Re: More orthographic miscellanea (was: Chinese Romanization)

On 10 Sep 2004 John Cowan <cowan@CCI...> wrote:

> If it were so, the Turks would surely have adopted it in the form
> of s-comma-below rather than s-cedilla.
  I think any close distinction between these diacritics is a
relatively new process which was made possible by modern
typesetting facilities*.

  E.g. in traditional Czech orthography "hacek" (wedge) was used on
light typefaces and tilde was used on bold ones, i.e. hacek and
tilde were allographs not distinct graphemes. In the middle of the
20th century Rumanian printing-houses were short of a-circumflex,
therefore they began to use i-circumflex instead (with the exeption
of etnomym |Roma^n| and some historic proper names). A-circumflex
was re-introduced again only in 1990's.

  Therefore I do not think that Turks adopted either cedilla or
comma-below. They were used "stroke-below" and the stabilization of
its actual form was a later process both in Turk and Romanian (and
in other languages using stroke-below, etc. Latvian).

  (* The most modern typesetting facilites tend the merge the two
variants again, Rumanian |s,| in defined as s-cedilla in Latin-2
codesets ISO-8859-2, Win-1250.  Cedilla and comma-below are not
distinguished in other specifications, e.g. rfc-1345.)


> Yiddish continued to be written in the Hebrew
  The list of resistants can be extended by Lituanian and Latvian.
But this is still a very small list and consists mainly of nations
having long independent cultural and/or western Judeo-Christian
traditions. And even some of these orthographies was "sovietized",
cf. the "phonetical" re-design of Yiddish in 1926, Armanian reform
in 1922.


> > But I believe the pre-1939 Romanized alphabets have been
> > re-established everywhere now.
>
> Sometimes with changes, as in Turkmenistan.
  Finno-Ugric languages kept Cyrillic orthography, even Zyrien
which had its own "Abur" script. AFAIK Chuvash uses still Cyrillic.
(And what about Kazakh, Kirghiz? My book does not mention that they
would return to Latin in contrast with Turkmen, Tatar.)

  It has to be said, though, the Romanized alphabets are also
Soviet creations in these nations. In case of Turkmens, Latin
script replaced Arab only in 1928 (as many southern Muslim
nations).

-----

On 10 Sep 2004 Ray Brown <ray.brown@FRE...> wrote:

> Yep - the earliest Rumanian text date from the 16th cent IIRC.
  It is the letter of boyar |Neac,su| from 1521. Its facsimile is
available online at
<http://www.cimec.ro/Istorie/neacsu/eng/letter.htm>

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