Re: Vowel romanization

Tristan McLeay wrote:
>On Sun, 22 Feb 2004, Ray Brown wrote:
>>In fact, the dual alphabet system is an odd aberration, found only, I
>>believe, in the modern Roman, Greek & Cyrillic systems. Older alphabets
>>knew of no such system and, till the present day, the Hebrew & Arabic
>>alphabets have no such dual systems, nor do the abugidas of India &
>>Ethiopia, nor the Korean hangul alphabet nor, AFAIK any other alphabet,
>>abjad or abugida.
>
>doesn't or didn't the georgian alphabet do it?
In fact, no.  The older alphabets, Asomtavruli/Mrglovani and
Nusxuri, have not been in wide use for about a thousand years.
Ak'ak'i Shanidze (19th-20th century Georgian linguist and
grammarian) proposed using some of the letters from the Asomtavruli
for proper names and for beginning sentences, in effect creating
two cases, but this never caught on.

> (i know there are three,
>and I thought two are or were used together as uppercase and lowercase, no
>doubt influenced by the roman alphabet?)
There were simply three variants, and none of them had specific
'case' connotations.  Mkhedruli superceded the other two long
before the notion of 'case' existed in the West.

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