Re: Questions about proposed characters

From: Curtis Clark (jcclark@csupomona.edu)
Date: Sun May 30 1999 - 22:12:48 EDT


At 09:50 AM 5/30/99 -0700, Michael Everson wrote:
>The kind of ligature you are requesting, Adam, would be very bad for your
>language in the long run, because you'd never know whether something was
>spelled <ch> and when <c><h>.

This reminds me of a time when I was lecturing to Venezuelan biology
students in Spanish about the strange scientific (generic) name of our
California poppy, Eschscholzia. It was named after a chap whose German
family (Escholtz) had moved to Russia, resulting in a transliterated name
spelled e-sha-sha-o-el-tse; when it was rendered back into German in order
to be Latinized, the "sch", which was single in the original German family
name, was doubled because of the double "sha". I spelled it in Spanish,
e-ese-ce-ache-ese-ce-ache-[etc.], but realized later that it would be
e-ese-che-ese-che. "Sha" is a single letter in Russian, "sch" is a phoneme
in German, but treated as three letters, and "ch" is a phoneme in Spanish
entered as two letters on a keyboard, but sorted as one.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Curtis Clark http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Biological Sciences Department Voice: (909) 869-4062
California State Polytechnic University FAX: (909) 869-4078
Pomona CA 91768-4032 USA jcclark@csupomona.edu



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