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Comment by Jach | Hacker News Reader

> the text as they present it doesn't seem to mark vowel length at all

I think most Latin text out there won't use diacritics at all. I only studied it for 3 years back in high school leading to the AP exam and I don't think I was ever taught about them or saw them once. This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3bmLi1bKI0 and wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_%28diacritic%29 were interesting. I'd bet part of the reason is just a side-effect of teaching Latin as a dead language where you never speak it / pronunciation doesn't matter. I remember very little of the language, I believe also in part because of that.

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You are correct: Latin vowel length is usually only indicated in educational material, dictionaries, etc.

> just a side-effect of teaching Latin as a dead language where you never speak it / pronunciation doesn't matter. I remember very little of the language, I believe also in part because of that.

You're not the only person to have had this insight. Modern pedagogy often emphasizes using ancient languages spoken aloud, conversationally. We read Latin aloud in class, and our textbook had Latin dialogues to act out in class. We used the reconstructed classical pronunciation. We were graded on our pronunciation. Mostly as a token though and our teacher allowed some leeway, because it is after all a dead language. (I found it hard to drop some of the church Latin "ch" for "k".)

With the exception of the Aeneid, all the epic poetry of antiquity was originally oral poetry later written down, and it is obviously meant to be read aloud. The Iliad, Odyssey, Gilgamesh, Mahabharata, the Chinese Classic of Poetry. All were meant to be read aloud in performance, and probably they were set to song.

My understanding is that the lack of vowels, word spacing, and punctuation in texts suggests that all ancient texts were meant to be heard, not read. I think it was Augustine, or some other Church Father, was talking about seeing someone reading silently as something remarkable or that he hadn't seen before.

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