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Category: Writing Systems
What language uses 7’s and !’s?
Squamish language uses <7> conventionally to substitute for IPA <ʔ>, and I can imagine other languages doing so if their Romanisation was influenced by linguists. Squamish doesn’t use <!>, which turns up in Khoisan languages for clicks (Exclamation mark). Not convinced there’s a language that uses both, but who knows… For the same reason of […]
Why don’t we all use the IPA?
Nice idea, but of course even spelling reform is near impossible, let along script reform—unless you’re Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and your country is post-Ottoman Turkey. And even when your language community adopts a script from scratch, practicality means the script will look a lot closer to the local majority or prestige language’s script. And the […]
Could emojis ever replace written language? Why or why not?
If you want emojis to be not just a bunch of nouns, but the basis of a full written language, with verbs and prepositions and pronouns—then you’re going to need to supplement emojis with some sort of grammatical sign system. They will end up looking a lot more like Blissymbols. Answered 2015-11-23 [Originally posted on […]
In Indo-European languages using a Latin alphabet, what’s up with these two letters “ch” that are pronounced (phonetics) so differently?
Roman alphabet digraphs were invented with the digraphs Latin used to represent Greek aspirated letters: <ch th ph>. So <ch> was available very very early on to languages using the Roman alphabet, to represent new sounds. Palatal sounds are notoriously unstable phonologically: once /k/ goes to [c] (as it did in late Latin), it can […]
Why do Greek and Cyrillic have different collation order than Roman alphabet?
The collation of Greek and Roman are pretty similar, as Philip said, once you factor out archaisms, and the tendency to insert new letters at the end of the alphabet. The original Roman alphabet matches to the original Greek alphabet pretty well: A ΑB ΒC ΓD ΔE ΕF ϜG —— ΖH Η— ΘI ~ J […]
Why doesn’t English have diacritics?
Been thinking about this question for a little while. I don’t have a firm answer, but I do have some idle chatter. tl;dr (a) English does not have consonant diacritics because England isn’t in Eastern Europe.English does not have vowel diacritics because (b) initially neither did French, and (b) by the time diacritics could have […]
When was the uncial Greek script adapted and abandoned?
Thx for A2A. Being lazy, I refer you to An introduction to Greek and Latin palaeography : Thompson, Edward Maunde, Sir, 1840-1929 : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive . From what he says (with nice photos for 1912), the uncial starts in codices 3rd century AD, but is anticipated in papyri in the […]
Why do the names of many Greek letters end in “a”?
The following is intelligent guesswork. In ancient Greek, words were constrained to end in a vowel, /n/ or /s/.The Phoenecian letter names did not fit that pattern, so they were adapted to end in vowels. Of the available vowels, nouns most frequently ended in alpha (neuters or feminines) or eta (feminines). Omega, iota and upsilon […]
Sorting of breathings and accents in Unicode
Microsoft’s implementation of Unicode, as a recent post by Michael Kaplan points out, sorts ἒ and ἕ as the same character. In fact, it sorts identically any vowel with acute and rough breathing, and the same vowel with grave and smooth breathing. Why is it so? Allow me to get my geek on. You may […]
Mariupolitan transcribed through Russian ears
Challenging people on what phonemes they’re hearing, when they’re analysing a language: that’s thankless stuff. There are subtle continua of phonetics, and if you’re actually doing this kind of thing for a living, you rely on spectrograms and electropalatograms, with chocolate paste to tell where your tongue is actually moving. One’s ears? They hear what […]