Re: Graeca sine flexione

Hi!

Philip Newton writes:
>...
> I just recently read something on how IPA letters that look as if they
> come from Greek aren't, because they're intended to fit into the Latin
> alphabet typographically. For example, Greek lowercase letters don't
> really have serifs, but IPA "Greek" letters such as phi (top and
> bottom), beta (bottom), and gamma (top) do.
In TeX, it was an issue, too, since the regular Greek letters were
used for maths only at the beginning.  The problem was that these were
all italic so not suited at all to be mixed with other IPA letters.

>...
> I think if I did introduce Cyrillic soft sign into the Greek
> orthography, it would be for forced palatalisation, not for the
> stand-alone [j\], so I'd disunify the two. Then, say, "pjo" (which:
> forced palatalisation after voiceless consonant, [C]), "vjo" (goods:
> forced palatalisation after voiced consonant, [j\]) and "iljo" (sun:
> regular palatalisation, [L]) would be similar, and both different from
> "jo" (son: voiced palatal fricative, [j\]).
>
> Though the sound in "vjo" and "jo" is the same, [j\], I'm not sure
> whether I'd like to use soft sign for the second case, since it's more
> of a consonant post-modifier to me than a stand-alone consonant.
Ok, yes, it definitely is a postmodifier in Russian.  In Bulgarian,
however, the hard sign is a regular vowel (but not the soft sign).
According to my dictionary, there are even some words beginning with a
hard sign.

Anyway, I fully share your view: it might be nicer to distinguish j in
vjo and jo.

In S11, I used the soft sign for /j/ (and to get a symmetry the hard
sign for /w/) because I wanted to get rid of all diacritics, including
dot above.  Strange motivation -- but the result looked quite ok.

> I suppose you could call it Dog Latin (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_Latin ) ...
Boooo, Wikipedia, boooo!

**Henrik

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