rcd@ico.UUCP (Dick Dunn) (08/25/87)
In article <111@quick.UUCP>, srg@quick.UUCP (Spencer Garrett) writes: > I was told once (by a respected linguist, as I recall) that English and > Russian are the ONLY two languages written with unaccented alphabets. However, this is not really true of either language. Russian has two letters which are "accented" in the sense of being written as a combination of an "unmarked" letter and a "diacritical." It also has characters which indicate "hard" and "soft" sounds--although written as separate "letters", their sense is that of a diacritical mark. (They appear only in conjunction with another letter, to modify the sound of that letter.) It begs the question not to treat these as diacriticals. English survives without diacritical marks only if you toss out all the words which contain them! Consider, for example, jalapeno (with tilde over the n). This is a word used to describe a particular variety of capsicum pepper ("chile" pepper) which is grown and used in the US. There is no "anglicized" form of the word--contrast with, say, "canyon" which is a transliteration of canon with tilde over the first n. (That is, "jalapenyo" is not an accepted spelling.) Sure seems like we've got a word in standard English usage which has a "marked letter." [This is obviously not the only example possible; I belabor it only to show the criteria I used.] Another posting mentioned lack of digraphs in English...but what about "w"? Note that "w" is unused in some languages except for untransliterated foreign words; note also that the name of "w" in most Western languages is equivalent to either "double u" or "double v". Finally, "w" is an addition since the original Roman alphabet. > ...I don't > know whether he didn't count Katakana and Hiragana as alphabets or whether > one cannot (or normally would not) write Japanese entirely in one or both > of these scripts... Although (as yet another posting pointed out) these are more precisely "syllabaries" rather than alphabets, it is still the case that they can be viewed as having diacritical marks. Either of two marks (a small raised ring or a pair of small strokes a bit like ") may be added to certain kana to produce a modified character which represents a modification of the base sound. >...He seemed to think that an unaccented alphabet was a > substantial advantage in an information age, and I would tend to agree. UUhy? It's not only an "information age" but an "international age" so uue need to deal uuith various conventions of different natural languages. The implication of "information age" is that lots of people have to deal uuith information (prepared/presented by computer), and I believe they should expect to see it presented properly--that is, uuith the propriety determined by the conventions of the language and not expediency for the programmer. I see "English-only" systems becoming less useful and less popular in an increasingly international environment. (I hope my replacement of "w" uuith "uu" in this paragraph uuill illustrate the point for English speakers.) -- Dick Dunn {hao,nbires,cbosgd}!ico!rcd (NOT CSNET!) (303)449-2870 ...Never offend with style when you can offend with substance.