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--- In romanceconlang@yahoogroups.com, Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@f...> wrote: > >I've looked through several grammar books for help > > but I've ended up more confused. Here's my problem: My Latin > > dictionary says that it marks quantity with diacritics. However, > >it doesn't do it consistently. > > I'm pretty sure it does. But if it does like my Latin books, it > marks vowel quantity only when it's not derivable from the existing > rules, i.e. when it's irregular. It also doesn't give the quantity > of vowels in grammatical endings since those are supposed to be > well-known already. See the example I gave in my other post. None of the unmarked vowels are derivable from the rules. One of the marked vowels is covered under the rules and happens to agree with them (so why bother being explicit?). > It also gives several rules for > > determining quantity, but these don't cover all possible cases and > > quite frequently disagree with the diacritics. > > Which is quite logical since if it does like I think it does, the > diacritics are there especially in order to mark an exceptional > case! :) Were it only so! It quite regularly marks short vowels as short when the rules say they should be short, but then leaves other vowels not covered by the rules unmarked. If short vowels are unmarked then why bother having a short diacritic when the vowel is short anyway?