Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- 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.

It has been suggested (I forget by whom) that the <h> in the English
digraphs ch, sh, th is a diacritic.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...