Mark Miller wrote:
My point was that wikipedia (the link i gave and other definitions I
saw) seem to refer to the little markings around a letter as
diacriticals whether they mean the letter is a completely different
letter or not (see the part mentioning Scandinavian, as well as possibly
Websters dictionary). Marko disputed this in his last comment, and I
don't know that he is wrong. All I have seen seems to indicate this though.
It is confusing.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic:
A diacritical mark or diacritic, also called an accent, is a small
sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish
between similar words.
In Swedish these are not added to a letter: they're part of the letter,
so they're not diacritics. Later in the page it says:
The Scandinavian languages, by contrast, treat the characters with
diacritics ä, ö and å as new and separate letters of the alphabet,
and sort them after z.
Perhaps they could more properly say something like, "Scandinavian
languages treat as separate letters things that other languages consider
letters with diacritics".
Webster defines a diactritic as:
a mark near or through an orthographic or phonetic character or
combination of characters indicating a phonetic value different
from that given the unmarked or otherwise marked element
Which points to the diacritic as a marker, but in Swedish the dots are
no more a marker than the upright on a 'b' is a marker to pronounce it
differently than an 'o'.
Ah, it's fun to be pedantic in the morning!
Doug
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