N30F15H wrote:yeah i know what you mean but all the latin your writing doesn't have accents
why does the whole thing have accents, why not just the first few chapters, and all the new words
Episcopus wrote:I think that macrons are great. I feel weaker when I read a text without macrons. And I like to write macrons also. They are pretty.
Ulpianus wrote:You could make almost an opposite argument though. You could say: marking vowels as long means that people don't really bother to learn them at all
On consonant u: it's not only old Oxford texts that prefer it; there is something of a purist mania for it in Britain generally
Episcopus wrote:Shut yo mouf I do in fact know all the long and short vowels of each word that I learn. Coming hither insulting me and macrons.
And that whole Italian Latin thing is quite pathetic it's for those who will not dare pronounce it properly.
Ulpianus wrote: Macrons pepper it with ghastly interlinear acne.
benissimus wrote:Episcopus, he made a thoughtful and worthy argument against the use of macrons and I cannot understand why you would accuse him of attacking you. I would be obliged if you would either respond in an equally civil way or else refrain from responding at all.
xn wrote:Ulpanius: In the absence of a knowledgable speaker, would you prefer an accompanying IPA transcription to the presence of macrons for learning the pronunciations of unfamiliar Latin words? Presuming that English is your mother tongue, perhaps your aesthetic distaste for macrons comes from an English typographical background? (That is, would a native speaker of a language that uses macrons [e.g. Latvian] find an absence of macrons similarly jarring?) I wonder if the evenness of the macronless ‘Latin’ gibberish line would be due more to a greater ratio of x-height letters to ascending/descending letters than a typical ‘English’ gibberish line would have? As an aside, do you also prefer monotonic Greek to polytonic Greek? (I don’t have the medical background to come up with a polytonic Greek analogue to the Latin macron ‘acne’…)
xn
I made it clear that I am not against macrons in dictionaries or vocabulary lists, or in paradigms, or even right at the start.
There's something to be said for marking them in dictionaries, and learning when one learns the word (but not as macrons: one should learn how the word is pronounced).
KICargill wrote:Macrons are not just useful with dead languages (though that's where they are usually employed), but in learning modern languages. Indeed, I think the foreign student of English would benifit from marking quantity when he writes out verb paradigms, e.g., in "drive, drove, driven", the theme vowels for the first two parts are long, whereas the participle is short.
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