--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
wrote:

> Stage Linguistique wrote:
> >
> > Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > > in whichever
> > > Scandinavian languages there are letters after z,
> > > they don't have
> > > diacritics.
> >
> > Are you implying that ä, ö, å aren't 'diacriticised
> > letters' because they have their own place in the
> > alphabet?
>
> Isn't that what I just said?

Peter Daniels is basing his distinction on their function rather
than their form. This view sees not a Latin alphabet in use in
Scandinavia, but a Swedish alphabet, or a Norwegian alphabet, etc.

The way these letters are written cannot be used as an argument, for
then one could argue that a 't' is an 'l' plus the diacritic added
when crossing it! If you view them as part of a Latin script (most
of whose letters are alien to most users!), I suspect their use as
diacritics in some languages make them diacritics in the concept of
the script, but not say the Swedish _alphabet_. Here 'alphabet' is
used in the old sense that would include a Phoenician 'alphabet',
for developers of the Swedish alphabet may have been too
sophisticated for Peter's classificatory system to be applied to
their product!

Do marks expressly introduced to create new letters at will count as
diacritics? The nukta in Devanagari and the prime in modern Hebrew
are such marks.

Richard.