Re: VMs: Split -ol- pairs...?

["Barbara Barrett" <barbarabarrett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Rene wRote;
> In English, 'th' and 'sh' and 'ch' are like
> your verbose pairs. Other languages do have
> one symbol for the corresponding sound (note absence
> of the proper linguistic terms).

Barbara Babbles;
"digraph" is the epigraphical term you're looking for. Where two or more of
an alphabet's letters are used to represent a single phoneme; although not
always the same phoneme in every instance (eg; baTH /baT/ and baTHe /baD/).
Icelandic uses the letters Thorn and Eth for these phonemes (Old English had
these graphemes too but they were phonetically interchangable).

Historically digraphs come into existance to represent phonemes the alphabet
in question didn't originally represent - so one would not expect them in
invented writing systems which tend to be inclusive. However they occur in
substitution alphabets which represent letters of another alphabet rather
than phonemes and have the same grapheme/phoneme ratio as the "parent"
alphabet.

Identifying digraphs in Voynichese (*if* voynichese is a substitution
alphabet) could identify the langauge because IIRCC every written language's
total of digraphs is unique.

Barbara.




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