4 ms·
> - i <-> İ > - ı <-> I After seeing this, I don't understand how the rest of us can fail to have the same distinction. There's something logically beautiful
by generationP 6y ago
> - i <-> İ
> - ı <-> I
After seeing this, I don't understand how the rest of us can fail to have the same distinction. There's something logically beautiful -- like the rhyme in a good poem -- about artificial languages (or, in this case, alphabets) that naturally evolved languages just cannot compete with.
- lolc 6y agoTo me, the undotted-i thing is more of a hack. Far more beautiful is why Turkish distinguishes the two vowels: Speakers of Turk languages don't like to mingle bright and dark vowels in the same word. Appreciate the economy of not having to switch your enunciation between front and back in the same word. Speakers of Turkish generally build words with vowels from either of these exclusive groups: aıuo eiüö You see? They could write "ä" instead of "e" to have all bright vowels dotted and mirror the symmetry. But because "e" was already available and pronounced like that in other dominant languages of the time, they stuck to it. No need to break conventions. This didn't work for "ı" because there was no corresponding letter in the Latin alphabet. So they loped off the dot from i and called it a day. A pragmatic decision. Except that the capital version had then to be dotted to keep the distinction. That caused a lot of headaches downstream.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y agoThis is called vowel harmony and it's a fairly common linguistic feature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_harmony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_harmony ...but it's notably absent from the Indo-European languages.