BRB, bringing Cicero back with a time machine - he must judge our pronunciations! X-D
I wouldn’t be too worried about it. There are minimal pairs*, but most of the time you can get who’s who by context; even nominative -a vs. ablative -ā, one is often right at the start of the sentence, the other is typically right before the verb. Ecclesiastical speakers typically don’t even bother.
And apparently some native speakers didn’t either; specially in Sardinia and Africa proconsularis, the local dialects merged long/short pairs early on. (Eventually other dialects would do the same, but they first rearranged the vowels. It seems that Latin in those parts did something German and plenty Arabic varieties do, short vowels get centralised.)
* the ones that I remember, besides luteus/lūteus and NOM/ABL:
BRB, bringing Cicero back with a time machine - he must judge our pronunciations! X-D
I wouldn’t be too worried about it. There are minimal pairs*, but most of the time you can get who’s who by context; even nominative -a vs. ablative -ā, one is often right at the start of the sentence, the other is typically right before the verb. Ecclesiastical speakers typically don’t even bother.
And apparently some native speakers didn’t either; specially in Sardinia and Africa proconsularis, the local dialects merged long/short pairs early on. (Eventually other dialects would do the same, but they first rearranged the vowels. It seems that Latin in those parts did something German and plenty Arabic varieties do, short vowels get centralised.)
* the ones that I remember, besides luteus/lūteus and NOM/ABL: