[Id. ib. vii. 30, 31.] Indicium autem suum grammaticus interponat his
omnibus; nam hoc valere plurimum debet. Ego (note the _ego_) nisi quod
consuetudo obtinuerit sic scribendum quidque judico, quomodo sonat. Hic
enim est usus litterarum, ut custodiant voces et velut depositum reddant
legentibus, itaque id exprimere debent quod dicturi sumus.

This is still a characteristic of the Italian language, so that one may
by books, getting the rules from the grammarians, learn to pronounce the
language with a good degree of correctness.

On this point Professor Munro says:

"We see in the first volume of the Corpus Inscr. Latin. a map, as it
were, of the language spread open before us, and feel sure that change
of spelling meant systematical change of pronunciation: _coira, coera,
cura; aiquos, aequos, aecus; queicumque, quicumque, etc., etc."

And again:

"We know exactly how Cicero or Quintilian did or could spell; we know
the syllable on which they placed the accent of almost every word; and
in almost every case we already follow them in this. I have the
conviction that in their best days philological people took vast pains
to make the writing exactly reproduce the sounding; and that if
Quintilian or Tacitus spelt a word differently from Cicero or Livy, he
also spoke it so far differently."

Three chief factors are essential to the Latin language, and each of
these must be known with some good degree of certainty, if we would lay