2 ms·

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 3y ago
  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.