Re: OT? Languages with letters that always take diacriticals

From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Tue Mar 16 2004 - 08:09:48 EST

  • Next message: Marion Gunn: "Re: OT? Languages with letters that always take diacriticals"

    On 16/03/2004 01:24, Marco Cimarosti wrote:

    >Curtis Clark wrote:
    >
    >
    >>Are there any languages that use letters with diacriticals,
    >>but *never* use the base letter without diacriticals?
    >>
    >>
    >
    >AFAIK, Thaana is such a case.
    >
    >Unlike Indic scripts, Thaana has no inherent vowel, so each consonant letter
    >always takes either a vowel mark or the sukuun (= no-vowel mark).
    >
    >_ Marco
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    Well, the same in Hebrew and Arabic if written with full vowels. In a
    fully pointed Hebrew text some base characters should never appear
    without any diacritic - although most letters can be completely
    unpointed when word final (but not non-final forms), and alef, he and
    yod are unpointed when silent.

    Transliterated Arabic is likely to have g with breve (or maybe with some
    other diacritic) but no g. But I'm not sure if that is an official
    orthography anywhere. 

    -- 
Peter Kirk
peter@qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Mar 16 2004 - 08:45:38 EST