On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 3:37 AM, Piers Hemy <piers@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The Slavonic languages have plenty of vowels too, even more than German and
> Latin - such as the vowel in "chrzaszcz", which is actually a nasal, using a
> different letter from a normal "a" (but you can't see it in ASCII text).
>
> The issue (n.b. it's not a problem!) is simply how to represent consonantal
> sounds not present in Latin using a Latin alphabet. The sounds are common,
> more or less, to all Slavonic languages, Russian, Polish, Serbo-Croat and
> all points in between. The languages which use the Cyrillic alphabet have
> some "invented" letters for the sounds that did not exist in Greek, but
> otherwise use Greek letters. Thus the (invented) Cyrillic letter which
> looks like two "k"s back to back is used where Polish uses "rz" for the same
> sound. But the (Greek) "x" is used where Polish uses "ch" for the same
> sound.
>
> It might hurt Nathan to hear this, but it would have been easier to use the
> Cyrillic alphabet for Polish! It's not a question of who has the more vowels
> (or consonants), but who had the most letters to spare - and the Latin
> Alphabet wasn't the best foundation. And who do we blame for all of this?
> Ninth century competition between Rome and Constantinople to spread the
> Roman and Orthodox spheres of influence!
>
> Piers
Thanks for this, Piers. Very interesting.
Makes one wonder if many of the mysteries of the Hebrew bible would be
cleared up if we could just go back to the original Chaldean!
Joel (tower of Babel) W.
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