Doug Ewell scripsit: > Compare these to the Greek distinction between ?? and "word-final" ??. I > would have assumed that current Greek usage of ?? and ?? is parallel to > 18th-century English usage of ?? and s, but TUS says (p. 176) that "use > of the final sigma is a matter of spelling convention," so that > assumption is probably overly simplistic.
Full details on sigma are at http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/dist/sigma.html . In short: sigma followed by period is final if the period marks a sentence end, but medial if it marks an abbreviation; in dialect writing where a dialect drops a final vowel before a sigma, the sigma remains medial (and an apostrophe may or may not be added); languages other than Greek don't necessarily obey the rules. Similar statements can be made about Hebrew final consonants (in particular, Yiddish uses a non-final p for -p, since final p means -f). -- "Take two turkeys, one goose, four John Cowan cabbages, but no duck, and mix them http://www.ccil.org/~cowan together. After one taste, you'll duck [EMAIL PROTECTED] soup the rest of your life." http://www.reutershealth.com --Groucho
