suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- 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?

What a surprise that they came up with something vague and useless.

I'd say diacritics do NOT create a new symbol -- that's the point
(Turkish dotted and dotless i don't involve a diacritic) -- but modify a
symbol to give it a modified reading.

NB This is NOT a definition, so all you computer engineers don't start
looking for borderline cases that you want to force into "diacritic" or
"not diacritic."

> 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.

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...