged short-i and short-u, realized as [ɨ].)
The Latin length distinction was probably one of quantity, secondarily including quality but not laxness. Of notes:
* Latin poetry relied on meter with regular alternation of long and short vowels. This was partly Greek influence, Ancient Greek having had pitch and not stress accent, but it does suggest the Romans mapped the stronger long vowels of Greek to their own long vowels, not their stressed ones.
* Short- and long-a merged throughout Romance. This doesn’t happen in Germanic languages, which keep these separate, often with a notable difference in quality.
* Short-i consistently merged with long-e, and short-u consistently merged with long-o. This suggests that the length distinction evolved into a quality difference, in which short-e and short-o were lower/more open than long-e and long-o, as in English, but not more central or laxer.
Sorry about the formatting. I said in the the second sentence that in English, only short-i and short-u have a centralized realization, but I used angled brackets and WordPress interpreted that as, of all things, an italic tag.
Ha! I guess we’re lucky there’s no blink vowel.
It’s not quite 100% accurate to say Latin never wrote long vowels – it did sometimes! There’s a diacritic called an ‘apex’ that’s a little hook to the left over long vowel letters (or some extra height added to ). It’s just easy to miss if you’re not looking for it, because it’s usually inscribed with a much thinner stroke than the letters it’s accompanying – it’s easy to mistake it for just incidental damage to the stone. But it is there sometimes, and you’ll definitely see it when you know to look for it!
As a classical singer, I get to mess around with another interesting collection of Latin pronunciation variations: historically informed performance, especially of Baroque and Renaissance music. Singers from the Romantic period forward had sung Latin texts in modern Italianate ecclesiastical Latin. But, starting in the late 20th century, there was a growing movement to sing the words composers wrote as closely to how they would have said and sung them as we can figure out, since that can change the sounds and stresses and feel of the text. Just like playing a Baroque piece on the violin sounds different with gut strings vs. modern metal strings.
So, for instance, modern church Latin would have you pronounce “Kyrie eleison” as “Keer-ee-ay el-ay-eess-on.” But, if you’re singing historically informed Baroque German (e.g. Bach or Schütz), you would sound more like “Kür-ee-eh el-ay-eez-on.”
And the irony here is that ‘Kyrie eleision’ is a Greek, not Latin phrase, merely transliterated through Latin in the Latin west. κύριε ἐλέησον read from Ancient Greek should be kur-e-ay el-e-ay-son, closer to the Baroque German.
>kur-e-ay
I thought the ύ in Koine Greek was a front rounded vowel.
That remains the only Greek found in the traditional Roman rite mass.
The same pronunciation was used by the German traditionalist Catholics I grew up with. There were a few differences to the Latin pronunciation used at school, but not too many. Standard German pronunciation (if this is the correct term) is fairly close to Classical Latin. Traditional English Latin pronunciation is something I never figured out, and judging by the embarrassing spelling advice used by London’s Natural History Museum for their dinosaur exhibits (“ah-KEL-oo-SORE-us”) many natives haven’t either.
” But, if you’re singing historically informed Baroque German (e.g. Bach or Schütz), you would sound more like “Kür-ee-eh el-ay-eez-on.”
This is very interesting because my choir’s conductor was very insistent on pronouncing “kyrie” in this way, but she justified it simply as “it sounds better when sung that way” – whether it was Bach or not! I can kind of see her point. 80 people singing Kee-ri-ay sounds kind of screechy.
As a botany student, I learned three rules for scientific names (which are of course an unholy mix of Latin, Greek, and whatever):
1. Say every syllable (cotoneaster is co-to-ne-as-ter, not cotton-easter)
2. Say it with confidence.
3. If someone corrects you, look them straight in the eye and inform them that that’s not the way you were taught to say it.
One of my teachers taught us that a botanist can tell where another botanist was educated, based on how they pronounce certain words.
I know folk / traditional musicians who use this same technique — “That’s how I was taught to play it.” And they’re usually not dodging.
About the problem with the Humanities departments.
It always strikes me as problematic that most STEM students, when they’re not going into academia or other “pure” research jobs, will only work in their technical fields for at most 10 to 15 years? After that, they mostly will be getting management and/or leadership positions, in which they must do what all Humanities students (according to my view) learn from the get go: wade through tons of letters/reports/mails/texts/books/manuals etc. and distil meaning, policy and/or direction out of that. And then they often find out that their humanities trained peers are so much better at that than they are, as those have a 10 to 15 year head start. Which means that the STEM people tend to loose quite a few administrative and/or bureaucratic battle, if they’re not working in a tech centred institution to begin with. Seen this happen a few times.
This is actually a problem that my dad complained about a lot.
You work as a, say, programmer, for oh, 20 years. You absorb lots of programming experience, nurture contacts with global programming experts to keep up on the state of the art, and develop an intuitive understanding for how you solve difficult but common programming problems. You’re very good at your job.
You then get shuffled off into administration (and later management), because that’s the only way to keep climbing the corporate ladder and get pay raises. At that point you’re very little actual programming yourself and all that expertise and experience just vanishes into the void.
He was adamant that if our country wanted to go anywhere, we had to develop a system of letting production people promote into senior production people and senior-senior production people and keep getting pay raises without having to go into administration, “like they do in other countries”.
One issue there is a norm management generally gets paid more than the people under them, so your most talented people get rewarded by getting promoted, but that isn’t necessarily their best use. Being more comfortable with people making more than their supervisor probably would help.
Scott Adams might be a horrible person, but the idea of the “Peter Principle” is actually kinda sound: By the very nature of a meritocratic promotion system you end up promoted *up to the point where you are no longer good at your job*.
(that said, there is an advantage in having management actually know the stuff they’re managing)
As an addendum, you’re also not only losing 20 years of programming experience.
You’re making someone manager of a team (which is a very people-focused, soft-power, social-skilled role) to someone who essentially spent the last 20 years alone in a room in front of a screen. Which is not necessarily the best play in order to have a team function smoothly.
