PETRI RAMI

Emperor Claudius (as Suetonius says) invented three new letters and added them as if most necessary to the number of the ancients. King Chilperic of the Gauls (as Gregory of Tours writes), when he saw that the orthography of the Gauls was corrupted, himself invented three letters and ordered them to be divulged by public edicts throughout the whole Gallic kingdom. What of our Ramus here? Did he not, with a certain imperial and royal majesty in grammar, add two letters to the previous ones: Iod and Vau? But what new troubles did this innovated pronunciation beget? Around the year 1550, when the royal professors had begun to introduce a more sincere pronunciation of the Latin language little by little, others, and especially the Sorbonists the theologians of the Sorbonne, bore it badly that the inveterate custom of Gallic speaking was disapproved, as if they were being forced to confess that what the boys had learned, the old men had to lose. Especially, however, there was ambiguity concerning the sound of the letter Q: the royal professors pronounced it as it should be, with the following u, as Quisquis, Quanquam; but the Sorbonists, according to the vernacular custom, Kiskis, Kankam. Now, when the Sorbonists had taken care that a man dedicated to sacred things should be despoiled of his most ample revenues because of his genuine pronunciation, and the lawsuit had been contested before the Parisian Senate, lest that poor man, on account of a grammatical heresy (as they called it), should rightfully lose his theological fruits, there was danger. The royal professors, and among them Petrus Ramus, flew as a group into the Court, and having prefaced the insolence of the judgment—because the jurists, accustomed to dispute about royal laws, had descended to judging the laws of grammarians—they so moved the judges that with their sentences they not only acquitted the priest, but also established impunity for disputing about grammatical pronunciation with silent assent forever. Therefore, Kis and Kalis, and Kantus, and Miki, and similar Gothisms and barbarisms were used in the Parisian Academy before the royal professors; if any colleague did not wish to imitate these barbarisms, he was treated bitterly and contumeliously because he was said to violate the custom of the college. From the royal school then, for the first time, Quis, Qualis, Quantus, Mihi sounded Latin and Roman, and it was a shame for royal professors to protest openly against the voice of the King himself. It is almost incredible to say, but it is true and revealed in published books, that there existed doctors in the Parisian Academy who clung tooth and nail to...