From: John Cowan (cowan@mercury.ccil.org)
Date: Sun Dec 28 2003 - 20:40:23 EST
Doug Ewell scripsit:
> Compare these to the Greek distinction between ?? and "word-final" ??. I
> would have assumed that current Greek usage of ?? and ?? is parallel to
> 18th-century English usage of ?? and s, but TUS says (p. 176) that "use
> of the final sigma is a matter of spelling convention," so that
> assumption is probably overly simplistic.
Full details on sigma are at
http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/dist/sigma.html . In short:
sigma followed by period is final if the period marks a sentence end,
but medial if it marks an abbreviation; in dialect writing where a
dialect drops a final vowel before a sigma, the sigma remains medial
(and an apostrophe may or may not be added); languages other than Greek
don't necessarily obey the rules.
Similar statements can be made about Hebrew final consonants (in
particular, Yiddish uses a non-final p for -p, since final p means -f).
-- "Take two turkeys, one goose, four John Cowan cabbages, but no duck, and mix them http://www.ccil.org/~cowan together. After one taste, you'll duck jcowan@reutershealth.com soup the rest of your life." http://www.reutershealth.com --Groucho
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