John H. Jenkins scripsit:
> Just to swerve the topic of conversation here, in the "E" for effort
> department, what about a statue to the Emperor Claudius for at least
> trying to add letters to the Latin alphabet? And does anybody know what
> the letters *were*?
No problem.
There were three letters, inverted F (not clear if inverted or turned),
antisigma, and RIGHT TACK.
The inverted F was used for the consonantal value of U/V, to disambiguate
it from the vocalic use.
The antisigma, whose form is not clear (it was probably a reversed lunate
sigma, but may have looked more like a curvy-armed asterisk) was used
in place of the digraph BS, whose phonetic value in Latin was /ps/.
Greek psi was probably not used by Claudius because in Western Greek
usage it stood for /x/, written chi in Attic Greek.
The RIGHT TACK represented /y/, the vowel of Greek upsilon, and was
used in borrowings from Greek.
--
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org
Please leave your values | Check your assumptions. In fact,
at the front desk. | check your assumptions at the door.
--sign in Paris hotel | --Miles Vorkosigan
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