Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Well if Turkish dotted and dotted i don't differ by a diacritic, nor
> within Turkish do the pairs <o> and <ö> and <u> and <ü>.

Correct.

> In German, they are modifications created by a live grammatical
> process. In French (and Greek) they are modifications like an
> Arabic hamza. As such differences use identical and identified
> ('unified') notation within the varieties of the Latin alphabet, the
> definiiton has to cover such vagueness.

Hamza isn't a diacritic. German umlaut is a diacritic; in whichever
Scandinavian languages there are letters after z, they don't have
diacritics.

Vietnamese has tone diacritics -- but the ears that make new vowels
aren't diacritics any more than an i's dot is.

> Does it matter whether <G> is <C> with a diacritic?

It isn't.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...