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Re: Optimum number of symbols

From:Lars Henrik Mathiesen <thorinn@...>
Date:Monday, May 20, 2002, 21:11
> Date: Mon, 20 May 2002 14:42:20 -0400 > From: Jake X <alwaysawake247@...> > > All the Roman letters were originally named as the sound and "eh" > (from bet), but english pronounces them as it does because of a > glide. The letter "h" comes from the french who named that letter by > its shape (there is no french phoneme for [h]).
Well, almost. The original Roman alphabet had pretty regular letter names, /a:/, /be:/, /ke:/, /de:/ and so on, probably inherited from the Etruscans --- the exceptions were the two velars /ka:/ and /qu:/, /ha:/ probably by analogy with /ka:/ (the Etruscan value was some sort of /e/), and the unvoiced fricatives /ef/, /es/ and /eks/. The alphabet probably had three velar stops because the distinction palatal/velar/labialized was phonemic somewhere along the chain of borrowing, but I'm not sure where --- so the original names were more like /ce/, /ka/, /k_wu/. I'm pretty sure the Romans themselves didn't make the distinction phonemically, and that the context-dependent use of the three letters was a matter of tradition --- but there's bound to have been some allophonic variation in those directions still, as evidenced by the later development of /k/ before /e/ and /i/. Note: This was before the reintroduction of the Greek letters /y:psilon/ and /ze:ta/ that were dropped somewhere, but felt to be needed when the Romans bought into Greek culture. (X may also have been reacquired then, I don't remember --- but in any case it got a name by analogy with the older ones, as did G when it was invented). J and V are even later additions, one getting it's name from Greek /io:ta/, the other by analogy --- but if the Romans had had it, perhaps it would have been /ev/? About the French name for H: There's another story, the references for which I didn't check out, that the name was changed to /aha/ when /h/ was lost in initial position, and then sharpened to /axa/ when /h/ was dying out altogether. The h in the current spelling of the name would then be spurious, or folk-etymological, since it is felt as quite natural that the name should begin with the letter. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)