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From: jeg@hector.UUCP (Judy Grass)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Computers and human languages (was Re: What is a byte)
Message-ID: <2955@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>
Date: Wed, 16-Sep-87 08:13:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: ulysses.2955
Posted: Wed Sep 16 08:13:21 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 18-Sep-87 06:48:24 EDT
References: <218@astra.necisa.oz> <142700010@tiger.UUCP> <2792@phri.UUCP> <2351@mmintl.UUCP> <141@minya.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com
Reply-To: jeg@hector (Judy Grass)
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill
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Xref: mnetor comp.std.internat:241 sci.lang:1370

In article <141@minya.UUCP> jc@minya.UUCP 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.
>

You can't talk about a Serbo-Croatian writing system.  Serbian is written in its
own form of Cyrillic (it shares a lot of letters with Russian Cyrillic, but
does not use all of them, and adds a few of its own).  Croatian is written in
a latin alphabet, with diacritics .. some that are absolutely required, 
and only a very few optionals.  To whit:  Croatian uses the hachek (an upside
down caret) over s, c, z for sh, ch, zh.  an acute accent is used over c
for a palatalized t (no such in english, sorry).  A line through a d
for a palatalized d.  (I may have forgotten one or two more such).  In addition,
some spoken dialects of Serbian and Croatian have tones.. lengthened vowel
with rising pitch, falling pitch, etc.  (somewhat like Chinese, but you
can learn to speak good Serbo-croatian without worrying much about it).
This stuff is sometimes written by using diacritics over vowels for the benefit
of foreign students.  Sometimes students only get word stress.

Serbo-croatian has yet a THIRD written version .. you may see Serbian texts
with Serbian pronunciations and Serbian vocabulary written in Croatian style
latin transcrition.  The issue of whether Serbo-Croatian is one language or
two is a hot one that has led to demonstrations in the streets of Zagreb,
various and sundry riots and a lot of linguistic engineering.

Re. Slavic writing systems:  The following languages use versions of Cyrillic,
in every case the writng systems are not identical:
	Russian, ByeloRussian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian.
None of these use diacritics to any great extent.

The following languages use spellings based on the latin alphabet:
	Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian, Sorbian (a dying language).
All of these use plenty of obligatory diacritics, but again all have ideosyncracies.
Polish is the one in this group that stands out.  Polish spells the 
sounds "sh", "ch" using digraphs: sz, cz. But, Polish uses diacritics to indicate
nasalized vowels, long vowels, etc.  The others are similar to Croatian.
In Czech and Slovak you need to add accents for the vowels to indicate long
vowels (not stress as stress is fixed for these languages).

Cyrillic has also been improvised upon to invent writing systems for any of a number
of languages of various national groups within the USSR.  Moldavian for
is one example  (an attempt to re-ethnicize a group of Rumanians within the USSR). 
Various Eastern tribal languages have also gotten their first writing systems
this way.  I have also seen a Yiddish publication or two within the USSR that
was written in Cyrillic. (Now THIS is touchy).

		Judy Grass,  ATT Bell Labs, Murray Hill
		ulysses!jeg