sommar@enea.UUCP (Erland Sommarskog) (08/22/87)
In a recent article 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. Jean-Francois Lamy stated something similar some days ago. In a private letter he admitted that this is true if you look at it from an ASCII point of view. Let me straighten you out about this confusion. Very few pairs of languages have a common alphabet. Thus, one langauge will probably appear "accented" from the point the of other. ("accented" here also including umlauts, extra letters, digraphs etc.). So of course, looking from English all other languages may appear accented. However, there are alphabets that are equal to English. As an example, I take my own, Swedish. Yes, we have A with dots and ring and O with dots, but they wouldn't cause any problem, if we would like to define a Swedish character standard code disregarding all other languages, just like ASCII. They are just three more letters at the end of the alphabet. Now, if we look at English from a Swedish point of a view, does English has any "accents"? Yes, they have W. W exists in Swedish to, but only in proper names and is co-sorted with V. If we had dominated the computer world like the English-speaking are, we would probably have hard to understand why you couldn't replace W with V or accept it having a code miles away from the others. (No, no ":-)" here. I'm completely serious.) The interesting point is here that quite many languages could have the simple 8-bit enumerate for representing and sorting characters. English can, Swedish can (if we forget W), but German and French can not. For the sake of completeness, we should add that both Swedish and English do use "e" with acute accent, mainly in French loan words. (E.g. "clich'e") In Swedish you can also find in names with U with dots, being co-sorted with Y. Newsgroup note: I have inluded both sci.lang and comp.std.internat for sci.lang people that do not the other group. I have, howvere, only comp.std.internat in the follow-up line, since I feel that the discussion belongs more to this group than sci.lang. -- Erland Sommarskog ENEA Data, Stockholm sommar@enea.UUCP
jim@epistemi.UUCP (Jim Scobbie) (08/24/87)
>>I was told once (by a respected linguist, as I recall) that English and >>Russian are the ONLY two languages written with unaccented alphabets. > For the sake of completeness, we should add that both Swedish and >English do use "e" with acute accent, mainly in French loan words. >(E.g. "clich'e") In proper names in English, note also Scots McEachern etc with a small "c" after the "M" sitting above the line as opposed to "Mac". It would be nice to be able to reproduce this on machines. And even nowadays, with all that bad grammar floating around :-), some of us still have a circumflex above the "o" in role. (Yes, really.) -- Jim Scobbie: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh University, 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND UUCP: ...!ukc!cstvax!epistemi!jim JANET: jim@uk.ac.ed.epistemi
hmj@tut.fi (Matti J{rvinen) (08/24/87)
In article <2206@enea.UUCP> sommar@enea.UUCP(Erland Sommarskog) writes: >In a recent article 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. What do you mean by accented alphabet??? Letters like a and o with two dots are letters of their own in several alphabets, like Swedish and Finnish. Finnish, my native language, is, as far as I know, not accented. > Let me straighten you out about this confusion. Very few pairs of >languages have a common alphabet. Thus, one langauge will probably >appear "accented" from the point the of other. ("accented" here also >including umlauts, extra letters, digraphs etc.). Very strange way to define accent... > So of course, looking >from English all other languages may appear accented. >... > Now, if we look at English from a Swedish point of a view, does English >has any "accents"? Yes, they have W. W exists in Swedish to, but only >in proper names and is co-sorted with V. If we had dominated the computer From Finnish point of view English is VERY accented. Finnish does NOT have letters like b, c, f, q, w, x and z. g is used only after n. D is added later. Those letters are used only in foreign names. > For the sake of completeness, we should add that both Swedish and >English do use "e" with acute accent, mainly in French loan words. Finnish does not have accent even in loan words. We simply drop them off. >(E.g. "clich'e") I'd write it "klisee". -- Hannu-Matti Jarvinen, Tampere University of Technology, Finland Project EAST - European Advanced Software Technology hmj@tut.fi, hmj@tut.uucp, hmj@tut.funet (tut.ARPA is not the same computer).