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Firstly, thanks to all of those who answered my earlier post. You have all given me some helpful ideas. It *is* a little early to be thinking about my orthography in anything but the vaguest terms, but sometimes its good to step back from the detail and look at the horizon. Helps to give me an idea where I might be going. Anyway, time to strap my nose firmly back on to the phonology grindstone. Since you need to know where you are starting from, before you can go anywhere, I'm sorting out how Latin would originally have been pronounced in my language area, before setting off on its own unique course (and thanks particulary, Henrik, for your thoughts on the vowels - which echoed and reaffirmed what I was thinking). Which brings me to how an ethnic speaker of Proto-Germanic might pronounce a latin /k_w/ (<QV>). Since PGmc and WGmc had the glide /w/, the most likely realisation of /k_w/, I think, would be (arrgh this keyboard has no square brackets!) 'kw'. However, If I go with /kw/ I will eventually end up with a horribly esperantine /kv/ (or perhaps even /kxv/ or /kCv/, if that's pronounceable). Yuck. So, as if by magic, that doesn't happen. That leaves me perhaps /ku/, /ku:/, /ku@/ or even just /k/ (or maybe just /k/ under certain conditions, e.g. /ka/, with one of the others for different conditions, perhaps like /kui/) Any thoughts? How did this sound develop in your langs, and actual romance? Last question today. Did word-final /t/ in latin get dropped unconditionally, like <_M>, or in specific circumstances only? Any idea when this generally happened? I have conflicting sources, some say it was a feature of late CL, others that it was a feature only much later in VL, or indeed after the various languages separated. - Peter.