4 ms·

Yeah, Latin characters are kind of limited in their sounds and few if any languages really experiment with them. Vietnamese is one of the few recent adopters I

by pigsty 4y ago

Yeah, Latin characters are kind of limited in their sounds and few if any languages really experiment with them. Vietnamese is one of the few recent adopters I know of to add unique accent marks, although they still use the same character set. One interesting thing is that as Cyrillic has spread, new local characters have been added depending on the language. Eg, Ukrainian has letters than Bulgarian doesn’t use. It’s pretty neat.

School-Cotton 4y ago
> One interesting thing is that as Cyrillic has spread, new local characters have been added depending on the language Isn’t this true of Latin characters, too? German has ß; French doesn’t. Inversely for ù.
- LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  The general tradition for Latin alphabets is to add diacritics to existing letters, which makes the text abstruse and nudges people to omit them.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Even English has a ton of digraphs which are technically two or more letters but are actually one "sound". We have a bunch in English but th, sh, ci are favorites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)#English
zozbot234 4y ago
Unicode has all kinds of weird exotic characters that are still considered part of the Latin script. Though diacritics are generally more common.
gilleain 4y ago
> Vietnamese is one of the few recent adopters I know of to add unique accent marks, although they still use the same character set. This is an understatement of how complex the Vietnamese writing system is (I speak not a single word). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet They don't just have diacritics, they _stack_ them to form towers of diacritics. Ok, so only 2 high, but even so.
Asooka 4y ago
If I'm not wrong, Ukrainian just has "ï" - lowercase i with diaeresis, which is just a Latin letter. Not sure I would call it an addition to the Cyrillic alphabet per se vs an adoption of a latin letter into the Ukrainian alphabet. Similar to North Macedonia uses "j" in place of й. It is an interesting philosophical question - is it a Cyrillic letter that looks like a Latin letter, or is it a Latin letter being used in a country's alphabet? Is "а" the same as "a" or different? But yeah, every regional variety has its small differences due to the different phonetics of the local language.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > It is an interesting philosophical question Like many “interesting” philosophical questions, its grounded in a false premise; the description of alphabets derived from the Latin or Cyrillic with subsequent evolution and possibly admixture as “Latin” or “Cyrillic” is imprecise; its a letter of a particular Ukrainian alphabetic of mostly Cyrillic derivation but some Latin influence. (This can be simplified either of the ways siggested by the question for purposes like defining international character sets, but then it is more of a practical question than philosophical.)

by pigsty 4y ago

School-Cotton 4y ago

> One interesting thing is that as Cyrillic has spread, new local characters have been added depending on the language Isn’t this true of Latin characters, too? German has ß; French doesn’t. Inversely for ù.

LudwigNagasena 4y ago
The general tradition for Latin alphabets is to add diacritics to existing letters, which makes the text abstruse and nudges people to omit them.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Even English has a ton of digraphs which are technically two or more letters but are actually one "sound". We have a bunch in English but th, sh, ci are favorites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)#English

zozbot234 4y ago

Unicode has all kinds of weird exotic characters that are still considered part of the Latin script. Though diacritics are generally more common.

gilleain 4y ago

> Vietnamese is one of the few recent adopters I know of to add unique accent marks, although they still use the same character set. This is an understatement of how complex the Vietnamese writing system is (I speak not a single word). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet They don't just have diacritics, they _stack_ them to form towers of diacritics. Ok, so only 2 high, but even so.

Asooka 4y ago

If I'm not wrong, Ukrainian just has "ï" - lowercase i with diaeresis, which is just a Latin letter. Not sure I would call it an addition to the Cyrillic alphabet per se vs an adoption of a latin letter into the Ukrainian alphabet. Similar to North Macedonia uses "j" in place of й. It is an interesting philosophical question - is it a Cyrillic letter that looks like a Latin letter, or is it a Latin letter being used in a country's alphabet? Is "а" the same as "a" or different? But yeah, every regional variety has its small differences due to the different phonetics of the local language.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> It is an interesting philosophical question Like many “interesting” philosophical questions, its grounded in a false premise; the description of alphabets derived from the Latin or Cyrillic with subsequent evolution and possibly admixture as “Latin” or “Cyrillic” is imprecise; its a letter of a particular Ukrainian alphabetic of mostly Cyrillic derivation but some Latin influence. (This can be simplified either of the ways siggested by the question for purposes like defining international character sets, but then it is more of a practical question than philosophical.)