Survey of Latin orthography preferences

Latin Learning Latin
1

I’m currently involved in the possible future publication of a new edition of a Latin novel, and am now trying to decide what orthography to use. In particular, I am contemplating to mark long vowels with macrons throughout. I know that this is an area where there are many different opinions, and since I of course want to please a majority of the potential readers, I have decided to set up a small survey to investigate what orthography people mostly prefer (or alternatively, which one is least objectionable to the majority):

http://www.kwiksurveys.com?s=KIDEGG_b419ec84

Once I have gathered a sufficient number of answers, I will post a summary of the results here, so that everyone can benefit from them.

Thank you in advance!

2

Isn’t it possible to somehow make all three of them? Macrons can pretty easy be removed with a search and replace function—same applies to accents. Ah well.

3

Very interesting. Good luck with your project–I look forward to reading it eventually.
Quam attractivum! Utinam bona fortuna fruaris–haec olim legere mihi placebit.

I filled out the survey, but generally I recommend that you follow the orthographical conventions of contemporary publications as much as possible. I don’t see any point in avoiding “j” and “v,” or not capitalizing the first word in a sentence. Some will assuredly prefer the “antiquated feel,” but they are sacrificing readability (which should be your primary concern) for a haphazard and quaint bricolage.

Dubiis quae nobis posuisti responsi, sed ut de re dicam, tibi commendo orthographiae consuetudinibus quae hodie in libris adhibentur quam maxime utaris. Rationem aliquam non video ego vitandarum litterarum ,cum novarum sicut “j” et “v,” tum capitanearum quae in principiis sententiarum ponuntur. Sunt, fateor, nonnulli qui, sine dubio, odori quodam antico favebunt. Hi autem viam asperam sequuntur–quamquam levis semper est praeferenda–ut tumultuariam farraginem paululum blandam habeant.

4

What is the title of the book?

5

i also filled out the survey. please DO include macrons - i am more nautral about the use of i/j v/u and caps. but i feel strongly that everything printed today in latin should have a convention for marking vowel length. I would guess there would be very few readers who wouldn’t benefit from the macrons.

I also am curious about what book you are thinking about but assume you would have already revealed that if you wanted us to know. but how about a hint or two. hmmm… just now … I am seeming to recall having once seen an edition on the internet by a swedish author about the adventures of someone who discovered a civilization beneath the surface of the earth.
am I on track ?

Personally, I’d like to see new editions of lots of stuff from the 15th - 19th centuries. In particular, since apparently you are in the publishing business, what about ARGENIS ? or maybe something by swedenborg?

6

Hampie: It’s largely a question of economical considerations, I’m afraid.

thesaurus: I shall not forego the result of the survey, but I can say so much that the first words of the sentences will most likely be capitalized.

Kynetus Valesius: I wanted to keep the survey somewhat generic, and so decided to not reveal the title. You are thinking of Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum I believe. No, thats not it, but one can say that you are on the right track in a very curious way. :wink:

I’m not directly involved with the publishing myself, but if it is decided to do an edition with diacritics, I would be responsible for the editing.

7

I favor macrons because there’s no reason not to include them (well, they may be a bit harder to type, but if you’re typing them in as you go along, it’s not that big a deal). Anybody who learned Latin without vowel length can just ignore them, and if you want to know the stress, you can still figure it out using a simple rule. It will also help ingrain which vowels are long, which may be good to know when you have to read a text, especially Classical poetry, that doesn’t use macrons.

I prefer the I/J and U/V convention and the capitalization convention in Wheelock/Lingua Latina (“Iam voluit etiam iuvenis”) since those conventions are probably the closest thing to a standard we have now. Text written with other standards isn’t particularly difficult to read, but it does look a bit funny to me. (Maybe that’s why so much text is still published without macrons, since others think macrons look funny…)

8

Dear Alatius,

I filled out your survey. All things being equal, I would favor macrons. As for the other orthographical questions - I think that the habit in some editions of using all lower case letters, except for proper names, even at the beginning of sentences, is a bit absurd, since the punctuation in modern editions of Latin texts is (usually) according to modern conventions anyway. One of the goals of an edition probably ought to be to make the text as readable as possible for modern readers. This is one reason why, all things being equal, I would favour macrons. Advanced readers don’t need them, but others find them helpful. So you can’t lose by adding them. But there are problems. Proofreading all of them is a miserable job (expertus dico – I have done some proofreading work for publishers of Latin textbooks), and finding every single missed macron is perhaps nearly impossible. Also, there will be cases (in place names, etc.) where the length of some syllables may be uncertain. The editor will have to take a stand in such cases - and maybe add a prefatory note too.

My best wishes to you. Neo-Latin novels interest me a great deal!

Impiger

9

survey answered and sent — I am OK with macrons and capitalization, but I really hate the J in Latin. I’m OK with V and without V, though.

