This was supposed to be wordplay and fun and you've made it all grown up and serious!
To be honest, I agree with you. Here are some more instances which, IMO, support this notion.
1. RP is not what it used to be. Recordings of BBC radio programmes from 50 years ago show that the pronunciation in those days was quite different from what we consider 'good' British English today. AS I mentioned in another thread (a long time ago in a forum far far away), even classic films like "Brief Encounter" are now less than easy to understand because of the change in accents. We do not have reliable knowledge of any accents before the invention of the gramophone. To claim otherwise is, I believe, disingenuous.
2. It isn't just Latin that has these problems. I learned in college that we do not 'really' know how Chaucer pronounced all those ownderful words in his "Canterbury Tales". We make some guesses based upon the rhyume scheme (much as we do with Shakespeare), but by and large we are guessing. There is no assurance that a Middle English scholar, if plonked by time machine in Chaucer's era, would be able to make herself intelligible. And this was a mere 700 years ago, not 1500 or more.
3. Whilst some may claim that the 'oral' tradition ensured some consistency, or purity, of pronunciation, we have instances today that show this not to be the case. Latn American Spanish and Spanish Spanish haave clearly marked pronunciation differences - the values given to the 'z', for inctance, or the 'c'. Similarly (and bel can maybe help us here), Quebecois French is not identical to French French, which is again different from West African French or Algerian French. A few generations is all that is required (even with the utmost care taken by speakers to 'preserve' the mother tongue) for a language to change greatly. In a few such changes (a few hundred years) it can become genuinely unintelligible.
4. The greatest case in point, I think, is Chinese. 1.3 billion people who can write to each other and make themselves undestood (I understand that the Chinese script, being composed of ideograms, is universally intelligible), but cannot conduct oral conversations with each other. I think Bridget made this point in a post somewhere.
In sum, when we speak of the pronunciation of Latin, even if we restrict ourselves to Latin 'RP', we would have to take into account at least the time difference. The Latin Caesar spoke would almost certainly sound different from the Latin that Jerome used, or that Constantine did. By analogy, another classical language, Sanskrit, had a number of phases, during which periods it was most likely close to unintelligible to users from other periods: the Vedic period (and yes the Rig Veda and others were composed in this language) approx 3200BP to 2400BP; 'Panini' Sanskrit - where the formal grammar was laid down - approx 2400BP to 1600BP; and 'golden age' Sanskrit - when Kalidas and others were wowing the Gupta court - approx 1600BP onwards. Sanskrit had, by about 1200 years ago, pretty much vanished as a living language, but we know from commentaries and texts throughout its life, that by the time Panini came along, there were already controversies about the meanings of various words and phrases in the Vedas. During Kalidas' period, Panini was archaic and difficult to interpret. And so on. I find it difficult to imagine such great formal changes without corresponding changes in pronunciation.
So there... spam me too.