Managing people is a skill. It requires just as much practice and effort as becoming skilled at anything else. It would therefore seem obvious that you should put people with that skill in that role, yet it seems to happen depressingly rarely.
I remember some chemical companies trying to establish dual tracts chemists to improve retention in the ’70s. Didn’t last very long though.
I trust Alyagon mentions this, but for the readers here who didn’t know, tattooing is not only permanent and visible, recognizable even in a widely illiterate society–it’s also something that, by Song times, had over a thousand years of tradition as being itself a punishment for convicts.
So marking out soldiers in this manner probably also consigned them to an underclass generally, in a way that would cause barriers for (re-)entry into civilian society.
veni vidi vici -> waynee, weedy, weekie
AIUI
I learned this silly rhyme in school’s Latin lessons. Sorry for the German.
Kikero und Kaiser gingen in den Kirkus. Kikero in Kylinder and Kaiser in Kivil.
To bring the point home on how we should pronounce the letter c.
There’s a YouTube channel “miracle_aligner” who covers modern songs in Latin and other ancient languages. They’re all subtitled, so now I’m watching and listening to the Latin versions again to see how the pronunciation works. I *think* it’s classical.
I am struggling with the Wheelock document. For two years at high school I had to study Latin, using this pronunciation.
But I can’t make sense of the document. I pronounce the a in father the same as the a in Dinah. Also I say rude and put with the same vowel. I’m Scottish. I believe my accent has fewer vowels than standard English.
Since our host raised the topic of humanities degrees in “real jobs”, I feel free to wade in. Yes, people with humanities degrees do surprisingly well on the job market, and art historians probably really well. Does that mean that employers are hungry for humanities degrees? Not necessarily. It may mean that the average humanities major walked into school with more social capital than the average–let’s say business major–and left school with the same advantage.
At least this reflects my experience in Ivy League undergrad STEM. The rich kids were more likely to major in physics than engineering, at least compared to the foreign-born kids and native kids from less money. “Physics” suggests more social capital than engineering, although an undergrad physics major is no more mathed-up than an undergrad EE or aerospace engineering major. A physics major knows that a job in physics is very unlikely, but would have enough social capital not to care. (Besides, everybody else likes physics majors–especially law schools.)
What I’m arguing is that the art history degree correlates with preexisting social capital, as may humanities degrees in general. People are more likely to major in the humanities if they have a strong account at the Bank of Mom and Dad–especially in terms of social entrees. No wonder they do better when they get out!
None of this is to knock humanities degrees. I was a physics major myself. I didn’t know what I didn’t know until I went to law school. I only got through the first year because my law school stressed economic analysis, which was easy-peasy for me. The humanities aspect of the law–it took a lot of getting used to.
I don’t think this would really apply outside of the Ivy Leagues. I’ve read that the Ivy Leagues have a strong rich kid/smart kid division, but I haven’t seen or heard of that elsewhere.
The rich kids I was thinking about were also smart kids with a work ethic. Intellectually lazy kids aren’t going to major in physics, unless they’re *really* smart. And I’ve worked at banks with some art history majors, who were hard workers and fine intellects, whatever Pop’s income may have been. (These are not the art history majors who went to Sotheby’s: a different sort of people with a different set of gifts.)
Ay de mi! I have an art history major friend who would take bitter exception to this. He never could land anything more than year-to-year teaching lectureships, and finally left the higher ed field entirely and became a white-collar grunt. he’s still very unhappy about the course of his career and “wasted” schooling (altho’ it enriched his life without monetary reward).
Well, do note that neither our host, nor the linked post (from one of the Pasts Imperfect founders) specify that the “job outcomes” have to be in the field directly matching the degree – merely being employed doing anything sufficient. In fact, almost exactly 5 years ago, Dr. Devereaux had already acknowledged that many Art History majors end up as what you call “white-collar grunts” – and he was completely fine with that.
https://acoup.blog/2020/08/28/fireside-friday-august-28-2020/
There’s a big difference between people who get a bachelor’s and get out, versus graduate students.
I have a dual Math/Comp Sci B.Sc. By the time I got that I didn’t want more. It’s a *very* different attitude from the ones who even apply for grad school.
Yeah I can see pretty much everyone wanting Physics majors. They’re really smart, probably smart enough to learn other things. And because they’re not going on, they have an interest in other fields too.
Kitties! Beautiful as always.
We need appropriate Latin phrases for praising felines. Anyone? Are there Roman authors or poets with a particular fondness for cats?
Typo:
“probably because everything thinks Ki-keh-roh sounds silly and doesn’t want to have to say it.”
Everyone
“But rather than doing the Roman thing and rotating commanders, the Song rotated soldiers, marching their common soldiery long distances, often in difficult conditions away from their home to facilitate rotating armies.”
For all the mockery of this practice in the comments (and I have done this to some extent), I think that if every Emperor signed off on this for centuries, we should consider the possibility that they had some good reason for doing so.
IIRC from The Moghul World, the Moghul practice of rotating people between different fiefs certainly stopped them from building up a power base against the Emperor, and presumably put less strain on the soldiery and exchequer than the Song system, but it also mean that everyone with any sense looted their fief for all it was worth from the moment they arrived to the moment they left. There was no thought of the future of the fief, because they would not be around for that. Perhaps the Song had similar problems, and decided to sacrifice the soldiers rather than the peasants.
At any event, people in the past did things for reasons, and if they did things for reasons we don’t understand that is a mark of our ignorance of their situation, not their moral or intellectual inferiority to ourselves.
CONTENT WARNING: GREAT CYNICISM:
The explanation I’ve heard for why the Song ran their army the way they did was, indeed, not that they were somehow mentally inferior, or at least not to first order. The explanation was:
The Song were much more afraid of military coups than they were of losing a war.