10

Survey sent.

I like “i” instead of “j.” I lilke “v.”

With or without macrons is fine.

11

I have done the survey too.
In short: I like macrons, I like “v” and I hate “j”.
I like too the capital letter at the beginning and some basic punctuation.

12

I prefer i over j (more accurately reflects the proper pronunciation, if your native language is English), v for consonants (i.e. “Veni, vidi, vici.”) but u for vowels (i.e. “Iulius”, not “Ivlivs”), and modern English capitalization and punctuation conventions. As someone very unskilled in Latin, I would prefer both macrons and stress accent markings, to help me build up a “feel” for the cadence of the language. I took the survey.

13

Avitus Alatio optimo suo S·P·D

You asked about what people “preferred”. I don’t think you needed to put a question like that. In terms of the letters to be used (i/j/u/v), people were bound to prefer what they have been used to seeing, however recent that practice may be. In the contemporary English and Italian speaking world in particular this means the i/u/v system. To reach the same conclusions, you just needed to look yourself at a sample of current editions of Latin text representative of a certain geographical area and choose the most prevalent system. That’s what a majority will “prefer”. People will tend to “like” what they’ve become accustomed to seeing and “dislike”, or even “hate” (!) as some put it, what they haven’t been so exposed to. Simple. If you choose something other than the mainstream for your edition, you will always be challenging established tastes.

For a more illumiating and in my mind more useful enquiry you should have asked also for the reasons behind those preferences, i.e. on what philological grounds, if at all they perceived there might be any worth considering beyond mere personal taste, can people justify such preferences: is it the spelling system that has prevailed the longest throught the history of Latin printing? is it the spelling system that most countries have used? is it the spelling system that could most help learners (and we are all learners, inasmuch as none of us are native speakers) pronounce Latin correctly? etc.

People do seem to be able to exercise a certain amount of philological reasoning when they justify their preferences regarding mere diacritics like the vowel-quantity marks to help their learning, but they bewilderingly drop that capability to reason when they look at the letters themselves. Unfortunately, that’s how you end up with so many Latinists, even Professors I have met in my life, who do not know how to pronounce the i in iam, quoniam, Maius, Gaius, or the ae in aeneus, aerius, aereus, and so many other words involving similar ambiguities, when it could be so easy to us all should we be able to come to our senses and return to more transparent and for a much longer time widespread spellings as jam vs quoniam, Majus vs Gaius, aeneus vs æreus vs aerius, etc.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Cura ut valeas optime!

14

Avitus Légi optimo suo S·P·D

“I prefer i over j: more accurately reflects the proper pronunciation, if your native language is English”

I love it!

What happens if your native language is German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Albanian, Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Latvian or Lithuanian, to name but a few where j more accurately, and in fact exactly, represents the proper pronunciation of the Latin sound?

I thought Latin was our common language, a universal language for all. Now it turns out that it has to be bespoken for the specific attention of English speakers … et pereat mundus!

What a sad condition Latin lives in. :frowning:

Cura ut valeas optime!

15

I think that’s excessive. The rules for figuring out where the stress goes are very easy. (One exception: nobody seems to know what the exact rule is when you add clitics such as “-que” or “-ne” – but that fact doesn’t disappear when you use accent marks, it just means somebody else makes that arbitrary decision for you). The rules boil down to this:

  1. If the word has two syllables, the first one is stressed.
  2. Does the second-to-last syllable have a long vowel? If so, it is stressed.
  3. Does the second-to-last syllable have a dipththong? If so, it is stressed.
  4. Does the second-to-last syllable end in a consonant? If so, it is stressed.
  5. Otherwise, the stress falls on the third-to-last syllable.

Rule 4 is the only tricky one. Basically, the syllable ends in a consonant if it is followed by two consonant sounds (including doubled consonants and the letter ‘x’, which is really short for ‘ks’, but not including ch/ph/th or ‘qu’) – unless the second consonant is ‘L’ or ‘R’.

Rules 2 through 4 are also the same rules for determining whether a syllable is ‘heavy’ for the purposes of poetry. So you can basically replace rules 2-5 with “If the second-to-last syllable is heavy, it is stressed; otherwise, the preceding syllable is stressed.”

I mastered these rules virtually immediately, so I think adding accent marks to a work that already uses macrons just adds a lot of visual noise, and a letter with both an accent mark and a macron is particularly ugly. (One reason I don’t like Vietnamese orthography, as it goes utterly nuts with diacritics.)

16

I don’t know, and I don’t care, since my native language is English. The original poster asked us what orthographical conventions we prefer, not what we think is the objectively best or most “fair”. So, I told him what I prefer.

