Comment by jthnews

You might be surprised at the size of the community of Latin speakers (outside the Vatican). It gets some attention from time to time on HN. For this community a shared pronunciation is crucial to being mutually intelligible. And I suppose it makes sense to use the one with the most support from the experts, even if it will always remain somewhat speculative. I take your point - it is possible to study and ready Latin without much regard for pronunciation. But I also feel that if you approach it this way you miss out on the fun of trying to recreate the speech of an ancient culture.