Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!olivea!mintaka!ai-lab!life!tmb From: tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) Newsgroups: comp.fonts Subject: Re: Umlaute [was: naive (...question about uncial...) ] Message-ID: Date: 23 May 91 12:04:55 GMT References: <1991Apr24.152455.22367@engage.enet.dec.com> Sender: news@ai.mit.edu Followup-To: comp.fonts Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Lines: 32 In-reply-to: eager@ringworld.Eng.Sun.COM's message of 23 May 91 02:36:56 GMT In article <13863@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> eager@ringworld.Eng.Sun.COM (Michael J. Eager) writes: >In any case, I believe most dialects of English already have more >vowels than any of the languages you mention (certainly more than >Spanish). English has somewhere around 14 vowels. Doesn't it sort of muddy the waters to mix phonemes into a discussion of fonts and orthography? [...] English may have fourteen vowel sounds (I'd really guess at a higher number if you include pronounciations from New England, Manchester, Texas, etc.) but it has 5 (perhaps as many as 7) orthographic vowels: a, e, i, o, u and occasionally y and w. Please quote in a meaningful context. The poster that I responded to essentially said: "These languages have many more 'vowels' [vowel sounds] than English and therefore need diacritical marks to distinguish them." All I did was point out that among those languages using the Roman alphabet, English probably has close to the largest number of 'vowels' (sounds, phonemes), and yet, English seems to get by fine without diacritical marks. German has umlauts; it also has standard orthographic substitutions for them which do not use the dots: ae, oe, ue. Sch, ch, au, mentioned above, are not orthographic substitutions; they _are_ the orthography. Yes, and I am suggesting that "ae", "oe", "ue", and "sz" be restored to their original status as _being_ the orthograpy, rather than being substitutions. Thomas.