🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <111@quick.UUCP> srg@quick.UUCP (Spencer Garrett) writes:
>
>I was told once (by a respected linguist, as I recall) that English and
>Russian are the ONLY two languages written with unaccented alphabets.  I
>know you have to add the qualifier "modern" to make that true, and maybe
>"major" as well, although I don't know of any exceptions right off.
> 				...
>This particular professor is extremely fond of Arabic script and has spent
>a great deal of time teaching TEX to handle it.)

Unlike Arabic, Modern Persian is written with no accents.  Accents are
only used in children's books and occasionally in print with a foreign
word.  This would perhaps be analogous to similar occurences in English.

In fact, a Persian alphabet would be easier to implement than an
English one (in terms of size) because there are 52 letters in the
Enlish language:  capitals and lower case.  These have to be specified
by the writer, while in Persian, the shape (or, loosely, case) of each
letter is absolutely determined by whether it has a connecting letter
or space before or after it.  

Since the Persian alphabet has only 32 letters, moreover, that would
leave at least 20 spaces for the 6-odd accents which are so
infrequently used.

Just in case Persian ever becomes that popular...
=======================================================================
Mark Towfigh             "Did you take that?"   "Soitanny not!"
                         "Oh, a wise guy, huh?" "Aaa-aaa-aaaaa-o-o-o-o"
UUCP:     harvard!husc4!corelib