If you are the Song emperor of China, this mindset actually does make a fair amount of sense. An invading army is probably some tribal confederation under some random charismatic steppe khan. It can reasonably be expected lack the numbers and organization to conquer a meaningful fraction of your gigantic empire. At most they will only manage to sack a couple of cities before they start to wander around in circles, get bored, and be worn down by desertions from all the warriors riding back to enjoy the benefit of their loot. If the invaders are particularly successful, you can buy them off with a small wagon train worth of tribute and possibly one of the many otherwise useless imperial princesses sitting around the harem. Problem sorted out!
By contrast, a military coup attempt is going to be coming straight down your throat and will not stop until you are dead, and some of the traditional methods of execution in China were nasty. So that is something you really do have to forestall with every means at your disposal. Especially since your own dynasty was, itself, founded by a military coup, so you know exactly how messy that can get, and what happened to the Later Zhou can easily happen to you!
So the Song military was, as I gather it, organized so as to make a coup virtually impossible. The soldiers in any one area were from a distant area, making regional uprisings unlikely. The soldiers were not allowed to form strong bonds with any one general, and the status divisions between the commanders and the soldiery were particularly sharp. Military command and control was strictly centralized and initiative was often discouraged, if I remember rightly.
Some of the specific methods used to make this happen may seem rather morally bankrupt to us, but then, we do come from a society where things like branding people for adultery used to seem relatively ‘reasonable’ well after this time period.
Of course, it all looks much worse in light of the fact that like a lot of autocratic states that took elaborate precautions to coup-proof their military, Song China eventually collapsed almost entirely because these precautions also made their military bad at fighting wars. But that is by no means a unique problem.
My understanding is that Chinese dynasties were a lot more likely to be overthrown by rebellion than by foreign conquest, so it looks like most of them didn’t worry about rebellion *enough*.
Yes, and the Song coup-proofing was successful in the sense that emperors lasted longer than in other dynasties – the average Song emperor lasted 18 years, the average non-Song emperor lasted 12 and if you remove the Kangxi and Qianlong outliers.
Qing Dynasty: “Why just not die?”
I typoed. The average non-Song emperor lasted 12 years counting the Kangxi and Qianlong outliers; the last sentence of my above comment should have read “if you remove the outliers then 8.”
The founder of the Song dynasty was the 3rd general to come to power via military coup in the last 13 years, and the collapse of the Tang from military revolt was basically within living memory. When viewed in those terms, coup-proofing your army is less cynicism and more common sense; a bad army may not be useful, but a coup-prone army is worse than useless.
Of course, the founder had the advantage that he was a general before he was the emperor and could lead his own army into battle, making centralization not a problem for him, but none of his descendants had that perk, so…
@ad9,
IIRC from The Moghul World, the Moghul practice of rotating people between different fiefs certainly stopped them from building up a power base against the Emperor, and presumably put less strain on the soldiery and exchequer than the Song system, but it also mean that everyone with any sense looted their fief for all it was worth from the moment they arrived to the moment they left
A bunch of the nominal Mughal governorates like Awadh, Hyderabad etc. did manage to declare independence and become fairly strong states in their own right (for a while, anyway) after Mughal central authority collapsed in the mid 18th c though, or were you more thinking about the 200-some years prior to that point?
I wouldn’t say I was thinking at all – I was going by a book someone else wrote. But yes, he was writing about the heyday of the empire – 16th to 18th centuries.
What you say about the Moghul world sounds quite reminiscent of modern Russia. One of the first things Putin did in his 2nd term (which was 20 years ago) was to cancel the elections of regional Governors and to instead appoint them directly. (Technically, they still needed to be approved by the local MPs, similar to Cabinet appointments in the U.S., but this was always a formality with no candidate ever receiving more than a handful of “no” votes.)
Initially, most of the governors who were already in place got reappointed, but soon, more and more had been rotated out – and often, by people from the federal bureaucracy who had no connection to the region. Such appointments had the nickname “varyagi”*, and often had the barely-veiled goal of breaking the power base of their local predecessors. The main exceptions were the more heavily ethnic regions – where the local power bases were also much less threatening, following the simple logic a regional ethnic minority ruler is unlikely to represent a credible contender for the ultimate power in the country.** After Putin formally returned to his third term in 2012, governor elections were resumed, as by that point, the process was considered sufficiently well-controlled anyway – and the power to dismiss them from above was also retained.
Of course, while these changes to governors’ positions attracted the most attention, a similar thing had happened to a whole lot of positions further down the food chain. That is, newly appointed managers of regional branches of state-run companies and the like never having stepped a foot in the region before had become rather more common from late 2000s onwards. The latter in particular have been notorious for generally following the template: “become appointed -> find an opportune time to loot -> start moving wealth abroad -> move the kids and/or yourself abroad before vacating the position”.
*Varangians – in reference to the first known rulers of both Russia and Ukraine, the Rurikid dynasty, who are believed to stem from the Norse who were “invited” to rule, and soon crushed all the more local Slavic rulers in their vicinity. Most famously, this fate had befallen the drevlyane of Northern Ukraine’s Korosten’, who are believed to have had an elected form of government, and after they voted to ambush and kill the Kievan Rurikid Igor for demanding excessive tribute, his widow, Olga, ultimately burnt down the entire city. (And was later canonized as a saint for being the first of the region’s rulers to have converted.))
**Although, many have speculated Chechnya’s Kadyrov could be the exception. While the demise of Prigozhin had considerably calmed such speculations, it also arguably made this scenario somewhat more likely, as it’s been well-known the two have shared a sizeable pool of mutual supporters.
https://www.eurasiareview.com/16072022-could-russias-next-president-be-a-non-russian-analysis/
The article you link to doesn’t even mention Medvedev. Is he that much of a lightweight?
