Ah, now I understand the 'guilty' part. The UTC decided that rather than change the base rules in #29, it would provide a prominent example of how those rules would be tailored for French and Italian, citing those rules in that section. So for that section, the only requirement is the set of letters X for French/Italian specifically that would break in the sequence LETTER APOSTROPHE X -- it doesn't have to be all vowels.
I am doing the other list for something unconnected to #29, but we do need that set X also. However, if I and U are sometimes consonants in Italian, it does make the #29 apostrophe rules trickier -- unless those cases are such a small percentage that it is not worth contorting the rules for. Mark __________ http://www.macchiato.com ◄ “Eppur si muove” ► ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marco Cimarosti" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "'Radovan Garabik'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, September 09, 2002 06:30 Subject: RE: Latin vowels? > Radovan Garabik wrote: > > Originally, of course, latin had only capital letters > > Well... This reminds me of people who say that language XYZ only has "one" > gender. :-) > I mean: if there was just one set of letters, how do you say they were > "capitals" or not? Are Arabic letters capitals? > > Seriously speaking: the percentage of Latin text written in all capitals is > so tiny that it can probably be ignored for any practical purpose. > > > 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"). > > Letter "j" ("long i") used to be a contextual variant of "i", used at the > beginning of words and in some other contexts, and it used to have no > phonetic meaning. > > In was only in the 16th century which printers started using "j" for the > consonantal value of "i". This usage was immediately successful for > languages for which the two sounds were radically (e.g., English, French, > Spanish). Languages, such as Hungarian, where the consonantal sound of "i" > was /j/ were slower to adopt it. In Italian and Latin, this convention has > never been very successful, and "j" is still regarded today as a just a > variant of "i". > > > 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. > > I tend to agree, in general. It makes no sense to say whether a letter is a > vowel or not, because vowels are sounds, not signs of writing, and letters > map to sounds in different ways in different languages. > > So I think that the purpose of this classification should be made clear. > > My assumption was that this had something to do with some heuristics I > proposed for handling of the apostrophe in DUTR#29 > (http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/tr29-2.html). If this is a case, > whether or not a letter is classified as "vowel" is a purely opportunistic > and arbitrary choice, which has little or no relationship with phonetics. > > But if the purpose is something different (e.g., a generic algorithm to > split words into syllables), then the answers could be very totally > different, and even evaluate to: "It's totally impossible". > > _ Marco >
