🚀 go-pugleaf

jc@minya.UUCP (jc) writes:
    There's also a cute historical quibble to the effect that English actually
    has an accented letter: 'i'.  This is one of many letters that ultimately
    derives from Greek, where the dot is in fact an accent on the iota, which
    is properly dotless.  The really weird thing in English is that we use the
    accent mark on the lower-case letter, but not on the upper-case 'I'.  This
    is basically a result of historic ignorance, confusion, illiteracy, and so
    on, in the development of the late Latin alphabet into a 2-case form.

    	John Chambers <{adelie,ima,maynard}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)

ARF! That's not a historical quibble, it's a falsehood.  Let's take things
from the beginning, so that hopefully we can get back to international
standards ...

The Phonecians were the first people to develop an alphabet (i.e. a
writing system based on phonetics instead of pictographs).  Around 800
B.C., the Greeks decided that this was a good idea, and in 403 B.C.
they came up with an official alphabet.  Meanwhile, the Etruscans, who
were the first reasonably-sized civilization on the Italian peninsula,
had gotten their hands on an early version of the Greek alphabet [this
is where the term "beta test" comes from :-)], which they futzed
around with to suit their language.  In 700 B.C., they decided to
occupy Rome and invent urban renewal, thus giving the early Romans an
alphabet to play with.  They, in turn, fiddled with it and started
writing it with a pen, which changed the letter shapes some more.  The
Roman alphabet is usually thought to have reached its highest
aesthetic point in the inscription on the Trajan column.  This type of
letter, which is sometimes called "Roman Square Capital," or more
often just "Roman," is the direct source of modern upper case, and the
indirect source of modern lower case.

The biggest problem with roman capitals is that they are rather slow
to write, and so Roman scribes developed a variety of cursive forms,
some of which are completely unreadable to modern eyes, bearing as
they do a strong resemblance to Old Martian.  This caused some
problems, and by the 4th century a compact, informal script called
"Roman Rustic" or "Capitalis Rustica", a remarkably graceful alphabet.
This was still an all-capital script.

Well, the early Christians seemed to think that since this alphabet
had been used for (gasp) pagan writings (such as Virgil), it just
wouldn't do, and so they developed an official script, called "uncial"
by modern scholars.  It began as a majuscule script, but since it was
designed to be written quickly, many of the letterforms started to
resemble modern lower case.  This was where ascenders and descenders
made there first appearance, for example.  People finally agreed that
punctuation was a good idea, although they still ran all of the words
together.  Dots were placed above letters, but only to signify
corrections.  As the early Christian monasteries got richer, the
script got more ornate again, and word spacing was introduced, albeit
fitfully. Still no diacritic marks, except for corrections and abbreviations
(usually a horizontal stroke above two or three letters).

About this time (6th century or so), the Christians had decided to
convert England, which turned out to be more difficult than they had
hoped, but they kept working at it.  They brought with them an
informal script called "half-uncial", which contained even more
letterforms that eventually made it into modern lower case.  The
Irish, and to a lesser extent the Anglo-Saxons, took this script and
produced a script called "Insular Majuscule," one of the most
beautiful versions of the roman alphabet ever produced.  They also
produced a script called "Insular Miniscule" (suprise, suprise) that
was used at first for commentary and other 'unofficial' uses.  For the
next several centuries, things went downhill when it came to
legibilty, although punctuation was approaching its modern form.

At the end of the 8th century, a very important thing happened.
Charlemagne and his adviser Alcuin (a Benedictine monk) founded a
scriptorium at which developed a new script called "Carolingian
Miniscule", which, when revived during the Renaissance, was the direct
predecessor of the modern lower case alphabet.  Even so, diacritics
were still only used for abbreviation.  This is the origin of
"accents" in European languages.  For example, the circumflex in
French was originally an abbreviation for "s."

As this script slowly metamorphosed into Gothic, it became more
compact and less legible, since it had a more even texture.  The "i"
and "j" were still undotted, but "y" *was* dotted, so as to make it
stand out more.  By the fifteenth century, "i" sometimes had a dot as
well.  This custom continued into the Renaissance, at which time the
dot was dropped off of the "y" and added to the "j".  It was only with
the development of printing that it was standardized.

The use of accents and "breathing marks" is a feature of modern Greek,
not classical Greek.  It developed in parallel with accents in Europe,
not as a precursor to them.

Now that I've beaten this into the ground, can we get back to
international standards?  I'd be happy to continue via mail, but it
does seem to be off the subject for this newsgroup.

-- 
							      Clayton M. Elwell
       The Ohio State University Department of Computer and Information Science
       (614) 292-6546	 UUCP: ...!cbosgd!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!elwell
		      ARPA: elwell@ohio-state.arpa (not working well right now)