On Mon, Mar 15, 2004 at 09:53:30PM -0800, Curtis Clark wrote: > Are there any languages that use letters with diacriticals, but *never* > use the base letter without diacriticals? A made-up example to explain > what made me think of it: Let's say a language has "Ã", to represent the > same sound that it does in German, but not "o", because the language > lacks the sound represented by that letter in common European languages
Almost all languages using latin script. They use "i" with dot above, but not "Ä" without. Turkish is the (almost) only language that has both :-) And Belorussian, which has "Ð" but not "Ð" (question is, should "Ð" be considered letter with diacritics - generally it is considered a separate full-featured letter, the same as in Swedish "Ã" is considered a letter of its own.) -- ----------------------------------------------------------- | Radovan GarabÃk http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/ | | __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk | ----------------------------------------------------------- Antivirus alert: file .signature infected by signature virus. Hi! I'm a signature virus! Copy me into your signature file to help me spread!