Re: diacritics

Marco Cimarosti scripsit:

> I though that h-digraphs were a relatively recent innovation in Irish
> spelling: in the uncial script (which was ubiquitous in Ireland up to at
> least the 1970's) aspiration is indicated by a dot over the letter.

Not as recently as that.

> I guess that the switch to <h> in roman type might have been caused
> by the fact that tall lowercase letters, such as "f" or "t", look ugly
> with a dot on them:

More like that English-language printers and typewriters didn't have
sorts for the dotted letters.

> IMHO, the most likely origin for all H-digraphs are the <CH>, <PH> and <TH>
> spelling used in Latin to spell Greek loanwords.

Clearly. What I've always wondered about is the z-digraphs of Central
Europe.

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