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Category: Writing Systems
What is the timeline of the Greek breathings?
I’ve written a fair bit up about this at http://www.opoudjis.net/unicode/… . All secondary research, but it’s secondary research that seems to have been cited at Wikipedia. Your timeline is right: There was a distinct heta letter for /h/, which looked like H, but it was not used in all locations. There was an innovation in […]
What is the twenty-third letter of the Latin alphabet?
I see what you did there, OP. Yes, the 23rd letter of the Latin alphabet depends on which version of the Latin alphabet you’re using: there’s no universal 23rd letter, because there’s no universal repertoire of Latin letters. Some languages have fewer letters than English. Some have more letters than English. Some languages count letters […]
Do letters exist?
Phonemes exist. That’s one of the key findings of 20th century linguistics. Where do they exist? In the Noosphere I guess; but they are mental constructs which underlie not only our articulation of language, but also our mental organisation and understanding of language. So unlike a lot that is in the noosphere, they do have […]
Instead of creating Pinyin, why didn’t the CCP use IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)?
Practical Roman alphabets do need to stick as close to ASCII as possible. Particularly before computerised typography, getting hold of letters outside the Latin-1 and Latin-2 repertoire (letters and standard diacritics) was painful, and you’d avoid it if you could. So if you had a choice between tʰiantɕʰi pu xao and Tianqi bu hao … […]
Among languages that presently use a non-Roman script, which are most likely to romanize in the coming decades?
As I groused at Brian Collins in his answer: it’s always political. Scripts are bound to identity, and the major vehicle of identity in our age is the nation-state. So scripts that are tied up with the nation-state as emblematic—say, Greek or Thai—aren’t going away in a hurry. Minority scripts in a country have been […]
What is the history of Greek punctuation?
I have written some pointers about the history of Greek punctuation on my Greek Unicode Issues website: Punctuation. To summarise: The basics of punctuation as we know it in both Latin in Greek were in place by around the 10th century, including commas, periods, and interrogatives. They appear to have developed independently, although they had […]
How have English punctuation conventions changed over the centuries?
David Crystal’s recent book Making a Point has a rundown of the changes and a very clear framework for discussing them. I’m not going to do it justice, especially because I don’t remember every bit of it. But: There has been a tussle in the history of English punctuation from the invention of printing on, […]
How would you use a different alphabet to write your native language?
This is a much-beloved topic of mine. There are a suite of ad hoc romanisations of non-Roman alphabets, devised for the ASCII-based internet (and phones). Greeklish is the Greek one. And Greeklish varies widely from practitioner to practitioner, mainly as to whether it’s a transcription (capturing the sounds of letters in Roman characters), or a […]
How did you learn the International Phonetic Alphabet, and how long did it take?
Two or three lectures spent on understanding the axes of the IPA charts: place of articulation, manner of articulation; vowel height, frontness, and rounding. A round of the class all calling out the cardinal vowels in unison. /iiiii eeeee ɛɛɛɛɛ æææææ, uuuuu ooooo ɔɔɔɔɔ ɑɑɑɑɑ/. I got to make my first year students do that, […]
Why is there no Unicode Italic H?
Because it was already created elsewhere, as U+210E PLANCK CONSTANT ℎ. Unicode will not differentiate between the symbol for the Planck Constant, and a mathematical italicised lowercase h (which is what the Planck Constant is). Every character has a story #20: U+210e (PLANCK CONSTANT) Answered 2016-12-07 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Why-is-there-no-Unicode-Italic-H/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]