Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site talcott.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!harvard!talcott!tmb From: tmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel) Newsgroups: net.nlang Subject: Re: Diacritics... Message-ID: <488@talcott.UUCP> Date: Sat, 17-Aug-85 05:18:32 EDT Article-I.D.: talcott.488 Posted: Sat Aug 17 05:18:32 1985 Date-Received: Wed, 21-Aug-85 07:22:27 EDT References: <258@jenny.UUCP> Organization: Harvard University Lines: 77 In article <258@jenny.UUCP>, jbdp@jenny.UUCP (Julian Pardoe) writes: > 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 But I claim that the Roman alphabet is likely to be sufficient for the representation of most languages (notable exceptions: Chinese, because of tones and homphones, and Japanese because of an even larger number of homophones than Chinese): German, for example, has a large number of vowels, which are represented by combinations of the basic vowels 'aeiou' with 'h' or 'e' (or doubled) to indicate length, vowel followed by 'e' to indicate umlaut formation, and vowel followed by double consonant to indicate brevity. The special sounds 'sh', 'zh', 'ch', and 'kh' are all represented by unique combinations of consonants. In principle, the letter 'c' could be eliminated from the German alphabet (in East Germany it has been, except for the consonants 'sch', 'ch' and in a small number of foreign words), as well as the letter 'v', which can be replaced by either 'f' or 'w' in all contexts. Nasalised 'n' is written as 'ng'. And so on. The point is that German is phonetically not simple, but nevertheless has a relatively straightforward orthography (i.e. you can spell a word by sound) and can do without special characters. > 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. Given how complicated orthography is in English, people are doing very well. In fact, English is one of the easiest languages to learn. Therefore, even if a spelling reform that eliminates all national characters would complicate the orthography slightly (which I strongly doubt), it would probably not harm the language too much. But if a government undertook the task of a spelling reform with the goal of eliminating national characters, they would at the same time probably also correct some unrelated spelling problems, which would improve rather than worsen matters. Why am I arguing about this at all? The existence of national characters is a problem: it requires special equipment and impedes trade and information exchange. I have experienced these problems myself (being German), and I believe that the most reasonable solution is to eliminate national characters rather than to live with the burden, unless such an elimination is linguistically unacceptable, as in the case of Chinese or Japanese. If there are such linguistic reasons in the case of the Scandinavian languages, I would like to hear about them. Mere flaming or insistence is not going to help anyone. Thomas. P.S.: The English, by the way, have shown that it is possible to eliminate letters from their alphabet and replace them with letter combinations (I don't know the historical details or reasons for this, though): they eliminated 'th' and 'dh' (which are still present in modern Icelandic). P.P.S.: > Houu one can uurite a C program in Hungarian or Serbo-Croat I don't > knouu... It's an interesting problem! Again, I can only tell you about my experience in German: it is actually quite nice to have keywords and identifiers in different languages, since one is unlikely to use a keyword as an identifier accidentally. PASCAL and 'C' programs just look horrible, though, when printed on a printer in 'German mode' (i.e. with brackets and braces mapped to umlaute). Since my old Epson printer could not be switched in software, I just used it in American mode and wrote all my papers using the vanilla 26 letter alphabet, which is marginally acceptable for school papers and certain kinds of publications (in particular in computer science).