Quote Originally Posted by Fridge
I doubt he's ancient Roman, but he is, after all, using a language directly descended from theirs.
Good God. You mean he is posting in Italian. I never noticed and since I can't read Italian I really don't know how I understood his post.

Quote Originally Posted by Fridge
And, having given us the ancient spelling of Boudicca, you're very confident of how it's pronounced, bearing in mind the original was wrtitten in a language with (AFAIK) no, or effectively no, relation to modern English.
Presumably, Boudicca is either derived from Celtic or Gallic and as modern English still retains links to both languages whilst latin was limited to the clergy and eventually irradicated from modern english by the Black Death, I would argue that Boudicca (according to language achaeologists pronounced BOO-DICK-AH) is more closely related to modern english than Boudicea.

Quote Originally Posted by Fridge
Did the Britons (or Iceni) even use a latin alphabet in those days? Or was Boudicca just an attempt to transcribe the name in the latin alphabet before the Romans came along and did their latinizing?
Not sure what that has to do with price of eggs. After all the Chinese don't use a latin alphabet but we still know how they pronounce their names.

Presumably no matter what alphabet the Iceni used the historians have managed to both translate it and read it, as indeed they are able to do with ancient Egyptian, Hebrew and many other languages.