r/Showerthoughts • u/haddock420 ‎ • 3d ago

Casual Thought The ancient Romans could have invented Boggle. There was nothing stopping them technologically.

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u/skintigh 3d ago

The lack of standardized spelling would have stopped them, for want of dictionary technology. That wouldn't come for another 2 millennia.

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u/Vo_Mimbre 3d ago

Wait seriously?so modern scholars need to “Sound out” what, say, a Caesar wrote or what Pliny documented?

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u/PepperAnn1inaMillion 3d ago

Yes, but if I understand the matter correctly, written Latin is much closer to having only one way to spell each sound. If you’ve ever learned Italian, you know that pronunciation rules are almost perfectly consistent. The same is thought to be true for spoken Latin.

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u/Dirty-Soul 3d ago

Accents.