Re: What is an alphabet? Re: Optimum number of symbols

Ray Brown wrote:
>
>English, of course, is notorious for using single vowel symbols with
>diphthongal values (unlike French which does the opposite: three symbols
>{eau} for a single vowel [o]).  I believe other instances of single letters
>with diphthongal value do occur outside of English, but none come to mind
>immediately, unless one counts the [ja] & [ju] of Cyrillic.
The Icelandic accented vowels comes to mind; |á|=[au] etc. A'course, these
used to be merely long monophthongs when the spelling was introduced, but
then that's the case of English too.

                                                         Andreas


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