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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 article  tmb@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

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