From: "S�amas � Br�g�in" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Philippe Verdy wrote: > > > Even in the case of Irish, the uppercase "S" denotes a distinctful > > variant of "s" . . . > > No, it doesn't. > > > which should better be noted with some diacritic, such as a hacek or > > cedilla . . . > > You're joking, right? Or is this the world's first proposal for > orthographic reform of a language made by someone who knows > nothing---really, nothing---about it?
No it's not a proposal to change something. It's just a comment, interpret it as a critic if you want, but I won't change anything. The comment from Michael about the occurence of "gW" in Breton was wrong: in Breton GW is a digraph single consonnant, and the leading G is elided as part of the softening mutation of the single consonnant GW into a single consonnant W after some articles like "ar"... Still it is normally written GW in uppercase, or Gw in titlecase or gw in lowercase, but there's no agreement about writing it gW even in cities name. If this appears, it's just a notation which you may find in dictionnaries to reflect the possible mutation of the GW digraph into a single W. It has nothing to do with the normal orthograph. So: "Gwerenn" mutates into "Ar werenn", and you may find in some Breton dictionnaries a _notation_ of this mutation as the single entry "gWerenn", sorted under "W" instead of "G". (Mutation of leading consonnants like K into C'H is part of the Breton grammar, not part of the lexical definitions, and this influences the way words are sorted in dictionnaries because there will be a single entry for the word with or without that mutation: the conventional choice of which mutation is used is explained in the dictionnary preface). Compare it to the _notation_ of aspirated leading H in French with a leading * symbol in French dictionnaries (notation used by Larousse). It's just notational as well, and there's no * symbol in the French orthograph...