There is simply almost no upside to letting him sit in the big chair “for real this time” as far as the key powerbrokers are concerned. From the POV of those who believe Russia should not be making any concessions to the West (i.e. the absolute majority of the population), his years are forever defined by failing to intervene on behalf of Libya – by being “tricked” into assuming the West was only going to do a limited operation akin to what happened in Iran earlier in the summer, rather than pushing for full regime change. (There were literally petitions and letter-writing campaigns begging for him to vote against the NATO operation in the UN and/or intervene in other ways, and “appoint Medvedev an ambassador to Libya” was a not-infrequent refrain whenever the country came up in the news in the following years.) He might have been working overtime to change the narrative with his Telegram rants in the recent years, but such performative “zeal of a convert” is rarely good enough over “the real thing”.
Perhaps, you might have heard that his term has received a nostalgic sheen as “time of no sanctions and prosperity” – but that is the attitude of the (generally speaking) Westernized information/financial services class who have never been large enough or loyal enough to act as the key power block – and those same people remember Navalny team’s viral documentaries on his corruption anyway. A move to appease them (which is how Medvedev’s renomination would be interpreted) is only going to be seen as the sign of regime’s weakness, and therefore encourage further dissent – i.e. the last thing the Kremlin establishment wants.
In fairness, the article above was from 2022. A year ago, a poll of around 40 experts did turn up a few people who thought Medvedev could still do it again – while only one expert named Kadyrov, since his health apparently took a turn for the worse, and the society retains too many bad memories of the notorious “gun carriage race” between the frail Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko in the early 1980s.* The plurality support was behind other options – though, I’ll concur with “several experts noted that predicting a possible successor is impossible because much depends on the circumstances of the transition.” (And to that, I would add that speculating about how any of those options are going to change current policies is even more premature, given that Soviet leaders’ publicly known pre-ascension reputation generally had very limited correlation with the actions taken during their tenure.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20250525151130/https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-putin-succession-successor-politics/33047855.html
*In fact, Putin’s main rival in 2000, the former Prime Minister Primakov, was “sunk” in large part by the pro-Kremlin media emphasizing his recent knee surgery to invoke those same comparisons. (And Primakov was a particularly influential figure too – he earned a lot of credit with the general population by literally turning his plane around when he was on the way to visit Washington to ask for additional financial support to deal with Russia’s default, believing it wasn’t worth it in light of the imminent bombing of Yugoslavia.) Likewise, Putin’s notorious bare-chested horse rides and the like make a lot more sense once you realize they are meant to create a contrast with that era.
I forgot to mention earlier that in addition to the above, Medvedev had already managed to alienate a critical swathe of the population when he returned to the Prime Minister role in the pre-pandemic period. A big reason Navalny’s drone video about Medvedev’s dacha with ~4 hectare land area enclosed by a 6-meter fence went so viral (as opposed to videos about other non-Putin figures receiving much more muted reaction) was due to him effectively styling himself as the kind of a “modernizing, pro-business liberal conservative” figure – in an economy which does even pretend to work under those principles.
That is, when someone like (former) British Chancellor George Osborne or his contemporary, then-Australian Chancellor Joe Hockey had talked about “strivers and skivers” or “lifters and leaners”, respectively, (with Macron being even more direct a few years later, dividing people into “those who succeed and those who are nothing” early in his first term), they were at least doing this in the context where private companies rather than the state itself are responsible for most of the economic activity, and voters have been generally willing to re-elect their parties (although Hockey’s boss had to be toppled in an internal revolt (a “spill”), triggering his own resignation, and the Cameron-Osborne government had notoriously won reelection only to lose the Brexit referendum a year later.)
On the other hand, when Medvedev had told a pensioner (in the newly “reunified” Crimea, to boot) “We have no more money [for you], you’ll just have to hold out”, and suggested that teachers who are unhappy about their wages being 3-5 times lower than the policemen [in Dagestan] should simply “engage in private business”, the context is very, very different. As such, pretty much any other succession alternative to Medvedev starts with the hefty advantage of not having once had ~100k people sign a petition for their dismissal within 24 hours.
https://web.archive.org/web/20171122171435/https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-medvedev-remarks-mocked-pensions-teachers/27900513.html
For the Moghuls, it depended on the emperor. The soldiery and governors were assigned jagirs (grants of tax revenue). With strong oversight (musters, campaigns, imperial visits) it worked quite well (one distant governor wrote that he never got a letter from the emperor without trembling). Aurangzeb’s endless Deccan campaigns and the short following reign of Bahadur weakened the centre considerably.
While we’re taking about pronunciation, now I wanted English students to be taught at least this alternate spelling. We can call this “Latin spelling”, “international spelling”, “japanese spelling”, whatever. That is, what you said as
‘a’ reads as in father, ‘e’ as in ‘they’ and ‘i’ as in machine
I find native English speakers routinely have difficulties in pronouncing foreign-derived word, and its solution is as simple as remembering these 3 simple facts. This spelling is used in Latin transliteration of almost all Asian and African languages that I know. So if we can insert this into curriculum, future native English speakers will instantly 90% correctly pronounce foreign words with minimal effort. And turns out it’s not only for Asian or African words, but also the original Latin!
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> likewise ‘g’ is soft (like a ‘j’ sound or the ‘g’ in ‘gel’) before that same set of vowels but other wise hard (like ‘gap’).
Ah I guess we found the correct pronunciation of GIF, then /s.
—
About Latin words, while reading your blog I just realized that some Roman words just doesn’t seem like what I imagine Latin is like. The one I can remember is Testudo and Assidui. The first seems like japanese and the second seems like… Persian? Can anyone explain etymology of these words or other Latin words like this?
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About rotating entire troops, I guess it’ll be much much more effective to ensure that no troops get too friendly with the natives. Only rotating commander may result in the troops being too entrenched with local people, resulting in “deep state” that may not listen to their commanders if there’s local conflict. How did Romans prevent this?
