Re: OT? Languages with letters that always take diacriticals

From: Radovan Garabik (garabik@melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk)
Date: Tue Mar 16 2004 - 04:10:31 EST

  • Next message: Marco Cimarosti: "RE: OT? Languages with letters that always take diacriticals"

    On Mon, Mar 15, 2004 at 09:53:30PM -0800, Curtis Clark wrote:
    > Are there any languages that use letters with diacriticals, but *never*
    > use the base letter without diacriticals? A made-up example to explain
    > what made me think of it: Let's say a language has "ö", to represent the
    > same sound that it does in German, but not "o", because the language
    > lacks the sound represented by that letter in common European languages

    Almost all languages using latin script. They use "i" with dot above,
    but not "ı" without. Turkish is the (almost) only language that has both :-)

    And Belorussian, which has "й" but not "и"
    (question is, should "й" be considered letter with diacritics -
    generally it is considered a separate full-featured letter, the same as in
    Swedish "å" is considered a letter of its own.)

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