John H. Jenkins scripsit: > Just to swerve the topic of conversation here, in the "E" for effort > department, what about a statue to the Emperor Claudius for at least > trying to add letters to the Latin alphabet? And does anybody know what > the letters *were*?
No problem. There were three letters, inverted F (not clear if inverted or turned), antisigma, and RIGHT TACK. The inverted F was used for the consonantal value of U/V, to disambiguate it from the vocalic use. The antisigma, whose form is not clear (it was probably a reversed lunate sigma, but may have looked more like a curvy-armed asterisk) was used in place of the digraph BS, whose phonetic value in Latin was /ps/. Greek psi was probably not used by Claudius because in Western Greek usage it stood for /x/, written chi in Attic Greek. The RIGHT TACK represented /y/, the vowel of Greek upsilon, and was used in borrowings from Greek. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please leave your values | Check your assumptions. In fact, at the front desk. | check your assumptions at the door. --sign in Paris hotel | --Miles Vorkosigan