I guess there’s logistical problem, but this is pure incompetency or ignorance that may result from soldier’s low prestige. I guess you’re trying to shame STEM people once again, given the previous paragraphs, but seems like STEM people would have the exact stereotype to over focus on the numbers and systems needed for excellent logistics. And remember, roman troops are well-known as engineers!
Casualty of the great vowel shift. I think foreign language teaching would be much more effective and popular in the US if people were introduced and understood that reading and then speaking other european languages is much simpler when you realize that English shifted a bunch of vowel sounds. English spelling hobbles us so much.
Testudo: the Japanese word you are thinking of is tetsudo, literally “iron road”, meaning railway. (AFAIK the large majority of languages use “iron road”. Maybe minor quibbles about exactly which of the many English words — path, street, [animal] track, etc. — best corresponds. But nobody needed to distinguish railways from plateways.)
Testudo is formed like pulchritudo (beauty) or latitudo and longitudo (which may be Neo-Latin coinage). If you are worried about the final -o, it only appears in the nominative case (subject of the sentence), not in other uses, e.g. testudinem, testudinis, longitudinis etc.
Assidui is the plural of assiduus, from (I suppose) assidere (sit down), from ad + sedere. Maybe this helps you hearing the Latin-ness of the words! Latin has quite a variety of sound patterns, more than e.g. Attic Greek.
If I recall correctly, the title character in Goodbye, Mr. Chips is displeased by the waning of traditional English Latin pronunciation. Setting is Edwardian era. That was the first I ever heard of this. (I knew that everyone in daily life said and says Caesar and Cicero with soft cs that match neither Classical nor Ecclesiastical, but I did not know that has once been applied to common nouns in the classroom as well.)
Do you know why Pasts Imperfect left Substack?
In the article they say “Then, we make the switch from Substack to Ghost (because Nazis),”.
I recall some controversy that substack hosted some group associated with Nazis and some writers said they would leave Substack if that remained on Substack. So I assume Pasts Imperfect was part of that movement.
I’m not sure of the full contours of the “controversy”, but I do know that Substack is the kind of a place where the most popular history writer is a former electrician who has had appearances on the “Southern Nationalist podcast of the Alt-Right”, claims Kristallnacht and the Holocaust were “unintentional” and calls Churchill the greatest villain of World War II.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/martyr-made-darryl-cooper-nazi-jews-juggernaut-nihilism-tucker-carlson-joe-rogan-substack/
Substack is a place that actually takes the “common carrier” approach to being a platform seriously.
As to Cooper–yeah, he’s a problem, and part of the problem is that some of the stuff he says is *technically* true–the Nazis weren’t initially planning on killing all the Jews, but once the war didn’t go as planned, they decided that they were going to kill all the Jews, because someone had to go to the wall and it might as well be them. That’s what the entire Wannsee conference was about.
The difference between Cooper and Holocaust historians on this matter is that Cooper, for reasons unknown to anyone but himself, thinks this exonerates the Nazis, whereas the Holocaust historians understand that if your plan for a people ends up involving genocide, even if it didn’t start out that way, you’re still evil.
I think they, like most companies, just really like money and don’t care very much where it comes from, including nazis or various “how dare you call me a nazi when i simply have alt right beliefs” types. Which seems to be working out well for them even as current zeitgeist winds blow in their favor
That is what Substack’s PR people claim, but they individually recruit some writers with special financial offers (including at least one writer with views on race and eugenics out of the 1920s). And as Ken White pointed out in 2023, there are all kinds of things which are free speech under US law which Substack ToS don’t let you post. So Substack encourages some foolish and dangerous speech, and discourages some legal speech, just like Google or Facebook.
@sean
My understanding is that subbstack didn’t offer larger payments than 90% of the subscriber income. The did offer an upfront payment and 25% of the subscriber income to some well known writers who wanted more certainty of income and those who took the payment received less than if they had not taken the advance and taken the majority of the subscription income.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1372612686803042317
Heather Co
The historian Heather Cox Richardson has 10 times the subscribers as Cooper, but apparently her substack talking about the ” history behind today’s politics” is not in the history category. This is probably a better reflection of substack.
Well, that’s a shame. Substack also has centrist liberal publications like Persuasion, which despite their own failings, have stood up (less effectively) for classical liberalism like Bret has.
(Much less effectively.)
The behaviour of universities is absurd if one thinks of them as “student factories” where they use the productive capital of their research staff to improve the marginal value of their student intermediate goods that they then can sell (to the students themselves, I agree this tortures the model somewhat).
It does seem to be rational if they regard themselves as endowment funds who are looking to invest in “student futures” where the payoff is a call option that they’re exercising in 40 years. A tenth of a percent of the wealth of a few STEM billionaires is the equivalent of a few thousand millionaire lawyers and businessmen and millions of humanities graduates who have savings in the thousands.
As always, describing a behaviour isn’t agreeing with it (and I’m not saying the demographic data is to scale).
I’m surprised to read about misspellings in Classical Latin. Was Latin a standardised enough language way back then in the Late Republic / Early Empire that some spellings could already be considered correct and others misspellings instead of merely different spellings?
Also, on a funnier note, I hope our host won’t berate me too much for chatter that’s only tangentially related, but:
The post talking about the plurality of Latin pronunciations (so, an imprecision in the spelling –> pronunciation problem, where we know how Romans wrote things but didn’t until recently know how they pronounced them) reminded me of how the romanisation of our language (trying to solve the pronunciation –> spelling problem, where we already have a language but it’s not written in a script that most Europeans can read) produced nearly identical issues.
The “official” standard we settled on, the one we use in government functions now, prioritised direct convertibility, creating that direct one-to-one correlation between pronunciation and spelling (well, that was the idea, but then people realised how silly that gets in the extremes, so some exceptions were put in, and and and–). This means that for readers who are familiar with how the system works, they can pronounce romanised Korean or transcribe Korean that they hear reasonably precisely.
The problem of course is that one-spelling-per-sound is very much *not* how English works. So the result of people who are *not* familiar with how the system works trying to pronounce romanised Korean using conventional English orthography/pronunciation norms can be… fascinating.
