Re: German 0364 COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER E

From: John Cowan (cowan@mercury.ccil.org)
Date: Sun Dec 28 2003 - 20:40:23 EST

  • Next message: John Hudson: "Re: German 0364 COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER E"

    Doug Ewell scripsit:

    > Compare these to the Greek distinction between ?? and "word-final" ??. I
    > would have assumed that current Greek usage of ?? and ?? is parallel to
    > 18th-century English usage of ?? and s, but TUS says (p. 176) that "use
    > of the final sigma is a matter of spelling convention," so that
    > assumption is probably overly simplistic.

    Full details on sigma are at
    http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/dist/sigma.html . In short:
    sigma followed by period is final if the period marks a sentence end,
    but medial if it marks an abbreviation; in dialect writing where a
    dialect drops a final vowel before a sigma, the sigma remains medial
    (and an apostrophe may or may not be added); languages other than Greek
    don't necessarily obey the rules.

    Similar statements can be made about Hebrew final consonants (in
    particular, Yiddish uses a non-final p for -p, since final p means -f).

    -- 
    "Take two turkeys, one goose, four              John Cowan
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