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Category: Writing Systems
What non-Roman scripts keep foreign words in Roman?
In the last few decades, written Greek uses Roman script for foreign names by default, unless the name is extremely newsworthy. So you’ll see Το συγκινητικό ντοκιμαντέρ για τη ζωή της Amy Winehouse (The moving documentary on Amy Winehouse’s life) Rehab της Amy Winehouse, σε διασκευή των Vocal Adrenaline. (Rehab by Amy Winehouse, arranged by […]
Why do we learn Ancient Greek and Latin using the modern alphabet and not the ancient ones used at the time?
It’s an interesting question, with a boring answer. Because there’s no point. Let’s break that down though. 1. Right up until the 19th century, the main language being written in Greek script was Ancient Greek; and right up until the 17th, the main language being written in Roman script was Latin. The script hands and […]
Why do we need to capitalize “I” and the days of the weeks in English?
No disagreement with the answers here. I’ll philosophise a bit more generally: Each language authority or community ends up with a particular set of conventions about punctuation and capitalisation—or borrows them from a more prestigious language. You only become aware of alternate ways of doing things if you’re exposed to other communities. And it only […]
What alphabets are not used in mathematics and why?
Not a mathematician, but: Mathematics as practiced in the West is a European invention, and it calls for its symbols on European patrimony. That means: Roman (italics, to differentiate from text) Including Fraktur if you want to spice things up And avoiding diacritics, not because they aren’t old (disagree with Martin Ekman’s answer to What […]
If the compound words, “insofar,” and “inasmuch” require that they be followed by “as”, why haven’t we made the leap to “insofaras,” and “inasmuchas”?
Constituency. If people are going to run words together, they don’t so randomly. They run words together when the words form a syntactic grouping. And the stop running words together when they run into a syntactic break. A clause like “in so far as I am able” is analysed syntactically as: [in [so far]] [as […]
Is there any language that uses the Greek Alphabet other than Greek?
Currently, no. Historically, Greek has been used routinely to write other languages, including the Bactrian language (hence Sho (letter) ), Karamanli Turkish, and Albanian. Answered 2016-01-13 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Is-there-any-language-that-uses-the-Greek-Alphabet-other-than-Greek/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Which language that uses the Latin alphabet has the most accents and diacritics in the world?
Counting distinct diacritics on the Wikipedia page Diacritic , and ignoring the distinction between diacritics that generate new letters and diacritics that don’t: Vietnamese has nine: horn, circumflex, breve, bar (đ), acute, grave, tilde, underdot, and hoi (mini-question mark) Livonian has six (macron, umlaut, ogonek, superdot, tilde, hacek), but wins points for multiply stacked diacritics, […]
Why is ‘selfie’ use suffix -ie instead of -y?
Selfie is an Australian coinage: No, a Drunken Australian Man Did Not Coin the Word Selfie. (The article disputes only that the particular guy came up with it, not that it was coined in Australia.) The Australian suffix used to coin cutesy abbreviations of words (hypocoristics) is conventionally spelled as –ie, not –y—even when it […]
Spelling: Why can’t we officially remove silent letters from English words and otherwise make English more consistent?
It’s not just that the words came from languages where the silent letters used to be pronounced. It’s also that silent letters were reintroduced by pedants, to remind people of the languages they came from, though they had long since passed out of pronunciation. Latin debitum went to French and Middle English dette (via *debte). […]
Why does the pronunciation of the letter ‘J’ vary so much throughout different languages?
Because /j/ (English y) is a palatal phoneme, and palatals are historically unstable. (See for example Nick Nicholas’ answer to Linguistics: In Indo-European languages using a Latin alphabet, what’s up with these two letters “ch” that are pronounced (phonetics) so differently?) Rob Kerr’s answer is correct in principle, but the variation between German, English, French, […]