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a curious thing about being a historical linguist is that many native speakers *and* philologists/classicists are sceptical, wary, or downright hostile over the idea that the classics were pronounced in a different way than the modern language. so you meet for example Greek folk or Greek theatre specialists who get all but hostile if you point out that χ was an aspirate plosive not a fricative at the time of Euripides etc., or English speakers who get nervous when you pronounce Old English with normal pre-shift vowels etc. that happens in Japanology also, no matter how strong is the evidence for previous stages of the language (e.g. with Jesuit transcriptions of syllable-final consonants in nanban-era Sino-Japanese), or when the old sounds are still alive in peripheral dialects (e.g. Tōhoku preserving prenasalisation of voiced plosives), or the simple fact that phonetics change palpably even in a single lifetime and listening to records from 100y+ ago is enough to extrapolate how much sound systems must change in 500 or 2000 years.