Re: Latin mxedruli, or do we really need capital and small letters?

--- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
>
> > In Greek, you have two forms for minuscule beta
> > (beginning or inside of the word),
>
> _Not_ in Greek texts printed in the anglophone
> world, you don't. Nor AFAIK
> do the Greeks themselves do this.
Interesting remark. I checked in an edition of the
Little Prince (O mikros prigkipas), and it seems that
you're right: in "sto basilia", the initial "b" is has
the same form as in the middle of a word. Yet when I
was learning some ancient Greek, we always wrote the
"b" of "basileus" a different way, more or less like:

 bbb
b   b
bbbb
b   b
bbbbb
b
b

But nowadays, the beta doesn't sound any more like
"b", but like "v". The Greek had to reinvent a new "b"
for foreign words, composed of "m" + "p", like in
"mpar" = "bar".

> > and two for
> > minuscule sigma (inside or end of the word); plus
> the
> > capital forms.
>
> _Positional_ variant - done also in German Fraktur.
>
> At one time Latin alphabets had two forms for lower
> case 's', one which
> looked remarkably like lower case 'f', used
> initially an within words, and
> 's' only at the end. I believe this system did not
> give way to our modern
> system in Britain till the 19th century.
It was so in French too, earlier. I don't know when it
was abandoned. I believe the written German "ess-zed"
also derives from that ancient form of s.

> On the other hand, I have seen Greek texts printed
> with just a single form
In my book, there are still two different forms for
"s"; and in another manual I can see that it is so for
cursives too.

(I just noticed that my (modern Greek) manual uses the
"b" I drawed before as the printed lowercase form,
while the other book uses only the other form...)




=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)


	
		
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