[JSteff]

“Latin is a dead language”

Uhmmm, what about legal profession and medical doctors? Look at some of those text books.

[Bosco]

Dead in the sense that it's not spoken. Written, obviously.

From my Latin class: "Latin is a dead language. It killed the Romans, and now it is killing me."

I'll stand on my brother's assertion: we don't have an audio recording of a genuine Latin speaker. The audio recording assumption in my post was implied.

Any pronunciation can be correct within grammatical reason. Scipio could have a hard 'C' or a soft 'C'. Take your pick, no one can prove it otherwise.

It's somewhat ironic that we don't know what the language of one of the most powerful empires on earth (Rome) sounds like, but we do know the language of one of its most influential subjects (a Jewish carpenter) sounds like - Hebrew and Aramaic.

All the best.