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From: hmj@tut.fi (Matti J{rvinen)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: "Unaccented" languages
Message-ID: <1687@kuukkeli.tut.fi>
Date: Mon, 24-Aug-87 12:35:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: kuukkeli.1687
Posted: Mon Aug 24 12:35:42 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 25-Aug-87 04:31:03 EDT
References: <8708171253.AA21033@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu> <111@quick.UUCP> <2206@enea.UUCP>
Reply-To: hmj@kuukkeli.UUCP (Hannu-Matti J{rvinen)
Organization: Tampere University of Technology, Finland
Lines: 39

In article <2206@enea.UUCP> sommar@enea.UUCP(Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>In a recent article 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.  

What do you mean by accented alphabet??? Letters like a and o with two
dots are letters of their own in several alphabets, like Swedish and
Finnish.  Finnish, my native language, is, as far as I know, not accented.

>  Let me straighten you out about this confusion. Very few pairs of 
>languages have a common alphabet. Thus, one langauge will probably
>appear "accented" from the point the of other. ("accented" here also
>including umlauts, extra letters, digraphs etc.).

Very strange way to define accent...

> So of course, looking
>from English all other languages may appear accented.
>...
>  Now, if we look at English from a Swedish point of a view, does English
>has any "accents"? Yes, they have W. W exists in Swedish to, but only
>in proper names and is co-sorted with V. If we had dominated the computer

From Finnish point of view English is VERY accented.  Finnish does
NOT have letters like b, c, f, q, w, x and z. g is used only after
n. D is added later.  Those letters are used only in foreign names.

>  For the sake of completeness, we should add that both Swedish and
>English do use "e" with acute accent, mainly in French loan words.

Finnish does not have accent even in loan words.  We simply drop them
off.

>(E.g. "clich'e")
I'd write it "klisee".
-- 
Hannu-Matti Jarvinen, Tampere University of Technology, Finland
Project EAST - European Advanced Software Technology
hmj@tut.fi, hmj@tut.uucp, hmj@tut.funet (tut.ARPA is not the same computer).