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Category: Writing Systems
Why does Greek Wikipedia use the two different spellings (and pronunciations) Όθων ντε Σικόν and Οτόν ντε Σικόν for the Frankish noble Othon de Cicon?
https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%8C%CE%B8%CF%89%CE%BD_%CE%BD%CF%84%CE%B5_%CE%A3%CE%B9%CE%BA%CF%8C%CE%BD What Billy Kerr said. To elaborate: the <Otón> transcription is a phonetic transcription from French. The <Óthōn> transcription is the longstanding traditional hellenisation of Otto; it was used inter alia for King Otto of Greece. It incorporates the –th– of the old spelling Otho; and it ends in –ōn, which makes it declinable. (In […]
How has pronunciation vs written form evolved in the History of English? Why is it so confusing, to the point that you have spelling contests?
Up until the late Middle Ages, English spelling (at least, as we reconstruct it) is not that bad. It is internally consistent, and, importantly, it varies from region to region, because they actually spoke different dialects from region to region. Yeah, the mute final <e> was an annoying way to indicate that a vowel was […]
Why does no one put a period after the P in R.I.P.?
Clearly not noone; but there is a global movement in English away from using periods in abbreviations and acronyms—hence RIP rather than R.I.P. The intermediate form R.I.P looks odd for a reason—why keep some periods in an acronym and not others? But the motivation for it is that abbreviations have been dropping their final period […]
Do I hyphenate “upper middle class family”, if yes, then how?
Yes, hyphenation is less fashionable than it used to be, and yes, people think that it is finicky to introduce a distinction between two levels of punctuation. But may the fire of a thousand Harts and Fowlers rain down on all respondents, for not one of them suggesting as an alternative something involving an en-dash: […]
What language first introduced punctuation such as the period, comma, exclamation point, and question mark?
See Punctuation on Wikipedia. David Crystal has a lovely book out on the history of punctuation: Making a Point. As Adam Mathias Bittlingmayer indicated, there were anticipations of punctuation for a while; the notion of systematically indicating pauses (period, comma) was a Hellenistic Greek invention, which became systematic in the late Empire. Punctuation as we […]
Should primary and ESL teachers use an English alphabet that has the 44 or so phonemes that the language has?
“44 or so”. And there’s your problem. English phonology trap bath palm lot cloth thought The vowels in Received Pronunciation group as: (tɹæp) (bɑːθ pɑːm) (lɒt klɒθ) (θɔːt) They group the same way in Australian English, though as (tɹæp) (bɐːθ pɐːm) (lɔt klɔθ) (θoːt) The vowels in General American, however, group as: (tɹæp bæθ) (pɑːm […]
Does one accentuate French capital letters?
From this forum: France Forum Canadian French routinely accents capital letters, and Microsoft Word obliges them. The Academie Française says you should accent capital letters. France French usually nowadays don’t accent capital letters. Which means the Quebecois, once again, are being more royalist than the king… Answered 2016-09-11 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Does-one-accentuate-French-capital-letters/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Why are uppercase i, lowercase L and the number 1 similar looking?
An unfortunate number of coincidences. The coincidences all ended up converging in Sans Serif Latin script, because a vertical line is a simple thing, and any simplification of glyphs can’t get any simpler than a | . The letter I started as Phoenecian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodh, which did not look like a |: But by the time […]
Could saying words one phoneme at a time have been a common practice before the invention of written language?
Neeraj Mathur is quite right: syllables, not letters. Some circumstantial evidence for this from Ancient Greek drama. When literacy was a very new thing, and the tools of grammatical analysis (such as words) were still not very popular. (https://www.quora.com/Could-sayi…): the differentiation between utterance and word was newfangled with the Greek sophists. Aeschylus avoids Euripides’ new […]
Is there a connection between the two lower case sigmas in Greek and the two lower case s in traditional German writing (black letter / cursive)?
The two certainly originated independently. Blackletter started elongating the medial s in the 8th century (Long s); Greek started using the pre-8th century lunate sigma as a final form, from the 11th century on (Letters). Both Greek and Latin scripts invented lowercase at the same time, but there was no real cultural contact between West […]