Re: YO, ho ho, and a bottle of vodka

From: John Cowan (cowan@mercury.ccil.org)
Date: Tue Oct 30 2001 - 22:00:39 EST


John H. Jenkins scripsit:

> Just to swerve the topic of conversation here, in the "E" for effort
> department, what about a statue to the Emperor Claudius for at least
> trying to add letters to the Latin alphabet? And does anybody know what
> the letters *were*?

No problem.

There were three letters, inverted F (not clear if inverted or turned),
antisigma, and RIGHT TACK.

The inverted F was used for the consonantal value of U/V, to disambiguate
it from the vocalic use.

The antisigma, whose form is not clear (it was probably a reversed lunate
sigma, but may have looked more like a curvy-armed asterisk) was used
in place of the digraph BS, whose phonetic value in Latin was /ps/.
Greek psi was probably not used by Claudius because in Western Greek
usage it stood for /x/, written chi in Attic Greek.

The RIGHT TACK represented /y/, the vowel of Greek upsilon, and was
used in borrowings from Greek.

-- 
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
Please leave your values        |       Check your assumptions.  In fact,
   at the front desk.           |          check your assumptions at the door.
     --sign in Paris hotel      |            --Miles Vorkosigan



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