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--- In romconlang@yahoogroups.com, "Muke Tever" <muke@f...> wrote: > habarakhe4 <theophilus88@h...> wrote: > > Advising someone to ignore length in Latin is like advising themto ignore diacritics in a romance language - the diacritics existfor a reason. Furthermore, any understanding of Latin that lacksknowledge of vowel length cripples the understanding a poetry, oneof the major genres of Latin literature. > > Hey now, I wasn't answering a question about vowel length, only > a question about the writing system, i.e. "Latin with alot of > diacritics, and [...] Latin with almost no diacritics." The vowels > are still long in Classical pronunciation whether you choose to write > them that way or not. The vowels aren't long in ecclesiastical > pronunciation, but knowledge of what _was_ long helps one to know > where the accent goes. And that was another thing I forgot to mention > to the original poster: from what I'm told, the reconstructed > classical pronunciation and the ecclesiastical pronunciations are > the ones in most common use today. > > *Muke! > -- I confess I may have been overwrought when I wrote the message. I have seen the difficulties students who have been told 'don't worry about the macrons' experience later. The differences in length have grammatical implications (ablative -[a:] vs. nominative -[a]; present [weni:] vs. perfect [we:ni:]). Now I admit that these differences are not marked in orthography, and Latin writers exploit this ambiguity, but I find it easier to have a visual image with the macron that then was removed instead of supplying a macron which I never learned. It is worth noting, however, that the quantity of a Classical Latin word is not always known, since the Vulgar Latin can be different in quantity or vocabulary. Strictly speaking, the two most common variants of Latin are Classical and _Roman_ Ecclesiastical, which was imposed as a standard on the church.