A.A.I wrote:Godmy, I've been told my whole life to 'get over' being curious, asking questions and discussing such things. Well, I'm glad I didn't listen to those people who deemed my questions to be too stupid or obvious.
I am not saying: Don't ask questions.
I am saying: why do we need a poll for something like this? Do we need to take a vote to validate (by the vote of the majority) one or the other in the popular use? I don't think so. We would if vowel lengths were absolutely a foreign aspect for western learners, untraditional aspect, new aspect, not practiced aspect in Latin: then its use could be seen as controversial and a poll would be a very good thing. But neither of it is true.
A.A.I wrote:The poll itself asked: "When you pronounce latin, do you try to spend twice as long on the long syllables?"
Just using the word "to try" implies that "to do it regularly without thinking" is almost something unheard of, totally new and 'untraditional' in the world of Latin philology, foreign, weird, new... something you don't even know how to do (and that's why I said "get over it").
A.A.I wrote:Most of the Latin I hear lacks distinctions between vowel length - amongst other things.
I'm then sorry you haven't met the right latinists pronunciation-wise. If you want, we can go and speak sometimes (have a voice chat). I don't say I'm the "rightest" one, but I have no problems in this aspect and... to be honest, I don't see why anybody else should.
Seems like a reasonable line of questioning, in my eyes.
But why? This is not so uncommon in the modern languages in Europe or in its proximity... I understand when you ask (as I did) something similar over the melodic accent of Greek which is either: not easy to be imitated (as you don't have much living languages in your proximity to listen to or not enough resources) or it is still perceived as something **new** in the philological world, world which is/was used to pronounce the Greek always with a dynamic accent which is for a European fairly easy to imitate, and which world haven't considered a full-scale change yet...
But long vowels in Latin? I think that people have been trying to pronounce them across the pronunciations rigorously since the times of Erasmus, and they didn't particularly complain... Are we somewhat special generation that we cannot or that it is suddenly so "foreign" to us that we cannot even imagine how to do it and we have to ask whether people around the world "try" (not "do" but "try")?