Pronuncing or speaking a dead language out loud is about fun and personalising the experience we have as learners of the language. The make-believe world of creative anachronism allows entry into what might have been the world of the speech community of a language. Without it, those dead languages become pretty encoded puzzles in funny scripts and characters - and there are people who read dead languages more than adequately without ever seriously trying to speak or pronounce them. For example, almost no Egyptologists attempt anything other than a conventionalised pronunciation of any period of the language before Coptic, but still have a deep understanding of the language, and are able to produce accurate and readable translations.daveburt wrote:Aren't iota subscripts irrelevant to pronunciation?
If your system of pronunciation only has one or two lengths for vowels, then the iota is rightly written subscript and left unpronounced. What I mean is that in a system where short and long are differentiated, the omicron ("ο") is short, while the ("ω") is long and the diphthong "οι" is long too, but how about this diphthong, "ωι"? Is it tripple length. In a system that is binary, there is no tripple length. Was the iota of "ῳ" and others ever pronounced? Probably, yes.
Sorry to say, with prosody, there is only so far that you can go before it becomes guesswork. As with every type of guesswork, the more educated it is, the better it is. If you have a grammar (morphosyntactic) and discourse aware analyses to support your choices of prosodic features to use, and you use them more or less consistently, your TTS or even just reading. If somebody was to read, just getting the sounds right, without the mind engages in both understanding and analysis, it's probably going to sound strained or distracted. Reasonable standards to judge reading by are clarity, fluency, expressiveness, beauty, as well as the ones that more robotic TTS engines are capable of.daveburt wrote: ... if I start paying attention to prosody, the bar will be getting higher!