The subject of this appendix is one aspect of “philology” in the narrowest and most old-fashioned sense, i.e. the analysis of texts from past centuries. From the point of view of a modern descriptive linguist it can be thought of as “salvage linguistics.” While text philology is too far removed from the concerns of linguistics proper to be part of a course in historical linguistics, linguists who use the data of recorded documents do need to master the philological details of the specific corpus they are dealing with. This appendix is intended as general orientation for one aspect of that type of study.

The pronunciation of any language of the past can be recovered only approximately; the task of the philologist is to make the approximations as close as possible. For instance, if we are trying to reconstruct the pronunciation of Classical Latin, we should be satisfied if the result is something Cicero would have understood without difficulty, even if he would have noticed a foreign “accent” in our Latin.

Here is a concrete example. We know from the testimony of ancient grammarians and from verse (see below) that Classical Latin had two vowels written with the letter ‹a›, conventionally marked a (or ă) and ā; we also know that the second of those vowels took longer to say than the first, but there is no evidence of any other difference between them.