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From: andersa@kuling.UUCP (Anders Andersson)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Computers and human languages
Message-ID: <480@kuling.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 22-Aug-87 18:28:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: kuling.480
Posted: Sat Aug 22 18:28:01 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Aug-87 21:43:53 EDT
References: <218@astra.necisa.oz> <142700010@tiger.UUCP> <2792@phri.UUCP> <8708171253.AA21033@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu> <111@quick.UUCP>
Reply-To: andersa@kuling.UUCP (Anders Andersson)
Organization: Uppsala University, Sweden
Lines: 24
Xref: mnetor comp.std.internat:154 sci.lang:1196

In article <111@quick.UUCP> srg@quick.UUCP (Spencer Garrett) writes:
>I was told once (by a respected linguist, as I recall) that English and
>Russian are the ONLY two languages written with unaccented alphabets.  I

That depends on the definition of "accented". A Russian "J" is simply an "I"
(a reversed "N") with a kind of U-arc on top of it, and they are sorted the
same. "E" has an umlaut-like accent which changes the vowel from "ye" to
"yo", but this seldom shows up in print (except for dictionaries, which also
use common acute accent to show pronounciation). There are the hard and soft
signs which have no phonetic value of their own, but they look like ordinary
letters. I think it's funny that they are relevant in sorting, just as if the
apostrophe should have it's own place in the English and French alphabets...

Anyway, it's true that accents don't play such a big role in Russian as they
do in French or Czech. English is probably the least complicated in this
matter, but I don't consider the English alphabet absolutely "pure" in some
accentophobic sense. Every alphabet has its history of anomalies.

Disclaimer: I'm NOT an educated linguist, just an amateur. Although I hold
the above for true, any linguist could probably provide more detail.
-- 
Anders Andersson, Dept. of Computer Systems, Uppsala University, Sweden
Phone: +46 18 183170
UUCP: andersa@kuling.UUCP (...!{seismo,mcvax}!enea!kuling!andersa)