Pistas sobre a pronúncia do latim nos capítulos gramaticais da Institutio Oratoria, de Quintiliano

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.12957/soletras.2025.90029

Abstract

This article aims to find clues about the real pronunciation of spoken Latin, as the living language of the Roman Empire, in the so-called grammatical chapters of the Institutio Oratoria, by Quintilian (35-96 AD). Although this extensive treatise on Rhetoric has as its main objective the intellectual and moral formation of orators, the author dedicates chapters IV to IX of book I to relevant reflections on Grammar, which he considers a propaedeutic discipline. The topics covered in them are diverse: orthography, orthoepy, parts of speech, barbarisms, solecisms, etc. The research itself consisted of the selection and analysis of several excerpts from the work concerning orthography and orthoepy, which were then compared with other reliable sources in the field of Historical Linguistics, specially Faria (1957), in order to verify Quintilian's assertions or to elucidate them if they were not entirely comprehensible. The results obtained here confirm, more often than not, the already known characteristics of the reconstructed pronunciation of Latin in the classical period, but, at the same time, they bring to light some discrepancies between writing and speech that are generally hidden under an illusory idea of ​​orthographic uniformity.

Author Biography

Rogério Cardoso, Universidade Federal do Amazonas

Graduado em Letras - Língua e Literatura Portuguesa pela Universidade Federal do Amazonas (2016), mestre em Filologia do Português pela Universidade de São Paulo (2019) e doutor em Historiografia Linguística também pela Universidade de São Paulo (2023). Professor substituto de Latim e História da Língua Portuguesa na Universidade Federal do Amazonas, em 2023 e 2024. Professor de Redação e Linguagem Jurídica na Faculdade Santa Teresa. Tradutor voluntário (inglês-português) da página World History Encyclopedia: https://www.worldhistory.org/user/rogrioaugustomo/  

Published

2025-04-30

Issue

Section

Dossiê 51: Perspectivas históricas nos estudos linguístico-gramaticais