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From: sjaak@vuecho.psy.vu.nl (Sjaak Schuurman)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Computers and human languages (was Re: What is a byte)
Message-ID: <133@wundt.vuecho.psy.vu.nl>
Date: Tue, 15-Sep-87 19:13:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: wundt.133
Posted: Tue Sep 15 19:13:03 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 18-Sep-87 04:17:57 EDT
References: <218@astra.necisa.oz> <142700010@tiger.UUCP> <2792@phri.UUCP> <2351@mmintl.UUCP> <141@minya.UUCP>
Reply-To: sjaak@psy.vu.nl (Sjaak Schuurman)
Organization: VU Psychologie, Amsterdam
Lines: 38
Summary: One more language with an 'accentless' alphabet
Xref: mnetor comp.std.internat:239 sci.lang:1367

In article <141@minya.UUCP> jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers) writes:
>
>There's also Serbo-Croation, which has a set of (5) marks, but you very
>rarely see them outside of childrens' books and language texts.

In this case, it is time to give some more details about the Serbo-Croation
language.
It is, as far as I know, one of the few (if not only) european languages which
can be written with two alphabets, which are completely equivalent. (i.e. it
doesn't make difference which of the two -latin or cyrillic- you use, rather
than that one is a sort of transcription of the other)
The latin alphabet is more used by the people in Croatia, whereas the cyrillic
version is more favourite in Serbia.
One of the great characteristics of this alphabet (which consists of 30 letters)
is the fact that it is completely phonetic, in the sense that every letter
stands exactly for one sound, and that every letter is always pronounced the
same way. 
The latin version uses some diacritics like a 'v' on top of a c, s or z, and
there exists a 'dj' which is written as a 'd' with a stroke through the 
vertical part. 
The cyrillic version however does not use any accents, diacritics or other
signs whatsoever, and Serbo-Croation can therefore be seen as one of the
languages with an 'accentless' alphabet.

If John Chamber refers with the set of 5 marks to the accent-like signs
which (in coursebooks etc.) show how a vowel should be stressed, I would
like to say that as far as I know, there are just 4 of such marks, but
as he said, they are never really used in the language itself, and do
not form a part of the alphabet.

	   v      v         v  v         v                
	"PISI KAO STO GOVORIS, CITAJ KAO STO JE NAPISANO"

       		                                  v /
					VUK  KARADZIC


						Sjaak Schuurman