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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Spanish accents
In-Reply-To: millert@babbage.csee.usf.edu's message of 24 Nov 1994 18:51:36 GMT
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	<aldersonCzDrA8.DKy@netcom.com> <3b2nbo$d1e@mother.usf.edu>
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 1994 02:07:58 GMT
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In article <3b2nbo$d1e@mother.usf.edu> millert@babbage.csee.usf.edu
(Timothy Miller) writes:

>Richard M. Alderson III (alderson@netcom.com) wrote:

>:This is really the wrong way to look at it.  A better way is to view
>:<e+acute> as a separate unitary grapheme which represents an entirely
>:different phoneme than the graphemes <e+grave> or <e+circumflex> or <e>.

>Ok... so what purpose do the other accents serve?  I've asked this before but
>never got an adequate answer.  What does grave DO?  And in places where
>circumflex isn't a missing 's', what does it do?

*IN WHAT LANGUAGE*?

"Accents" are used to extend the basic Graeco-Roman alphabet to express sounds
not previously encountered by the creators of same.  It's easier that inventing
completely new graphemes:  Take a grapheme used to express a phoneme similar to
that intended, and modify it by adding to it, and call it a new letter.

There is no rhyme or reason to the choices made, as they are the cumulative
result of more than 2000 years of use by more or less schooled writers.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
