On Mon, Sep 09, 2002 at 11:43:52AM +0200, Marco Cimarosti wrote: > Mark Davis wrote: > > I need to get a list of Latin characters that are generally considered > > vowels. I partitioned the characters as in the list below, but there > > are lots of oddball ones for which I can only guess (LATIN CAPITAL > > LETTER OU? LATIN LETTER WYNN?...). > > > > http://www.macchiato.com/unicode/latin_vowels.html >
... > > - In Latin, i and u were also used to represent consonants /j/ and /v/ > (originally, /w/). This ambiguity is still partly present in modern > languages, especially for i. > - Notice that capital U is not listed, because it is a new form of V, > invented in the 16th century precisely for the purpose of distinguishing > the vowel and the consonantal sounds. Originally, of course, latin had only capital letters > - The macron on L and R with dot below makes clear that they are used as > "sonants", i.e. a kind of vowels. in Slovak, l and r with acute accents are technically vowels (long ones at that), as well as sometimes l and r. However, officially they are classified as consonants. > I would treat all these as vowels, although I know a few rare exceptions. > Apart Welsh W, all other exceptions are very rare: > - J is normally a consonant, but it originally was a font variant of I. In > ancient texts in many languages, and in some rare Italian proper names, it > can still stand for vowel /i/. A bookcase full of old (~100 years) hungarian books has just got into my posession. I noticed that "J" is there often used as a vowel at the beginning of word before consonant (where modern hungarian has "I"). However, before vowels, "J" stands for consonant /j/ universally, and in the middle of word "i" is used for /i/, as one would expect. I also noticed this (classified as vowel): U+016C # (Ŭ) LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH BREVE U+016D # (ŭ) LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH BREVE this is a semivowel :-), at least in Esperanto U+00D4 # (Ô) LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH CIRCUMFLEX U+00F4 # (ô) LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH CIRCUMFLEX this is also classified as a semivowel (in Slovak), though technically it is a glide plus following vowel. Conclusion? It is pointless to talk about vowels and consonants, if you are speaking about a _writing_ system (especially disregarding the language it concerns). Vowels and consonants make sense when speaking about pronunciation. -- ----------------------------------------------------------- | Radovan Garabík 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!
