pothos.org

Sorry to flood this place with self-centered questions, but I figured there might be a few people here with some knowledge of Latin...

Anyway, I'm a raw beginner at the language (entering Latin 2 this year). Now I have a macron dilemma.

In Latin 1, I had a different teacher. She didn't require us to use macrons (except one - 1st decelsnion ablative singular ending). However, I still made an effort to learn the macrons to the best of my ability. It seemed to me that it would be worth the extra work. For one thing, I want to be able to pronounce the words correctly - and aren't long vs. short vowels important in the meter of Latin poetry? And I always figured that it would be better to learn them now and then drop them if I don't need them later, rather than slacking off now and having to learn them later.

I've just met my new Latin teacher, and I've talked with him a little. He told me, in these words, "You need to wean yourself off macrons." It had never occurred to me that macrons might be BAD to learn, even if most Latin texts are written without them (this is true, right?). Though now that I think about it, that does make sense - if you get used to relying in macrons to distinguish between different parts of speech, reading without them might be difficult.

True, our textbook still is written with macrons, but most people in my class don't give them a second thought. I feel like I'm more aware of them, since I've actually taken the trouble to learn the macrons for different conjugations and declensions.

Anyway, Latin experts (or at least more advanced students), if you are out there, what do you think? Is it worth learning macrons? Is it BAD to learn macrons? If I continue Latin in college, will I be expected to know macrons?

(For the record, I'm not just one of those kids who wants to take a year or two of Latin to help with SAT vocab or whatever. I probably will continue with the language, so I want to do what is best in the long run.)

Thanks!

Macrons are basically used as an aid to pronunciation in Latin textbooks. They were not used by the Romans themselves and are not usually used in modern versions of Latin texts. In Latin dictionaries there is more comprehensive use of accents to illuminate diction (breves etc.) It would not be much more strange to persist in using macrons in your Latin, than to start using măcrŏns and brēves in your English - on the basis of the diction information in the OED

That being said, in fact medieval Latin texts do have interesting usage of accents, partly perhaps to make them more phonetic (and perhaps also to abbreviate their length): notably a tilde over some vowels indicates that a succeeding consonant has been omitted, because it was nasalised in pronunciation (e.g. ums were often actually nasalised like French uhns). However, there is not really just one Latin pronunciation. For example, in ancient Latin c's were almost always hard, whereas medieval church Latin gives many of them a ch sound. The matter of metre is also vexed: whether a syllable is long or short may have as much to do with the number of trailing consonants as whether the vowel itself is deemed long or short.

You say Jool-ee-uss Seez-ur and I say Yool-yoos Kiy-sahr, let's call the whole thing off!

Best wishes,

Andrew

Taphoi wrote:You say Jool-ee-uss Seez-ur and I say Yool-yoos Kiy-sahr, let's call the whole thing off!

I like that!

And a good explanation - to quote Oscar Wilde: "I wish I had said that!"

ATB