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--- In romconlang@yahoogroups.com, "Muke Tever" <muke@f...> wrote: > Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@e...> wrote: > > Muke Tever wrote: > >> 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. > > > > You will miss a lot in sound changes, since short and long vowels often > > change differently > > 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. > > *Muke! If you're going for classical latin, you need to know the lengths of the vowels. This is all the more important for this list, since the length of the Latin vowel determined the quality of the Romance descendents (most broadly, at first the long vowels merelydropped their length, while the short vowel became more open). Advising someone to ignore length in Latin is like advising them to ignore diacritics in a romance language - the diacritics exist for a reason. Furthermore, any understanding of Latin that lacks knowledge of vowel length cripples the understanding a poetry, one of the major genres of Latin literature. On a different note, I am reading about the development of nasal vowels and consonants within Portuguese and Galician - it's fascinating stuff - and necessary for my FI-verse, where England and Portugal are politically close. > -- > website: http://frath.net/ > LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/ > deviantArt: http://kohath.deviantart.com/ > > FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki: > http://wiki.frath.net/