Still, the census seemed to indicate a strong preference amongst some responders that there was merit in marking both consonantal /j/ and /w/~/v/ with a consonant to distinguish both of them consistently from vocalic /i/ and /u/.
I think this kind of blatant snobbism is ironic, considering how many here decry the demise of the study of classical languages. Maybe Latin isn’t the language for me, though. I’m a relative idiot when it comes to learning languages, I’ll admit. But still, why have to learn rules by rote memorization, even relatively simple ones, when with simple orthographical changes, a student can simply absorb the rules by osmosis, as it were, while reading? Hell, it seems to me that the simple rules are the ones that are best learned this way!
At one point in time, accent marks looked “funny” to Greeks, and yet now they are common practice. They became common practice in the Hellenistic period, which I don’t think is a coincidence. Once Greek became an important language politically, and people from different cultures had an incentive to learn it as a second language, such assistance to the reader appeared, even though the Greeks of that time probably thought it was unnecesary. The reason was that the orthographic innovators knew that their innovation helped people learn a difficult foreign language.
I think it is simply that j’s annoy you, and you’re trying to come up with rationalizations. It’s like me with Betts and Henry’s Teach Yourself Ancient Greek. They insist on using the lunate sigma, instead of the medial and finial forms. Now, from a purely logical point of view, there is no good reason not to do this. But I couldn’t stand this book. The lunate sigmas drove me to distraction simply because I was used to the more common medial and finial forms. I know it’s completely irrational, but I still can’t use this book. I think it’s the same with you and j’s, and I think it’s just a matter of taste. And you know what they say about taste…
Snobbery has nothing to do with it. Again, it’s pebbles on the mountaintop; that’s true whether I’m being a snob or not. I’m not saying that you’re too stupid to learn Latin, I’m just trying to put this issue into perspective. When you’re worrying about remembering to use the ablative case with “utor” and conjugating the verb into the perfect subjunctive correctly, things like how to pronounce “i” seem pretty trivial. It wouldn’t surprise me if, say, a year from now you look back on this discussion and chuckle that you thought it was such a big deal at the time.
You can’t pronounce Greek correctly without the accents unless you’ve memorized the pronunciation. The same is true of Latin and macrons. The same is not true with Latin and I/J.
It’s not that they annoy me, it’s that they annoy a whole bunch of people of which I am but one person. 
Or rather, it’s not the J’s that annoy me but the inconsistency – some texts being written with them and some without them. It’d be nice if the world would just agree on one Latin orthography. That means finding a standard and sticking to it. The closest thing to a standard we have now is to use “i” in place of “j” – hence, keeping it that way is the path of least resistance towards the goal of a unified Latin orthography, even though you and I agree that, aside from such considerations of consistency, the use of “J” would be better.
That’s a really strange thing. I’d prefer most to read Latin the way they did in ancient Rome. But having no punctuation and all uppercase letters is very hard to get accustomed to. Especially when you grow up using the Latin alphabet.
I think one of the funnest things in Latin is, when reading, to be able to spot out the consonantal and vocalic sounds without even thinking. But really, it’s not that hard once you get into the hang of how Latin works, because there is a method to it all.
But I just noticed that most of my books differentiate between u and v, but leave i as just i. How did this inconsistency become normal? I would definitely prefer keeping the v/u’s and the i/j’s only one letter, yet only the Oxford Classical Texts editions make the u-sound one letter.
But in my case, using the u could be no good. Because I’ve also studied Korean. a word like reuictum would make me want to pronounce the ui as this one glide that includes this close back unrounded vowel – definitely not a Latin sound. ^^;
The Latin Wikipedia’s rationale for following this convention (in addition to the fact that Wheelock’s Latin, etc. use it) is that J is non-classical, but V, while also non-classical, helps reading considerably more than J does. I’d have to agree. For one thing, maybe it’s just that using ‘u’ as a consonant between vowels looks horribly unnatural to modern eyes. But more importantly, unlike J, V also occurs in places other than at the start of the word or between vowels. Take “curvus” for example; if you spell it “curuus”, it’s a lot less obvious that the ‘u’ after the ‘r’ is a consonant (and the relation to the English word is also less obvious – a shame, because I love noticing the origin of English and Romance words). You might think the consecutive u’s is a clue, but then contrast “vacuum”, or the plural genitive of any fourth-declension noun (manuum, exercituum…), where it’s definitely a vowel. Or what about “graviter”? If you spell it “grauiter”, you might be tempted to pronounce it with the diphthong “au”.
To be fair, until recently I did somehow get a habit of pronouncing “iam” as “ee-am” rather than “yam” because for some reason the ‘i’ just “didn’t look like a consonant” to me. Likewise it somehow “looked like a consonant” in “diū”. But that was before I was 100% sure of my rule about when “i” is a consonant or not, since it had never been explained to me. If you have somebody explain the rule from the beginning, such pronunciation quirks are probably much less likely to develop…
[quote=“Smythe”]
Very cool. Looks good! When shall it be available?
[/quote][quote=“Evertype”]
Well, it will take a bit of time to put together. Perhaps in time for Christmas.
[/quote]
I was right. The perfect gift for your Latinist friends.