Wednesday, April 06, 2016

Cicero-Kickero Row

 I had first read about the "Cicero-Kickero" controversy in "Goodbye, Mr Chips!".  Lately, I found this in Volume VII of The Maine Journal of Education, 1873.
Chillocothe, Ohio, is divided on the momentous question whether Cicero shall be pronounced 'Kickero' or 'Sisero'.  A professor of the Kickero party has been dismissed from his position in the public schools, and the Kickeronians rally to his rescue and threaten to depose the school board.  The strife wages hotly, and the whole town shares the excitement.  Who talks about 'dead' classics?
There is a book with a free Kindle version on amazon.com, "The Roman Pronunciation of Latin : Why we use it and how to use it", by Frances Ellen Lord, Professor of Latin in Wellesley College, 1894, which goes into this and many other things.

Unlike Latin, there is very little controversy about pronunciation in Sanskrit.  The language was engineered to be a means of loss-free communication across the ages.