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From: comm@zeus.bris.ac.uk (D. Dawbarn)
Subject: Re: Languages written without diacritics
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Date: Thu, 5 Dec 1996 18:24:18 GMT
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Halldor Arnason (harnason@u.washington.edu) wrote:
: comm@zeus.bris.ac.uk (M. Murray) writes:
: 
: >Halldor Arnason (harnason@u.washington.edu) wrote:
: >: 
: >: This leads me to ask, what is a diacritical?  As far as Icelandic is
: >: concerned , , , , , , , ,  and  are all letters in their own
: >: right.  Does that make Icelandic a language without diacriticals?
: 
: >All depends what you mean by a letter, and what you mean by a 
: >diacritical.
: 
: That was kind of my question.
: 
: >On my understanding of the words, Swedish and Icelandic both 
: >use diacriticals.
: 
: Mine too, but I guess in McGregor's understanding is that they (at least 
: Swedish) do not.

And it's McGregor's attitude I'm attacking.
 
: >To say that  in some way is not an A with an acute 
: >accent is nonsense.

: And then again, saying that  is an A with an acute accent can also be
: considered nonsense.  The mark that differentiate between A and  is not
: an acute accent mark, it just looks identical to the acute accent mark
: used in some other languages.

This is just the kind of nonsense I was complaining about. Just because
you call this thing 'the mark that differentiates between A and ' and I,
and anyone who knows French, call it 'an acute accent mark' doesn't mean
it's not the same thing. 

Think about what it is, not what people call it. Call a spade a spade, and
call a diacritical a diacritical. It's like the arguments whether the two
dots over a letter are an umlaut or a diaresis. Two dots are still two
dots. The two dots over a Swedish  are the same as the two dots over a
German  (to prove it, I've just used the same keystroke to produce both
of them). If Steve MacGregor tries to tell me that the first  is
different from the second , I'll just ask him whether
				
is one letter or a letter with a diacritical. I can answer the question
easily enough. If he says he can't answer the question without me telling
him which language it's in (and he knows I won't tell him) then his world
view has some problems.

: The letters A, E, I, , O, , U, , Y, 
: and  are just ordinary vowels in Icelandic, ,  and  are diphthongs and
:  is a semivowel.

If I asked someone what the difference between A, I, O, U, and Y on the one 
hand and , , , , and  on the other hand were, I would seriously 
question his/her intelligence if he/she didn't point out that the latter 
four all had an acute accent (mark, little dash, or whatever). Ordinary 
vowels they may be under some Icelandic definitions, in the real world 
they're letters with diacriticals.

: All these letters are referred to by their own name, but never A with some
: mark or an other.  It would sound just as weird as calling o a closed c or
: an m an n with an extra arc.

I'm afraid the above applies to Iceland only. About 100,000 people know
the Icelandic names of these letters. Several billions can see they are
letters with diacriticals. 

-- 
Martin Murray :: School of Chemistry, Bristol University, BS8 1TS, England
