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From: jc@minya.UUCP (jc)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Computers and human languages (was Re: What is a byte)
Message-ID: <203@minya.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 20-Sep-87 16:31:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: minya.203
Posted: Sun Sep 20 16:31:33 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 20-Sep-87 23:39:12 EDT
Organization: home
Lines: 33
Summary: English has an accented letter....
Xref: mnetor comp.std.internat:250 sci.lang:1429

> I would be quite surprized if English and Russian were the only languages
> with no accented letters, when a letter is regarded as accented only when it
> is alphabetized the same as the original form.
> 
> By the way, does Greek use accented letters?

Indeed it does.  Proper spelling in Greek requires rather frequent accents
on vowels; it is rare to see more that 2 or 3 words go by without one.  Some
even have two:  Initial vowels may have either of two 'aspiration' marks that
are useless in modern Greek (one of which used to indicate an initial [h]),
in addition to the main accent.

There's also a cute historical quibble to the effect that English actually
has an accented letter: 'i'.  This is one of many letters that ultimately
derives from Greek, where the dot is in fact an accent on the iota, which
is properly dotless.  The really weird thing in English is that we use the
accent mark on the lower-case letter, but not on the upper-case 'I'.  This
is basically a result of historic ignorance, confusion, illiteracy, and so
on, in the development of the late Latin alphabet into a 2-case form.  The
Greek iota can have accents (or not) in either case.  Also, modern Turkish
uses both the dotted and undotted 'i', to make a phonetic distinction like
the vowels in 'beet' and 'bit'.  The Turkish capital, Istanbul, properly 
has a dot over the 'I', for instance, but it's hard to do in ASCII.

According to the above definition, since 'I' and 'i' are alphabetized the
same in English, I would conclude that English has an accented letter! (;-)

(Quick, someone point out the other accented letter in English.)

[Hmmm...Is 't' really an accented 'l'?  Now you're getting really weird!]

-- 
	John Chambers <{adelie,ima,maynard}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)