985
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] lvxferre@mander.xyz 3 points 1 week ago

Italian is the exception that proves the rule. The orthography is well-designed (transparent, without too much fluff), but not even then it could avoid ⟨ch gh⟩ for /k g/ before ⟨e i⟩, so it could reserve ⟨c(i) g(i)⟩ for /tʃ dʒ/.

It's all related: modern European languages typically have a lot more sounds than Latin did, so Latin itself never developed letters for them. Across the Middle Ages you saw a bunch of local solutions for that, like:

  • Italian - refer to the etymology to pick a digraph, then solve the /k tʃ g dʒ/ mess with ⟨h⟩.
  • Occitan - spam ⟨h⟩ everywhere. (Portuguese borrowed from it.)
  • English - spam ⟨h⟩ too.
  • Hungarian - spam ⟨y⟩ instead.
  • Polish - spam ⟨z⟩, plus a few acute accents (Polish has the retroflex series to handle too, not just the palatal/palato-alveolar like the four above)
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
985 points (98.4% liked)

memes

10165 readers
2493 users here now

Community rules

1. Be civilNo trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour

2. No politicsThis is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world

3. No recent repostsCheck for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month

4. No botsNo bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins

5. No Spam/AdsNo advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.

Sister communities

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS