Eurysilas wrote:Now, from what I'm hearing in the Wheelock sound recordings, I know there are certain instances where a vowel is pronounced long even if it's not marked (saepe's end "e" and the "e" in the suffix "re"), so is this one of those times?
Are you refering to the sound files found at this site:
http://wheelockslatin.com/chapters/intr ... ction.html ?
The simple answer is that they are not perfect.
Saepe shall end in a short vowel, [É›]. I am unsure of what suffix "re" you are talking about, but if it is not marked with a macron in dictionaries or grammars, it should have a short vowel too. If you hear it pronounced differently, that only means the speaker has an accent.
Especially his pronunciation of the nasal vowel in "-um" is way off, and as a result of that, the advice on how to pronounce short "u" is outright bizzare: "[o] as in [pʰʊt]: [tɔ̃], [sɔ̃]". First, the examples should of course include a word where the vowel is not nasalized, but there is no reason to think that the nasal vowels would have any other quality than the regular ones. Anything between [ʊ] and [u] would be fine, in my opinion.