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gregbontrager <GregBont@hidden.email> wrote:
Plus, what's the best form of Latin to learn? I've seen Latin with alot of diacritics, and I've seen Latin with almost no diacritics. What forms of Latin are there and which one(s) are most commonly learned by modern people?
Modern convention is to eschew diacritics altogether, except sometimes the diaeresis. In textbooks and dictionaries you will find breves and macrons. In older books you may find macrons spelled as acutes, graves, and circumflexes. Since for the most part all the diacritics only serve to disambiguate, you won't miss much if you don't bother to learn them. As for what kinds of Latin there are that you might be able to learn, there's two basic categories: classical Latin and neo-Latin. Classical will help you read, well, the classics, and is more useful when one is making Romance languages. Neo-Latin is useful if you plan on talking about anything modern in Latin with people... For the most part though, it's a difference of vocabulary, namely that neo-Latin has more of it. (I'm no expert though. I just work on the Latin Wikipedia and Wiktionary.) *Muke! -- website: http://frath.net/ LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/ deviantArt: http://kohath.deviantart.com/ FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki: http://wiki.frath.net/