On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 at 01:00, Grant Taylor via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > If they are not seen as separate letters, then do their meaning's > change? Or is the different accent more for pronunciation?
No, mainly, it changes alphabetical order and it makes asking questions tricky. I see š as an s-with-a-haček and if I forget the haček, I may pronounce it as an s; š = ``sh'' in English. ``č'' = "ch" in English. But that isn't how Czechs think. It's as impossible to misread or mispronounce Š as S as it would be a nonsense to mispronounced ``T'' as ``M'' in English, so people find it very hard to guess what I mean. To me, the diacritic modifies a letter, and in a word with 4 or 5 diacritics, they pile up in my head, I overload and may drop one or 2 of them. That renders the world as babel in Czech. (I chose T/M because, incredibly to me, hand-written T in Russian is written as M. Mind you, handwritten almost everything in Russian becomes mmmmmMmmmMmmmmMmm. I can read printed Cyrillic but I find handwritten stuff impossible.) > I assume that they have different meanings (if that applies to letters) > and are uses as different as "A" and "q". Yes. > > Czech is like that. Š and Č and Ž and many more that my Mac can't > > readily type are _extra letters_ which come after the unmodified form > > in the alphabet. > > ~twitch~ Yep. The Scandinavians have just 3 extras. Czech has about a dozen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_orthography 42 letters (!). > I don't even know how to properly describe something that visually looks > like letters (glyphs?) to me, but may be an imprecise simplification on > my part. If it's in Roman, Cyrillic, or Greek, they're alphabets, so it's a letter. I can't read Arabic or Hebrew but I believe they're alphabets too. I don't know anything about any Asian scripts except a tiny bit of Japanese and Chinese, and they get called different things, but "character" is probably most common. > I had to zoom my font to see enough detail in Křižíkova, but it does > look like things came through just like you describe. (They even made > it through my shell script that I use to re-flow text in replies.) Good! -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053