Italians tend to be particularly touchy about evidence-based conjectures on the sound of ancient Latin whenever the conjectures differ from their pronunciation of Latin based on modern standard Italian. Plenty of them attack the use of the [k] sound in cī/ci/cē/ce/cae/coe (as opposed to the [tʃ] sound as in church), even though the use of <c> as in ca/co/cu already suggests the use of a single sound for it, something that phonetically still survives in the Sardinian language (which has [kentu] for centum), and also a number of other medieval Romance languages (notably some varieties of Aragonese and Mozarabic), late enough that the Irish would adopt it for their language too.
It should not be surprising they'd attack something like the differences in quality between long and short vowels (other than /a a:/), since Italian doesn't have something similar. It is also not surprising that the guy in one of the videos has an easier time accepting close e and open e in some form, since one of the standard Italian accents (the northern one) does have that distinction.
I would suggest ignoring Italians who cry "Allen is biased by English!", as I see the exact opposite, namely them being too influenced by Italian. For what it's worth my main language is Spanish.
It is also the case that most people who study Latin simply don't care about reconstructed pronunciation though. At most they try to render quantity (long and short vowels) some of the time, but for the most part, most people (other than Italians and adjacent Catholics) just kind of half-imitate a reconstructed pronunciation like Allen's using the phonetics of their own native language. Most Spanish speakers who study Latin don't distinguish the qualities of long i vs. most short i vs. short i before a vowel vs. short i before a labial (as explained by Allen and other linguists), but because they don't care to know and don't care to do it, not because they outright reject it. I think it's fine if they want to ignore the topic, because there are honestly more important topics, but that's not the same as rejecting it all on no grounds other than aesthetics.
I would like to emphasize what Hemo Rusticus said too, that there were differences in how different people actually pronounced Latin in the classical centuries, or how a single person would render something in spoken form depending on context. Consider, for example, the political move of Publius Clōdius Pulcher and his sister Quarta in the mid-1st c. BC, undergoing a fake adoption from a patrician family into a plebeian one, in which they didn't even bother taking the adopter's nōmen (Fonteius) but just changed the pronunciation of their original nōmen from a prestigious one (Claudius) to a rural one (Clōdius). This kind of thing only makes sense in the context of competing pronunciations between the more urban ae/au and the more rural ē/ō in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC (see also paelex ~ pēlex). (Allen, in fact, discusses this competition in the diphthong section.)
It is true that not a lot has been published on classical-era (i.e. circa both 1st centuries) reconstructed pronunciation since the 1960s, but some has. I remember recently reading a paper from 2018 about word-final -m, which was fairly persuasive about its pronunciation as a nasalized [w] preceded by a short vowel in non-poetic careful speech/prose in the 1st c. AD (in poetry the convention was to drop it), and otherwise also a full [m] preceded by a short vowel, especially in the 3rd/4th centuries AD (and possibly the late 5th if we believe Priscian).
What there has been a fair bit of research on since the 1980s has been the pronunciation of spoken Latin focused on later stages (say, from the late 4th century onwards, into about the 11th) due to its relevance for the history of Romance. This is a lot less relevant to people interested in the classical era and Latin writings though.
It should not be surprising they'd attack something like the differences in quality between long and short vowels (other than /a a:/), since Italian doesn't have something similar. It is also not surprising that the guy in one of the videos has an easier time accepting close e and open e in some form, since one of the standard Italian accents (the northern one) does have that distinction.
I would suggest ignoring Italians who cry "Allen is biased by English!", as I see the exact opposite, namely them being too influenced by Italian. For what it's worth my main language is Spanish.
It is also the case that most people who study Latin simply don't care about reconstructed pronunciation though. At most they try to render quantity (long and short vowels) some of the time, but for the most part, most people (other than Italians and adjacent Catholics) just kind of half-imitate a reconstructed pronunciation like Allen's using the phonetics of their own native language. Most Spanish speakers who study Latin don't distinguish the qualities of long i vs. most short i vs. short i before a vowel vs. short i before a labial (as explained by Allen and other linguists), but because they don't care to know and don't care to do it, not because they outright reject it. I think it's fine if they want to ignore the topic, because there are honestly more important topics, but that's not the same as rejecting it all on no grounds other than aesthetics.
I would like to emphasize what Hemo Rusticus said too, that there were differences in how different people actually pronounced Latin in the classical centuries, or how a single person would render something in spoken form depending on context. Consider, for example, the political move of Publius Clōdius Pulcher and his sister Quarta in the mid-1st c. BC, undergoing a fake adoption from a patrician family into a plebeian one, in which they didn't even bother taking the adopter's nōmen (Fonteius) but just changed the pronunciation of their original nōmen from a prestigious one (Claudius) to a rural one (Clōdius). This kind of thing only makes sense in the context of competing pronunciations between the more urban ae/au and the more rural ē/ō in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC (see also paelex ~ pēlex). (Allen, in fact, discusses this competition in the diphthong section.)
It is true that not a lot has been published on classical-era (i.e. circa both 1st centuries) reconstructed pronunciation since the 1960s, but some has. I remember recently reading a paper from 2018 about word-final -m, which was fairly persuasive about its pronunciation as a nasalized [w] preceded by a short vowel in non-poetic careful speech/prose in the 1st c. AD (in poetry the convention was to drop it), and otherwise also a full [m] preceded by a short vowel, especially in the 3rd/4th centuries AD (and possibly the late 5th if we believe Priscian).
What there has been a fair bit of research on since the 1980s has been the pronunciation of spoken Latin focused on later stages (say, from the late 4th century onwards, into about the 11th) due to its relevance for the history of Romance. This is a lot less relevant to people interested in the classical era and Latin writings though.
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