Re: Eastern cz sz

From: tolgs001
Message: 52500
Date: 2008-02-07

> cz and sz are also used in Hungarian.
>
>Arnaud

<cz> no longer: old-fashioned. Both <cz> and <c> have the
same pronunciation /ts/, hence adding that <z> is superfluous.
The <cz> is kept only in (some) names (e.g. Racz, with an accent
on a; meaning "Serbian").

#

Note that <sz> is also a German occurrence ("Eszet"): <ß>.
Nowadays rendered as <ss>. (In "internetese", now and then
<sz> as well, e.g. <heisz>, <Masz>, <fleiszig>.)

But it is in fact the digraph <sz> (actually, both are medieval
fonts looking rather like "f" + "3") linked together to generate
that "ligature" font looking like a beta, but it isn't a beta.

The German sz and the Hungarian sz have the same value /s/.
In Hungarian writing, in order to show a longer /s/, one writes
ssz (e.g. hosszu "long; tall").

#

<cs> in Hung. reads as <ch> and <tch> in English (csardas; never
*czardas. /both a's bear an accent, because they are /a:/'s).

George