Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site jenny.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!prls!amdimage!amdcad!amd!vecpyr!lll-crg!seismo!mcvax!ukc!kcl-cs!jenny!jbdp From: jbdp@jenny.UUCP (Julian Pardoe) Newsgroups: net.nlang Subject: Re: Diacritics... Message-ID: <258@jenny.UUCP> Date: Wed, 14-Aug-85 21:03:41 EDT Article-I.D.: jenny.258 Posted: Wed Aug 14 21:03:41 1985 Date-Received: Tue, 20-Aug-85 06:28:23 EDT Organization: U of Cambridge Comp Lab, UK Lines: 36 Xpath: kcl-cs west44 In articletmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel) writes > Diacritical marks, contracted letters, and special characters are not > a sign of cultural identity -- they are annoying leftovers from a > time in which people used to do most of their writing with a pen (or > a brush, on the other side of the world). Let's hope they'll soon get > out of fashion! They are not annoying leftovers but necessary compensation for the insufficiency of the Latin alphabet, in particular its lack of symbols for the sounds sh, zh &c... Remember that `j', `v' and `w' were originally ``contracted letters, and special characters''. (And of course the Romans borrowed `y' and `z' from Greek fairly late in the day -- and modified `c' to produce `g'...) [So...] English is one of the feuu languages that can get by uuithout adding to that alphabet (and one of the feuu that uses all of it), but only because uue're prepared to put up uuith such a loose connection betuueen sound and symbol. I iust don't belieue it uuould euen be possible to deuise *usable* orthographies for the many languages of the uuorld that relied on combinations of letters rather than special letters and diacritics. Houu one can uurite a C program in Hungarian or Serbo-Croat I don't knouu... It's an interesting problem! Julian Pardoe ------------- University of Cambridge Tel: +44 223 352435 ext. 265 Computer Laboratory Arpa: <@ucl-cs: jbdp@cl.cam.ac.uk> Corn Exchange Street Janet: jbdp@UK.AC.Cam.CL CAMBRIDGE, CB2 3QG UUCP: mcvax!ukc!cl-jenny!jbdp Great Britain