[saaaaaam]

I'm curious about why you've added what I assume are stress marks in the Latin. I studied it (admittedly, a while back) all my way through school and have never once seen this used, including in this poem. In no way a criticism of me trying to make a thing about it - is it an American thing?

[academia_hack]

Honestly they were just there in the Wikipedia text I copied. I've seen them in more modern texts to help with pronunciations and translation (if I recall correctly some words have different meanings depending on the length of the final vowel but that can normally be determined from context). Romans sometimes used the apex to denote long vowels which would have otherwise been ambiguous but I think it wasn't as commonplace as in textbooks today.

[lynguist]

They’re length markers. There’s also the rarely used ˘ to show that a vowel be read short instead of long.

At least in my gymnasium in Switzerland we had the length markers for all the words, from the very beginning, and in all texts we read and all grammar forms we learned.

[toyg]

Seems like a modern addition. I've seen quite a few Roman inscriptions in my life, and I don't remember ever noticing any such marker.

[lynguist]

No, not in inscriptions! (Even though inscriptions did in fact use length markers, there’s the superlong I for example.) When we transcribe actual Latin text we make some changes.

The actual inscriptions use heavy abbreviations, which we resolve in our text. And then we also disambiguate V into v and u. And as a bonus we often add the length markers.

So we do inscription -> cleaned Latin text.

And the cleaned text is given to students.

[saaaaaam]

Interesting. We were just expected to learn it or work it out!