Notes on Latin Typography

The texts for the prayers have been extracted from a number of sources. Roman Catholic texts also tend also add accents to words greater than two syllables long. Anglican texts tend not to use accented Latin (on the assumption that a priest using them ought to be fluent enough to know automatically where the accents should fall!).

For the sake of backward compatibility with older browsers (and because I am Anglican) I have omitted accents and ligatures from the Latin texts. Only in limited cases are ligatures (æ and œ) actually useful and they never serve to distinguish two words which would otherwise be identical. 'Israel' for example, is not spelled 'Isræl' because the 'a' and 'e' are pronounced separately.

The punctuation of Latin texts is a contentious issue and how a particular text is punctuated depends on the date of your source, the country of origin and the phase of the moon (and people who occupy their time talking about it are indulging in hair-splitting). Remember that Latin was not originally punctuated (St Jerome's Vulgate is not).

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