Well, what can I say? I’m a moron when it comes to learning foreign languages, so anything that makes things easier, I am for. Anything that would allow me to learn the accentuation rules by simple osmosis, instead of trying to memorize and then internalize rules, is a winner by me. And I got used to the diacritical marks when I tried to learn Greek, so those don’t bother me. (I also would prefer macrons on all long vowels in Greek, except the ones with circumflexes, even though it’s possible to figure those out by accentuation rules in many places.)

Beginning books, at least, should be made to be as helpful as possible to the reader/learner. Anything else is the crotchety old “It was hard when I learned it 50 years ago, so it should be hard now, pedagogical advances be damned!” attitude that so many teachers seem to have. Education should be about teaching students, or helping them to teach themselves, not about hazing or a sort of medieval guild initiation. But that’s just my opinion, and I had bad experiences in college that make me very opinionated about this sort of thing.

17

I agree that it’s about preferences and not about objectivity. I’m not a scholar, just a learner for fun, and I don’t care if j has been used for X years now, I find it aesthetically ugly. I don’t like the ae ligature either. Both look too ecclesiastical to me, don’t ask why.

About the stress marks, I guess it is too difficult to display macrons AND stress marks at the same time, if the stressed vowel is also a long one. I find the stress rules are pretty easy anyway, but I acknowledge that it may not be so easy for everyone.

18

Avitus Légi & loqu optimis suís S·P·D

In what I hope will be my last intervention on this issue:

I don’t know, and I don’t care, since my native language is English. The original poster asked us what orthographical conventions we prefer, not what we think is the objectively best or most “fair”. So, I told him what I prefer.

You are right. You were completely legitimised to say what you preferred. That was indeed the original question. I’m a bit more saddened that, now awareness has been raised that other considerations are possible and advantageous, you intimate that, because your native language is English, you don’t care about everybody else. I would be taken aback had I not been hardened to the fact that such are indeed the prevailing attitudes.

anything that makes things easier, I am for

and

Beginning books, at least, should be made to be as helpful as possible to the reader/learner

Well, precisely that is all my concern when I advocated a clear distinction i (vowel) / j (semivowel) and æ (diphthong) / ae (hiatus): precisely because they help the reader visualise important distinctions they otherwise normally fail to learn. Maybe you are an exception, but I’ve heard many times the “i” in “iam” pronounced as in the name “Ian”, and likewise for all the examples I provided above and many others, and, as I said, even from Latin professors; but maybe everyone is beyond that here.

Both look too ecclesiastical to me, don’t ask why.

I don’t need to ask you why. It is because the better spelling appears in older books, and those, in Spain in particular, are ecclesiastical ones. As an atheist, I regret as much as you the still prevailing associations between Latin and the Church, but we shouldn’t let those considerations affect our better philological judgement. We should choose spelling system that are “as helpful as possible to the reader/learner”, and that would surely be the one that is most transparent regarding the pronunciation of the language (distinction between vowels and consonants, diphthongs and hiatuses, long and short vowels, etc.) and not the ones that obscure all this. In fact, you may find it illuminating and equally sad to know that the i/u/v system of spelling was also introduced and pushed on to the world by the Church.

Curate ut valeatis omnes!

19

The survey has now run for three weeks, and collected 251 responses. It was posted on the following websites and mailing lists (and may have been forwarded to other places that I am not aware of):

http://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-forum/
http://latindiscussion.com/forum/
http://nxport.com/mailman/listinfo/latinteach
http://www.alcuinus.net/GLL/
http://schola.ning.com/
http://nxport.com/mailman/listinfo/latinofftop
http://nxport.com/mailman/listinfo/oerberg

Apart from the obvious selection bias of only adressing internet users, one should note that the respondents are predominantly anglophone.

First question: What orthography do you prefer?

The results are hardly surprising: as Avitus rightly points out, the orthography that is most widely used is also by far the most popular. The attitudes towards the other two options, “u, i” and “u, v, i, j”, are more evenly distributed. The option to include “j” seems to evoke slightly more extreme responses, compared to “u, i only”.

I agree that it would have been interesting to investigate the reasoning behind these attitudes, but from a marketing point of view, the preferences themselves are more relevant. However, I would wager that most negative feelings against “j” are simply due to its rarity in modern editions, rather than based on any rational philological grounds. By the way, the merits of “j” has recently been discussed here on textkit: http://discourse.textkit.com/t/classical-latin-alphabet/9285/1

20

Second question: Beginning sentences with capital letters or not?

Personally, I’m not a fan of the fairly rare practice of beginning sentences with lower case letters, but I included this question anyway: because of its use in the Harrius Potter books, I was simply curious how popular it actually is.

While there is a sizeable group that are positive (i.e. answered either “like” or “love”) towards this practice, as many as 44% were negative. This should be compared with the 3% who were negative towards beginning sentences with capital letters.