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On Sun, Feb 06, 2005 at 09:34:04AM -0700, Muke Tever wrote: > True. I was only thinking as far as reading and writing is concerned, > not other useful purposes. Still, it's possible to know which vowels > are long without worrying how they're written... More so if you know > where the accent is, etc. I think the best of all possible worlds is to get in the habit of *writing* with the macrons, but practice *reading* without them. When learning a new word, be sure to learn which vowels are long and practice writing the word out, declining it, conjugating it, whatever, fully macronned. For typing instead of handwriting, macronned vowels pose no difficulties in modern text editing software thanks to Unicode, but they may not be the most convenient thing to actually type on your keyboard. So you can always substitute something easier like acute accents, circumflexes, diareses, etc. Or you can do what the folks on the latinstudy mailing list do in pure ASCII environments - capitalize the long vowels and leave the short vowels lowercase. As for other orthographic conventions: modern Latin pedagogical practice seems to use English capitalization conventions and maintain a distinction between vocalic U and consonantal V, while using I for both vowel and consonant; not sure why that is. -Marcos