Re: Con-Alphabets & Real Languages

Thomas R. Wier scripsit:
> Quoting laokou <laokou@...>:
>
> > From: "jogloran"
> >
> > > Christian Thalmann wrote:
> >
> > > > Inspired by the different modes of Tengwar, I added a few more
> > > > characters to my original con-alphabet for Obrenje to allow more
> > for
> > > > more language modes.  It seems to work nicely with English, German
> > > and
> > > > Latin so far.
> >
> > > It's quite nice and all, but realistically, other than for the
> > > enjoyment of the creator, is there any reason to adapt one's script
> > > to other (natural) languages?
> >
> > Cultural proximity? Latin imported k, x, y, and z from Greek, no? I'm
> > not a Latinist, but "x" seemed to catch on, while k, y, and z, were
> > used mostly for Greek imports.
>
> IIRC, <k> and <x> were original to the Latin alphabet straight
> <k> survived in some very archaic circumstances,
> e.g. <Kalends>, but by the Classical period had been edged out
> almost completely by <c>, which originally stood for [g].  When
> Augustus instituted a spelling reform to distinguish /g/ from
> /k/, he put a small slash on the <C> to give the capital version
> of <G>.
Not Augustus, but another Roman some three centuries earlier:

     The first Roman to open a fee-paying school, a freedman named
     Spurius Carvilius Ruga, amended the Latin script by replacing the
     seventh letter, Z, which represented the unneeded Greek sound /dz/,
     with a new letter, LATIN LETTER C WITH STROKE, which we have come
     to know as G. (One may symphathize with Ruga, whom we can imagine
     found it tiresome to explain to people how to pronounce RVCA before
     he solved the problem by deriving G.)

        --Michael Everson, "On the status of the Latin letter thorn [...]"
        http://www.evertype.com/standards/wynnyogh/thorn.html

--
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
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