Re: Umlauts (was Re: Elves and Ill Bethisad)

Steg Belsky ha tera a:

> Actually, i now feel that the dots on lowercase I's and J's are
> extraneous ornaments.  I learned this attitude from a Spanish teacher
> of mine, in fact, and got used to it when using pens that didn't make
> dots very well.  Now i only dot my |i|s and |j|s when my handwriting
is
> so bad that they can be confused with other letters - usually |e| for
> |i| and |g| for |j|.
Well, the dot on |i| arose, I believe, sometime in the middle ages
because sequences of |i|, |n|, |m|, and |u| were hard to read - each of
these letters was made from a sequence of strokes called "minims" - one
for |i|, two for |n| and |u| (originally joined at the top for |n| and
at the bottom for |u|, but it didn't always work that way), and three
for |m|.  So sequences like |in| and |m| could look identical.  So the
convention arose of adding a dot to |i|, so that it at least could be
told apart from the other letters.  (|j|, of course, wasn't yet a
distinct letter from |i|, just a variant.)  Sorry, that's probably not
explained very well.  I agree, the dots are quite dispensible.

Estel

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