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

>
> That depends, of course, on what the meaning of "diacritic" is.

That is a very good question. Here is the Unicode definition. "A
mark applied or attached to a symbol to create a new symbol that
represents a modified or new value." I sometimes think that the
term diacritic is used interchangeably with 'combining character'.
Both a pulli and the dependent vowels are called combining
characters, but are they both considered diacritics?


In Greek, the breathing marks and the accents appear as diacritics
but would they not be on a different level in a phonographic mental
representation of the word? There has been lots of different
approaches to these additional marks in Cree. Some diacritics are
obligatory and consistent, i.e. 'w', but others are used in a
completely different fashion by non native Cree linguists and native
Cree speakers, because non native speakers have the perception that
these marks should be used phonemically. The Cree speakers use the
aspirate for emphasis, not for phonemic distinction.

Suzanne McCarthy