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

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"

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