[comp.std.internat] English digraphs, diacritiacl marks

dant@tekla.TEK.COM (Dan Tilque;1893;92-789;LP=A;60HC) (08/19/87)

Jean-Francois Lamy writes:
>
>Just by curiosity, a quick scan of my brain seems to indicate that English
>would be the only European language not to use diacritical marks, digraphs,
>or extra letters. (? - I mean something like the dutch "ij").

English contains many digraphs, it's just that none of them are pronounced
the same in all words.  (Example: ng in singer and finger.)  BTW, I thought
that the Dutch "ij" would be classified as a dipthong, but then I don't
know Dutch so maybe I'm wrong.

As for diacritical marks, a diaeresis (umlaut) used to be used when the
the prefix on a word ended in the same vowel that the root started with.
Examples: preempt and cooperation.  The diaeresis was placed over the
second vowel.  The use of diaeresis never was universal and was largely
discontinued well before computers although some dictionaries still include
the form.  Some older works will also have them (my copy of Sherlock Holmes
has them).

---
Dan Tilque
dant@tekla.tek.com  or dant@tekla.UUCP

jss@hector..UUCP (Jerry Schwarz) (08/21/87)

Jean-Francois Lamy writes:
>
>Just by curiosity, a quick scan of my brain seems to indicate that English
>would be the only European language not to use diacritical marks, digraphs,
>or extra letters. (? - I mean something like the dutch "ij").


I quote from a draft of the Rationale of the proposed 
ANSI C standard, section 4.4:

	The English language uses 26 letters derived from the
	Latin alphabet. The set of letters suffices for English, 
	Swahili, and Hawaiian; all other living languages use
	either the Latin aphabet plus other characters, or other 
	non Latin aphabets or syllabaries.

They cite no reference for this piece of trivia.

dant@tekla.TEK.COM (Dan Tilque;1893;92-789;LP=A;60HC) (08/23/87)

Jerry Schwarz writes:
>
>I quote from a draft of the Rationale of the proposed 
>ANSI C standard, section 4.4:
>
>	The English language uses 26 letters derived from the
>	Latin alphabet. The set of letters suffices for English, 
>	Swahili, and Hawaiian; all other living languages use
>	either the Latin aphabet plus other characters, or other 
>	non Latin aphabets or syllabaries.
>
>They cite no reference for this piece of trivia.

The ANSI X3J11 committee should stick to things they are expert in,
like C.  Hawaiian has 14 sounds in it including the glottal stop.
Glottal stops are usually written with an apostrophe.  Admittedly,
the apostrophe is in the ASCII character set, but it's not one
of the 26 Latin derived letters.

I would expect most, if not all, the other Polynesian languages to
be similar to Hawaiian (in having a glottal and having such a
limited set of sounds as to be representable by at most 26 letters
plus the apostrophe.)


---
Dan Tilque
dant@tekla.tek.com  or dant@tekla.UUCP