ABSTRACT
Coin legends offer an interesting sidelight on the pronunciation of Latin. The language of coinage is mostly produced by a central authority but forms which are exceptional, emanating from a more limited and perhaps less literate authority, areilluminating. Engravers’ errors and accidents excluded, the non-classical legends demonstrate the ways in which those who drafted and engraved them perceived the sound values of the letters they described. A language like Latin that has lost terminal m and s, and does not distinguish between e and i, and o and u, cannot have still been significantly inflected in speech, whatever may have been retained informal, especially liturgical use, by both pagans and Christians, and in literature. Twenty-six coins are used to illustrate vowel and consonant substitutions, which suggest that perhaps Romans may have really spoken Italian, however they tried to write it.