So we can say that there is a “classical” Korean, which successfully reconstructs the pronunciation used by us natives, a “traditional” Korean, which pronounces the romanisation as if it was English, and an
ecclesiastical“expatriate” Korean, derived from Korean-to-English loanword pronunciations that happened before centralised public education cut down on regional dialects and before standardised romanisation was a thing. 😉When one sees something like this happen with a *living* language that real people right now speak natively, it’s not difficult to imagine how an undead language like Latin might have ended up being the mess of different pronunciations that it is.
“a “traditional” Korean, which pronounces the romanisation as if it was English”
Shouldn’t that be a “traditional English” Korean, which pronounces the romanisation as if it was English? Presumably Italian or Spanish speakers would try to pronounce it as if it were Italian or Spanish. If only because Spanish has simpler spelling rules to apply.
And I find myself wondering about speakers of Chinese or Japanese…
Traditional English, yes.
I don’t know anything about Japanese or Japanese romanisation, so I can’t comment. As for Chinese:
The most common romanisation scheme used for Mandarin Chinese is pinyin (or hanyu pinyin, to differentiate it from other schemes with similar names), which is in a very similar position: scheme prioritised one-to-one precise convertibility over intuitiveness to native European languages speakers, with the result that it’s very effective at letting you pronounce things accurately if you know the system, but you have to *know the system* because the rules are different from typical English spelling.
(pinyin “qi” is a soft tsi- sound always and a hard ki- sound never; this one seems to trip up native English speakers a lot, in my experience)
Chinese, unlike Korean, not being an alphabetic language, I’ve heard of pinyin also being used to teach *natives* how to pronounce characters they’re not familiar with. But naturally I have no personal experience with Chinese education for native speakers, so take that with a grain of salt.
(pinyin “qi” is a soft tsi- sound always and a hard ki- sound never; this one seems to trip up native English speakers a lot, in my experience)
English, unlike Mandarin Chinese (and also some Slavic and Indic languages) doesn’t have the retroflex vs. alveolar distinction, so many English speakers aren’t going to intitutively understand why “Q” and “CH” (or for that matter, accented S vs. SZ in Polish, etc.) are different letters or what the distinctin is.
Pretty much every language has some sounds that it does not distinguish, which other languages do.
The sounds for English I guess matter more because of how many people are trying to learn it.
That’s because pinyin isn’t just the official romanisation scheme, it’s also the official phonetic transliteration scheme in mainland China. There is also the symbol based bopomofo/zhuyin developed in the early 20th C that’s mainly only used in Taiwan now. They both cover the same set of 37 sounds used in Mandarin and so can be used to pronounce any character.
I’m not sure how they teach it on the mainland, but I encountered a hybrid of the two in Singapore. I was taught Mandarin phonics in the 90s using the bopomofo sequence but with pinyin letters instead of the symbols since that’s what’s used here. I can’t sound out any individual pinyin letter offhand, but if you stick all of them in the bopomofo sequence I’ll rattle the whole string off for you.
> Was Latin a standardised enough language way back then in the Late Republic / Early Empire that some spellings could already be considered correct and others misspellings instead of merely different spellings?
Informally what we’re calling “mistakes” are written evidence of sound change followed by analogical restoration. For example, the word for “horse” starts out as equos, where the labialisation of the velar consonant represented by QU is a result of the following O. Sound change turns that O into a U, so the velar consonant loses its labialisation and ecus starts to show up in writing, only for analogy from words like eques “cavalryman” and equito “I ride on horseback” to restore the labialisation, resulting in equus.
“> Was Latin a standardised enough language way back then in the Late Republic / Early Empire that some spellings could already be considered correct and others misspellings instead of merely different spellings?”
12 Caesars, Augustus, 87-88:
“That in his everyday conversation he used certain favourite and peculiar expressions appears from letters in his own hand, in which he says every now and then, when he wished to indicate that certain men will never pay, that “they will pay on the Greek Kalends.” Urging his correspondent to put up with present circumstances, such as they were, he says: “Let’s be satisfied with the Cato we have;”204 and to express the speed of a hasty action, “Quicker than you can cook asparagus.” He continually used baceolus (dolt) for stultus (fool), for pullus (dark) pulleiaceus (darkish), for cerritus (mad) vacerrosus (blockhead); also vapide se habere (feel flat) for male se habere (feel badly) and betizare205 (be like a beet) for languere (be weak), for which the vulgar term is lachanizare. Besides he used simus for sumus206 and domos in the genitive singular instead of domuos.207 The last two forms he wrote invariably, for fear they should be thought errors rather than a habit.
I have also observed this special peculiarity in his manner of writing: he does not divide words or carry superfluous letters from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, but writes them just below the rest of the word and draws a loop around them.
He does not strictly comply with orthography, that is the say the theoretical rules of spelling laid down by the grammarians, seeming to be rather of the mind of those who believe that we should spell exactly as we pronounce. Of course his frequent transposition or omission of syllables as well as of letters are slips common to all mankind. I should not have noted this, did it not seem to me surprising that some have written that he cashiered a consular governor, as an uncultivated and ignorant fellow, because he observed that he had written ixi for ipsi.”
There was also the Emperor Vespasian, who said “plostra” for “plaustra” (wagons.)
For obvious reasons, almost every Korean TV show has a scene or a flashback scene where a character is in military uniform. Is this “official” situation you describe the reason that the names printed on the uniform shirts are never spelled the same way that Netflix spells the names in the subtitles?
Personal names especially are a mess.
There’s no legal requirement to use the official romanisation scheme or anything compulsory like that. The spelling of my legal English name that appears on my passport doesn’t conform to the official romanisation scheme, for example. This sort of thing is not rare.
I don’t really watch television (and I certainly don’t watch Korean shows with English subs), so I can’t answer your specific example, but I can very easily imagine that the subtitle translators and the costume designers might come up with two different spellings for character names.
