From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet (was: Inventing a writing system?)
Date: 8 Apr 92 23:39:06 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <167C212DA7.JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU> JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU writes:
> <...> it is
>of historic interest to note that Russian Cyrillic (Scott will know at
>least 2 reasons I must use the limitation) formerly had a character that
>was the equivalent of Greek 'theta',

Cyrillic full stop formerly had this letter.  It was there since the
alphabet's first day, and it didn't spend its first day in Russia.
The _thita_ (_tita_ in Bulgarian, _fita_ in Russian) was never a very
useful letter from the point of view of the Slavic language(s), which
had no interdental fricatives.  It stopped being used in Bulgarian
some time around the middle of the 19th century.  In Russian it was
abolished shortly after the October Revolution.

>which would have been handy for
>representing the interdental fricative (as was the 'thorn' in earlier
>English) without need for "digraphs".

True.  But the problem is that languages which have a thorn-sound
frequently also have an eth-sound, and there is only one thita.  So
in the Cyrillic-written languages that have these sounds they are
written as an _s_ and a _z_ with diacritics of some kind.

>Unfortunately they discarded this

_Fortunately_, from the point of view of Russian, which had no use for
it.  It didn't exactly die, it only got a new job: it is used in many
Altaic languages under the name "barred `o'" for the front rounded
midvowel.  (The bar is actually somewhat squigglish.)

>(probably during some cruel Stalinist purge),

I don't know whether this was a guess or a joke, but whatever it was,
it was a very bad one.  It didn't take any cruel event for the Slavic
languages to discard a letter that didn't correspond to any phoneme
which wouldn't be covered by another letter and was only used in
church terminology borrowed from Greek and a certain number of
personal names.  On the other hand, English had a good use for the
thorn and the eth, and my honest opinion is that those villains who
were guilty of their loss fully deserved to have their ears cut off
and to be drawn and quartered afterwards.

>I have often
>speculated as to whether this might eventually lead to the abandonment of
>the dissertation requirement for the doctorate requirement in Russia on the
>basis that it has become more difficult to distinguish between 'theses' and
>'feces'.

Well, no, it mightn't, because (1) in Russian these two words differ
in more than the first letter (_tezis_ and _fekalii_, respectively)
and (2) it is _tezis_, not _fezis_, because the word has not been
borrowed from Greek.

>{please supply your own smiley, or equivalent, as Cyrillic lacks one.

I'll be damned if I see anything particularly Roman about a smiley.
(I'm damned anyway, of course.  :-))

-- 
---- --- -- -  Long Live the Rose and the Heather!  - -- --- ----
Ivan A Derzhanski   (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk;  iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,  Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Park Road, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK