New answers tagged pronunciation
14
That's what Quintilian implicitly said in his Institutio Oratoria (in the 1st century CE), and there's no real reason to doubt him in this case: the fact that the earliest attested plural form (in Plautus' Poenulus, almost three centuries earlier) is avo rather than avēte conforms to it being a Punic loan, and the Punic certainly started with ḥ (/ħ/ rather ...
1
The Italian ecclesiastical pronunciation of "ev" is simply /ev/ (e. g. here). The same goes for the French pronunciation of ecclesiastical Latin (only the ending changes: /ɔm/).
Addendum
Wikipédia provides a summary of all Latin pronunciations here.
15
I would go further than Draconis's answer and say that we can be pretty certain that these diphthongs were indeed diphthongs in Homer's time. Here are some additional arguments:
The Homeric poems took shape over centuries so there was likely some amount of temporal and other variation in the pronunciation of "Homeric Greek". But that process ...
8
Transcriptions into Latin
While there are no transcriptions from the time of Homer (since the alphabet didn't exist yet), these provide good evidence that the change from [aw] and [ew] to [af] and [ef] happened after the Classical period. A brief search turns up examples like Autolycon, Baucus, and Caunus in the Metamorphoses, as well as borrowed words like ...
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