Re: TATAP => TATAR

From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Tue Sep 12 2000 - 13:50:01 EDT


Michael Everson wrote:

> I don't see how. It isn't difficult to learn the Cyrillic alphabet, and it
> isn't difficult to learn the Latin alphabet. Look at Greece: everybody
> knows both the Greek and Latin alphabets. It's on all the street signs.

Quite right. They are all just local variants of a single archetype,
along with Coptic. Armenian and Georgian, though....

> though that doesn't mean that Latin isn't better suited to Turkic
> languages than Cyrillic is.

Why so? Neither one has enough vowel letters however you look at it
(unless you use the Cyrillic vowels in very un-Cyrillic ways).
And Cyrillic is good at shibilants, which Latin is not.

-- 
There is / one art                   || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
no more / no less                    || http://www.reutershealth.com
to do / all things                   || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
with art- / lessness                 \\ -- Piet Hein



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:13 EDT