Philip Newton&#39;s journal

You're right about Marshallese, and it's the only language to use those two diacritics.

That's very cool. I like hearing about things like this. Another one is the n-umlaut found in the name of "Spinal Tap" - which actually is used in the Jacaltec Maya language.

And I suppose the Esperanto h-circumflex is pretty unique, too.

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Neat! I don't suppose this means there's any Unicode for that, or easy way to type it…

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Wikipedia's entry on Jacaltec says chat this character is also used in Malagasy.

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s/chat/that/

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Ah! Didn't know that. Looking at the Malagasy article, it would seem that it represents the palatal nasal, which can also be spelled /gn/.

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I don't think so... which is a bit goofy, considering that Unicode is supposed to be universal! In Lucida Sans Unicode, even Chichewa's ŵ has its own mapping, but the n-umlaut doesn't. (n-umlaut represents a velar nasal in Jacaltec, I think. But still, it's part of the practical orthography. Plus, Spin̈al Tap is more satirical than Spiŋal Tap, I guess.)

The z-circumflex character that is used in some representations of Ubykh is also missing from Unicode despite the presence of its voiceless counterpart ŝ, which annoys me no end. Interestingly, I think ŝ might only be in there for Esperanto... I can't think of any other languages that use it.

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Spin̈al Tap is more satirical than Spiŋal Tap

(; It's been suggested to me that I spelt the band with an ñ, which entirely misses the point...

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Heh... yes, it does somewhat.

You'll have to forgive the rather whimsical turn of mind that led me to this question... you wrote "an ñ" rather than "a ñ" - so how do you say "ñ"? As "n-tilde", or what? For me, it's like trying to work out what form of the definite article one would use in front of the letter ß.

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how do you say "ñ"? As "n-tilde", or what?

I'd probably say "n-tilde", though it's possible

angharad might have been thinking of the Spanish name for the letter, viz. "eñe" (IIRC).

For me, it's like trying to work out what form of the definite article one would use in front of the letter ß.

Eh? English only has one form of the definite article, at least in writing. Were you thinking of pronunciation ("thuh" vs "thee"), or of the indefinite article?

Then there's things such as "an FAQ" vs "a FAQ" (I prefer the latter, but many people use the former; it depends on whether it's "an eff-ay-queue" or "a fack").

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Yes, that is what I meant (as in "thuh pee" for the p versus "thee ay" for the a) - although I suppose the indefinite article is just as applicable!

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Ah, much more interesting. I think I would use the latter, because, again, of needing a consonant (in this case 'y') before the name "es-tset".

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"Yay for English and its diphthongs!"

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Oh, and I'd pronounce |an ß| as /@n Es-tsEt/, since that's the name I give it in my native German; other Germans, though call it a "scharfes S". No consensus even within the language! :)

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You know, I realised after posting that comment that my choice of article might look funny. In Spanish, "ch" (che), "ll" (e-ye), "ñ" (en-ye), and "rr" (errrrrrrre), are actually individual letters in the alphabet. I speak Spanish (although my first language is English). So whenever I use/see a tilde on top of an "n", I call it "enye" in my head. I don't know how, for example, the Portuguese spellings are pronounced, or whether those nasalised vowels (such as "ão") are letters in their own right. Me, for those, I would probably say "tilde a" or "a tilde".

And, in English, it matters that 'es-tset' begins with a vowel, so it's "an ß" isn't it? I confess that my German is atrophied enough that I have no idea about letters' genders. (Unless you mean "beta", in which case "a beta", in English.)

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As Philip's already pointed out, there is also the common variant "scharfes S"... :)

And yes, it was es-tset I was referring to, not beta. I didn't know what its German name was, since my German is extremely poor. I can say "Guten Tag!" and "Doch!" and "Ich bin ein Berliner!" and not much else.

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That's funny. My partner took just as much German as I did, but didn't have the same teachers, and I had to teach him "Doch"! Damned handy word, that.

And to sidetrack away from spelling from there, negative questions are fascinating, because of how they can be asked, and how they can be answered. Like, from anime, I've learned that Japanese answers "You didn't do that, did you?" with "yes", rather than "no". I wish I knew which languages do that.

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I confess that my German is atrophied enough that I have no idea about letters' genders.

I think all letter names are neuter (das A, das Zett, das Es-Zett, das scharfe S, das S, probably also "das Ö" but I'm so sure there for some reason).

Same in Greek TTBOMK: "to alpha, to vita, to o mikro, to o mega".

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Interestingly, I think ŝ might only be in there for Esperanto... I can't think of any other languages that use it.

The eki.ee letter database (http://www.eki.ee/letter/) doesn't know of any other languages using it (http://www.eki.ee/letter/chardata.cgi?search=s+with+circumflex), either.

Z-circumflex isn't "missing", per se, though, since the Unicode philosophy is that you can combine any letter with any diacritical mark; the precomposed letters are there mostly for round-trip convertability with "legacy" character sets and I get the feeling that they're somehow not quite the "proper" way to do things.

But fonts and rendering systems generally do a better job for precomposed characters :p

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Z-circumflex isn't "missing", per se, though, since the Unicode philosophy is that you can combine any letter with any diacritical mark; the precomposed letters are there mostly for round-trip convertability with "legacy" character sets and I get the feeling that they're somehow not quite the "proper" way to do things.

Yes, I agree... :P My beef isn't so much that there are characters "missing", but that the selection of which character+diacritic combinations are included and which aren't seems arbitrary (at best) or Eurocentric (at worst).

But fonts and rendering systems generally do a better job for precomposed characters :p

True... how true...

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the selection of which character+diacritic combinations are included and which aren't seems arbitrary (at best) or Eurocentric (at worst).

True, true.

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even Chichewa's ŵ has its own mapping

I wonder whether this is Chichewa's ŵ that's mapped or Welsh's, though... my guess would be that this precomposed letter is in Unicode thanks to its use in Welsh (since it's spoken by western European people = important) and/or its presence in iso-8859-14 aka Latin-8 (http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html#ISO-8859-14), and that Chicheŵa was simply lucky.

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Ah! I'd thought that ŵ was a fairly non-European thing; I guessed that Welsh had long vowels, being Celtic (Irish and Manx also both have long vowels), but I didn't think Welsh marked its long vowels orthographically.

Of course, that's probably because the sole piece of substantial Welsh I've ever seen is the name of Llanfair PG (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanfair_PG). :S

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