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Y not? (was: Of Haa/hhet & other matters)

From:Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Sunday, January 23, 2005, 7:31
On Saturday, January 22, 2005, at 12:37 , J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:

> On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 07:26:08 +0000, Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> > wrote:
[snip]
>> The Welsh have been using |y| for ages to represent /@/. >> But I notice that while there are characters in Unicode for y-acute, >> y-circumflex and y-diaeresis, there does not seem to be one for y-grave >> - >> strange. > > Yes, there is such a letter, and a whole bunch of other combinations of "y > with" ..., have a look at the following (a useful page, I think):
Yep - found them, thanks :)
> http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/search.htm?q=y+with > > Of the many different uses of the letter |y|, I like best that Welsh use, > since the other uses of |y| can be represented with other letters, but > there's no other letter for that one.
Strictly, the Welsh |y| has two uses: 1. 'clear' [1] (high unrounded central vowel)* - in final syllable of polysyllabic words, and generally in monosyllabic words (exceptions shown below). 2. 'obscure' [@] elsewhere in pollysyllabic words, and in the following monosyllabic words: yn (predicate marker); yn (in); y(r) (definite article); fy (my) - and occasionally in borrowed words like 'nyrs' (nurse). *in north Wales; pronounced like /i/ in the south. ====================================================== On Saturday, January 22, 2005, at 12:38 , Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Hi! > > Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> writes:
[snip]
>> The Welsh have been using |y| for ages to represent /@/. > > I though about that, too.
[snip]
> Because iso-8859-1 does not have them, I did not currently use it, but > in Unicode, it's U+1EF3. There are: > > 00FD LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH ACUTE > 00FF LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS > 0177 LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH CIRCUMFLEX > 01B4 LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH HOOK > 0233 LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH MACRON > 1E8F LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH DOT ABOVE > 1E99 LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH RING ABOVE > 1EF3 LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH GRAVE > 1EF5 LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH DOT BELOW > 1EF7 LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH HOOK ABOVE > 1EF9 LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH TILDE > > I must check whether my browser can display them.
I've checked on my Mac. My version of Mozilla does them all except 01B4, Opera does all except 01B4, 1E8F & 1E99, but Internet Explorer is quite hopeless.
> It is *very* *bad* (tm) with Chinese Pinyin accents. Aweful.
It wouldn't be IE, would it? ;)
> And I want it to look good in my browser, of course. :-)
I know the feeling only too well. When you get it looking good in one browser, it looks ghastly in another - blinking bowsers! ====================================================== On Saturday, January 22, 2005, at 02:03 , Andreas Johansson wrote:
> Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>: > >> Of the many different uses of the letter |y|, I like best that Welsh use, >> since the other uses of |y| can be represented with other letters, but >> there's no other letter for that one. > > Needless to say, I, as a Swede, disagree; |y| is, as even the IPA accepts, > to be > used for /y/! This moreover is the original use of the letter.
Yes it was, but I assume you would not use the same argument for |c| = /k/ and |v| = /w/ ;)
> For /@/ I like the Albanian |ë| - schwa sounds like the bastard offspring > of 'e' > and 'ö' to me.
Nah - we anglophones know nothing of 'ö' - but we kind of like [@]. The little sound ought to have its own simple letter. Why not? ;) Ray ======================================================= http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown ray.brown@freeuk.com ======================================================= "If /ni/ can change into /A/, then practically anything can change into anything" Yuen Ren Chao, 'Language and Symbolic Systems"

Replies

Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Michael Poxon <m.poxon@...>