W. Sidney Allen's Vox Latina in order to refresh my memory, review the examples he provides of this or that, and facilitate a series of self-checks on my own pronunciaton (which has, almost invariably, degenerated; I've noticed that I have somehow and from who knows when begun pronouncing v not as w but almost as if I'm partially articulating an English v but with a bit too much lip-- am not sure how to describe it but it isn't right, not being proper in any pronunciation scheme that I'm aware of).
This passage caught my eye earlier. I don't have any way of supplying the vowel length symbol in the font. There's a project....
In rural districts, however, both ae and au developed to long simple mid vowels of of [long e] and [long o] type. This we know from various contemporary references, such as Lucilius' '[long e] Cecilius pretor ne rusticus fiat' and Varro's mention of the form [long e] hedus 'in Latio rure'. For Festus' item, 'Orata, genus piscis, appellatur a colore auri, quod rustici orum dicebant, ut auriculas oriculas'.
Orata are species of fishes that we call gilt- or gilt-head bream: but we write aurata. Orum and oricula do show up in the dictionaries.
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