Re: More orthographic miscellanea (was: Chinese Romanization)

On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 15:42:10 -0400, John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote:

> Ray Brown scripsit:
>
>> But the rounded front vowels were not denoted by o-umlaut &
>> u-umlaut in Azeri and |?| (s with comma or cedilla) was not, according
>> to
>> my sources, introduced to Azeri until the 1933 reform which was _after_
>> the adoption of the Roman alphabet by the Turks. The letter was already
>> in
>> use in Romanian and this must surely have been the source its adoption
>> in
>> Turkish.
>
> If it were so, the Turks would surely have adopted it in the form
> of s-comma-below rather than s-cedilla.  So while the Romanian usage
> probably accounts for the pronunciation of Turkish s-cedilla, it seems
> to me unlikely to be the immediate source of its form.
OTOH, it's easy to me to see {s-comma} as {s-squiggle}, and given the
existing squiggle in {c-cedilla}, the use of {cedilla} for the squiggle
under the |s| would seem to me a logical jump to make. Most print in
newspapers and books is small enough to make the difference trivial (and
indeed, ISO deemed it trivial enough to not distinguish {s-cedilla} from
{s-comma} until recently).

Then again, I'm no master typographer, nor turkologist, but it's easy for
me to see where it could have been a direct influence.






Paul