Curtis Clark wrote:Well, the same in Hebrew and Arabic if written with full vowels. In a fully pointed Hebrew text some base characters should never appear without any diacritic - although most letters can be completely unpointed when word final (but not non-final forms), and alef, he and yod are unpointed when silent.
Are there any languages that use letters with diacriticals, but *never* use the base letter without diacriticals?
AFAIK, Thaana is such a case.
Unlike Indic scripts, Thaana has no inherent vowel, so each consonant letter always takes either a vowel mark or the sukuun (= no-vowel mark).
_ Marco
Transliterated Arabic is likely to have g with breve (or maybe with some other diacritic) but no g. But I'm not sure if that is an official orthography anywhere.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