There are a couple effects at play here.
The more obvious one is, well, why would native Koreans learn how the official romanisation scheme works? We certainly don’t need the help in pronouncing our own language. So when my parents went to the district office to get me my baby’s first passport and the clerk asked how they spell my name, they came up with something that sounded right on the spot without knowing the official standard.
But the second – and more interesting – effect is what I jokingly call “expatriate” Korean above. The Korean-American community came up with customary spellings for common surnames *long* before official romanisations (or the suppression of regional dialects, which those emigrants often spoke) were a thing. Their 3rd- and 4th-generation descendants whose native language is English and not Korean pronounce those names by English pronunciation norms. Then, the United States being the utterly dominant cultural hegemon that it is, those customary spellings and pronunciations used by the Korean-American community started filtering *back* into the old country and adopted by people who otherwise speak modern standard Korean. It’s not common by any means, but I definitely have seen people pronounce their own names differently when introducing themselves in English as opposed to Korean.
If you see someone introduce themselves as a “Park”, pronounced the same way as the place where people go to walk their dogs, that’s what’s happening there.
> What makes this lingering traditional pronunciation a pain is that even in classics we generally hold on to it for names, for the obvious reason that if I talk to my students about ki-keh-roh they are going to be very confused, as opposed to Si-ser-oh
Every time I hear this Englishy mangled pronunciation of Caesar, I tend get a seizure…
In one sentence complaining about English-speakers mangling Latin, you have managed to mangle English in two entirely separate ways!
This is the sort of article that would be made much better with a few short sound clips.
Ian commented above about using the pronunciation that the composer had in mind when writing liturgical music. This is even more relevant for spoken poetry. I usually try to use the pronunciation the poet would have used, though I can’t really do it for Shakespeare, and I am not sure about Boëthius. However, Virgil will have used almost exactly what Bret calls the classical pronunciation – I would only add the nasal vowels.
The line that sounds most beautiful to me in all Latin literature is from the VIII. ecloge, the beginning of lover’s lament:
Nascere, praeque diem veniens age, Lucifer, almum…
Rise, morning star, run ahead and pull in the sweet day…
It took me a while to understand why I find its sound so beautiful. Among the syllables that begin the six feet of the line, four also bear the word stress and are therefore particularly audible. These four syllables contain a dark vowel (a or u), and three of them are followed by a guttural sound (k or kw):
NASCere, PRAEQUe diem veniens age, LUCifer, ALmum.
For good measure there is an additional syllable with an a followed by a guttural sound: AG. But since Virgil is a great poet, he interrupts the pattern with light vowels. Here, the opening syllables of the feet (EM and ENS) do not carry the word stress, while DI and VE do not open the feet, so these are less salient.
Any other pronunciation of Latin will destroy this pattern, e.g. nastsere ou nassere, preque and lussifer. Evidently, since Medieval poets considered Virgil their king, enough of his word music was still present to their ears, but I find it undeniable that Virgil sounds best using his own pronunciation.
“What makes this lingering traditional pronunciation a pain is that even in classics we generally hold on to it for names, for the obvious reason that if I talk to my students about ki-keh-roh they are going to be very confused, as opposed to Si-ser-oh, a figure they are vaguely aware of.”
Reminds me of a class I was in and the professor asked a question about Darwin (in a very German accent) and the whole class sat there in silent confusion until someone tentatively asked “Do you mean Charles Darwin?”
“On top of this, of course, classical Latin has no ‘j’ but instead ‘i’ can be either a vowel or a consonant (thus Iulius, not Julius), where it has a ‘y’ sound like ‘yikes.”
Of course, as a swede I’m like “What do you mean? “j” is always pronounced “j” isn’t it? It’s the english who are wierd and pronounce it dj…”
And the French…
That Wheelock handout guide is baffling.
– “They” and “reign” have the same vowel (the diphthong [e͡ɪ]). Why is one of them given as an example for long “ē” and the other for the diphthong “ei”?
– “Orb” and “off” don’t have the same vowel. Why are they both given as examples for short “o”? Which one is it?
– The “ah” in “Dinah” is a schwa [ə]. Is the first vowel in “pater” really a schwa? Isn’t that a stressed syllable? Stressed schwa isn’t usually a thing.
– If they’re going to go ahead and bring in examples from Spanish like “muy”, why in the world didn’t they do that for the monophthong “ē”, which Spanish, unlike English, actually has?
Is there some reason these make sense if you know more about Latin? Or is the handout just bad?
@CB,
All of this stuff would be so much simpler if people (or specifically, history and language hobbyists) took a day to familiarize themselves with the International Phonetic Alphabet. Although these days, sound clips of speakers on the internet can do a lot of that work too.
I agree that a lot of those Wheelock examples sound….odd.
Agreed, especially about the sound clips. Before they became common, IPA for me was often just an extra level that didn’t help – the vowel sound is IPA [e], so how is that pronounced? Like in “may”, except the American accent usually turns that into a diphthong [eɪ].
This Australian also pronounces “orb” and “off” with different vowels. But my accent is non-rhotic: “r” at the end of a syllable is silent, and makes the vowel longer instead. Could this be how you’re pronouncing them?
According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English, non-rhotic accents are common in parts of the eastern US, England, Wales, and some other Commonwealth countries.
I’d add that using an unusual proper noun like “Dinah” for example pronunciation is a terrible idea.
Perhaps a better comparison is Roman army of late 4th century AD?
Vegetius and Ambrosius mention tattooing soldiers. This matches mentions of forced conscription campaigns in 370s…380s, increased concern passing new laws against deserters from 360s… and collapse of Rome soon after.
Sounds like a parallel to Song… but not as bad as this. Except the collapse of Rome was worse, because Song was soon (in about 150 years) reunited by a single barbarian conqueror (the Mongols) while Rome, in 1500 years, has not yet been reunited.
