From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Tue Mar 04 2003 - 15:10:50 EST
At 11:35 AM 3/4/2003, Frank da Cruz wrote:
>I just noticed that upper and/or lower case letters D, I, L, and T
>with caron (hacek) are sometimes displayed with an apostrophe instead
>of a caron (and sometimes not). Is there any rhyme or reason to
>this?
In the Slovak orthography, the lowercase d, l and t are normally written
with the 'apostrophe' form of the accent. Of the uppercase letters, only
the L should normally be written with the 'apostrophe' form of the accent;
the D and T should be written with the normal caron/hacek form. The C/c and
Z/z are written with the caron/hacek form in both upper and lowercase. The
reason for the distinction is, I believe, that the d, l and t with the
aprostrophe mark indicate palatalisation (softening) of the unmarked
consonant, whereas the c and z with caron indicate distinct consonants. In
the uppercase letters, presumably because of the lack of convenient space
for the apostrophe relative to the T and D, this form of the mark is only
retained for L.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
It is necessary that by all means and cunning,
the cursed owners of books should be persuaded
to make them available to us, either by argument
or by force. - Michael Apostolis, 1467
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