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En réponse à "Etherman23 <etherman23@hidden.email>" <etherman23@hidden.email>: > > So let me get this straight. The first i is pronounced with short > quality and short quantity, and the second is with long quality and > long quantity? So the two always correlate? > Yes. But note one thing: We know that long and short vowels in Latin had different qualities only because of the mergings they suffered of in Vulgar Latin after quantity disappeared as a phonemic feature. But in "correct" Classical Latin, or Latin as spoken during the time of the Roman Republic, long and short vowels always had the same quality (namely, they were always tense). > > A quick example would be abdi(ca-ti(o > > where i( is a short i and a- is a long a. Notice that the first a and > the o are not marked for length. So I look at my rules for > determining vowel length: > > 1) A vowel is short if > a) it's followed by another vowel or h > b) it's followed by nd or nt > 2) A vowel is long if > a) it's derived from a diphthong > b) it's followed by ns, nf, or sometimes gn > c) it's formed from a contraction > 3) A diphthong is long > Well, those rules are valid... except when they're not... Length in Latin is phonemic, i.e. not reducible to phonological rules. > Neither of the two unmarked vowels fall under these rules. > Well, as for the last "o", it's not marked for length because it's a well-known ending (nominative -o, genitive -onis). You should somewhere have a list of those endings with length marks indicated. Just report those length marks yourself :))) . As for the a, it's in a closed syllable, which is thus always long. But this a itself, like in many cases of prefixes like this one, can either be long or short depending on prosody only. For this reason it isn't marked for length. Christophe. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.