Re: USAGE: No rants! (USAGE: di"f"thong)

Keith Gaughan wrote:


|  3. Because it's easier to recycle two existing letters than to
|     introduce new ones (languages using Cyrillic being an obvious
|     example to the contrary).

That's only half true. Indeed a lot of ex-USSR langs using Cyrillic use
additional or modified letters. But some of them, esp. langs of the Northern
Caucasus (including Turkic langs of Caucasus, like Kumyk and
Karachay-Balkar), use digraphs, and even a few trigraphs. The modifying
element is usually "Roman digit one" (Unicode U+04C0, for some strange
reasons called "palochka"), "hard sign" (Unicode U+042A/U+044A) and "soft
sign" (Unicode U+042C/U+044C). E.g. /q/ in Kumyk is represented with a
digraph къ.

-- Yitzik

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