Ygorcs
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Also, during the actual period of the Republic and Empire I'm sure even the elites pronounced it differently as time went on depending on their region. Languages evolve, especially when there are other languages around.
Look at English as an example. It has been continually evolving. I had to read Beowulf and Chaucer in the original at university. Yes, it scanned better in the original, but it was almost like a foreign language.
By the 1800s, the pronounciation of English in the Americas was very different from what it was in England, even among elites. Australian English went its own way too.
Good point. People sometimes forget that Classical Latin was essentially the fossilized high-status dialect (or should we call it just sociolect?) of the elite of Rome as it was spoken roughly in the 100-50 BC period. There were surely differences in vocabulary, phonology and even grammar among Latin speakers by then, as the language had already spread to the entire Italian peninsula and even beyond it. This reconstructed pronunciation would be very close to what you'd hear in the speeches of Julius Caesar, but certainly very different from what you'd hear in the speeches of the last Western Roman emperors. By 400 AD for instance "v" as [w] probably had already turned into either [v] or a bilabial fricative like the Spanish "b", the final nasal vowels had already disappeared, and the vowel system of Latin had been profoundly altered (e.g. the distinction short vs. long vowel had probably started to consolidate as an open vs. closed vowel distinction).
When the Western Roman Empire fell, Classical Latin was a bit as if modern English speakers still wrote and at least tried to speak formally like Chaucer. In terms of spelling, that isn't even an absurd comparison, because in fact what English speakers read when they say e.g. English literature is very different from what the very same words would've been pronounced like 600 years ago - but the words are still written the same way nevertheless.