USAGE double written consonants (was: Orthography of palatalized consonants)

On Sunday, January 16, 2005, at 12:32 , kcasada wrote:

> Spanish-speakers I work with NEVER use the word "tilde," and I was
> blanking on
> it--thanks!!
I know that - in Spanish 'tilde' simple means "superscript diacritic", and
more often than not simple refers to the acute accent.  It is derived,
with metathesis of two middle consonants, from the Latin 'titulus' I meant
'more commonly called tilde in English' - sorry for the misunderstanding.

I assume the English usage must have arisen from a misunderstanding of
older (now obsolete?) Spanish usage of 'n con tilde' (n with superscript
diacritic) for the letter _eñe_ /eJe/.

> This convention of doubled letters reminds me that I just learned that New
> Testament Greek doubled the gamma to represent the sound English spells as
> "ng"; does modern Greek still do this?
It does indeed. But the sound is the English _ng_ in _finger_ [Ng] (two
sounds), not the normal pronunciation of _ng_ in _singer_ [N]. Gamma is
used to denote homorganic nasal before kappa, gamma & khi in the modern
language just as it did in the ancient language.

The big difference between ancient & modern use is that in ancient Greek
gamma was also used before mu to denote [N] (this was in fact the origin
of gamma = [N]). In the spoken language ancient [Nm] --> [mm] --> [m].
Where gamma-mu occurs in learned words in modern Greek, the spelling
pronunciation [Gm] is now used.

In many ancient inscriptions we do in fact often find _nu_ used before
velars to denote [N]. But there seems to have been a desire to spell [N]
the same way in all environments and thus in the spelling of Athens of the
5th cent BCE the convention was adopted of using gamma to denote {n}
whether before [m] or before velar plosives. This was possible because
*[gg] never occurred. Indeed, the voiced plosives were never geminate in
most ancient dialects - the only notable exception was that some dialects
pronounced zeta as [dd].

> Krista
>
>> ===== Original Message From Constructed Languages List
> <CONLANG@...> =====
[snip]
>> This is correct - and "squiggly line", more commonly called a tilde, was
>> once merely a superscript _n_ - hence its use in Portuguese above
>> nasalized vowels.
Ray
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"If /ni/ can change into /A/, then practically anything
can change into anything"
          Yuen Ren Chao, 'Language and Symbolic Systems"