How does the late Roman army, 4th…5th century, compare with high Empire and Republic? In terms of motivation of rank and file soldiers, and the attitude of their commanders and political decisionmakers to them?
Well, only the less populated half of Rome got overrun. The larger part lasted another thousand years or so.
I think any historian teaching Latin pronunciation should include Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 And All That:
The first date in English History is 55 BC (for the other date see Chapter 11, William the Conqueror), in which year Julius Caesar (the memorable Roman Emperor) landed, like all other successful invaders of these islands, at Thanet. This was in the Olden Days, when the Romans were top nation on account of their classical education, etc.
Julius Caesar advanced very energetically, throwing his cavalry several thousands of paces over the River Flumen; but the Ancient Britons, though all well over military age, painted themselves true blue, or woad, and fought as heroically under their dashing queen, Woadicea, as they did later in thin red lines under their good queen, Victoria.
Julius Caesar was therefore compelled to invade Britain again the following year (54 BC, not 56, owing to the peculiar Roman method of counting), and having defeated the Ancient Britons by unfair means, such as battering-rams, tortoises, hippocausts, centipedes, axes, and bundles, set the memorable Latin sentence, ‘Veni, Vidi, Vici’, which the Romans, who were all very well educated, construed correctly.
The Britons, however, who of course still used the old pronunciation, understanding him to have called them ‘Weeny, Weedy, and Weaky’, lost heart and gave up the struggle, thinking that he had already divided them All into Three Parts.
You are right
I went to a posh school and our school song was in Latin. In the first term of school, we had a lesson from the music department in how to sing the school song ready for the end of term assembly – followed swiftly by a lesson from the classics department, filled with thinly-veiled contempt for the music department, telling us how we should *actually* pronounce it!
Convenient timing! I was just wondering about Latin pronunciation.
Perhaps a better comparison is Roman army of late 4th century AD?
Vegetius and Ambrosius mention tattooing soldiers. This matches mentions of forced conscription campaigns in 370s…380s, increased concern passing new laws against deserters from 360s… and collapse of Rome soon after. Check out my highlife music blog
Igbo highlife
Sounds like a parallel to Song… but not as bad as this. Except the collapse of Rome was worse, because Song was soon (in about 150 years) reunited by a single barbarian conqueror (the Mongols) while Rome, in 1500 years, has not yet been reunited.
How does the late Roman army, 4th…5th century, compare with high Empire and Republic? In terms of motivation of rank and file soldiers, and the attitude of their commanders and political decisionmakers to them?
I wonder if any other readers have noted that the former piece is attributed to its author, and the latter to the publication. I suppose it’s a subtle way to minimize some potentially uncomfortable context. That is, one of the earliest posts on here was written to criticize a claim made by Sohrab Ahmari about early Christianity – and, by extension, to support the side of his interlocutor, David French.
https://acoup.blog/2019/09/07/new-acquisitions-class-status-and-the-early-church/
Hence, it’s quite an ironic reversal for this post, written nearly six years later, to simultaneously criticize an article in (French-founded) The Dispatch while recommending one published by the (Sohmari-founded) Compact, established three years ago with the following mission statement.
(Now condensed to a more anodyne, “Compact, an online magazine founded in 2022, seeks a new political center devoted to the common good. Believing that political forces, not economic ones, should determine our common life, we draw on the social-democratic tradition to argue for an order marked by authentic freedom, social stability, and shared prosperity. Though we have definite opinions, we proudly publish writers with whom we disagree.”)
I suppose the decision of Professor Ando (and by extension, that of Dr. Devereaux) can be interpreted as a forced move – a testament to how much “the traditional center” appears to have abandoned their field and how far away from it they apparently need to “stray” to find even temporary refuge from those “with whom we disagree.”. At the same time, I think it’s fair to wonder whether this was necessarily the only option available, let alone the best possible one.
Agreed on 1066 and All That. It’s interesting that what Bret describes as the youngest system, classical Latin, is (in a book written in the 1930s) called “the old pronunciation”, contrasting with Caesar speaking in (presumably newer) traditional Latin.
To complicate matters further P 360 of AP Herbert’s great “Uncommon Law” (https://www.survivorlibrary.com/library/uncommon_law_1948.pdf) has a vigorous offensive against the “new pronunciation” which in this case is classical Latin. “I suffer from lumbago,” the irate judge says, “I grow geraniums, I go to the cinema. And when my doctor diagnoses loombahgo, my gardener cultivates gerahniooms, or my cook enjoys herself at the kyneemah, I shall begin to think that the pedants are making headway.”
On the face of it, the classical Latin system is the oldest system, as it was spoken by the classical Latins, and the traditional system would be newer.
There is nothing so new as tradition. As someone said of the wisdom of the ages: “The oldest age is the present”.
I enjoyed this post a lot and my wish is that our Author would do something similar or GREEK — there seems to be so much confusion between classical Greek and modern Greek and YouTube tutorials only add to the inconsistency, even with modern-day Greek-speakers hosting. Ancient Greek passes thru koine and medieval and modern and then gets Latinized and Anglicized to a point beyond unraveling.
PS: Also, would the Vulgate of St. Jerome be considered closer to the Latin as spoken by the common sort in the later Roman Empire? Is “vulgate” what Caesar wrote in when Cicero criticized his bad Latin?
I once asked my ancient Greek teacher, having returned from Greece and picked up some bits, “but wait, Greek is not pronounced like that *at all*, why are we doing things differently from what modern Greeks do about their own language” and she went on about Erasmus and the need to adapt the pronounciation to Western European languages (it’s true that Modern Greek, with its 5 vowels and lack of vowel length or tonal accent is known to be dauntingly difficult).
But I suspect the actual reason was really to check whether students knew their cases and conjugations when uttered aloud. It’s more than likely that generations of philologists have never quite forgiven the Greeks for iotacization.
“for” Greek. Damn typos.