Time to abandon TAS?

[Dave Britten]

(06-22-2020 04:36 PM)grsbanks Wrote:  

(06-22-2020 04:15 PM)Thomas Okken Wrote:  It's not just a reminder, or at least it wasn't always. The circumflex used to indicate vowel lengthening, and in some cases it still does, like votre/vôtre, or in Belgian French in general.

It still does in Welsh, for example.

Trivia question: how many letters are there in the Welsh alphabet? It's less than 26...

This is getting way OT, but Japanese has a couple of phonetic characters (kana) that were discontinued around the late 1940s when they overhauled the "spelling" of words to match how the pronunciation had shifted over the centuries. So ゑ and ヱ (we/ye), and ゐ and ヰ (wi) were dropped and replaced with the existing え and エ (e), and い and イ (i) matching how the pronunciation of those characters had shifted.

The Japanese currency "yen" is actually pronounced "en", though you can hear some vestiges of the y sound reemerging occasionally, particularly when followed by an "n" sound (as in 千円 - thousand yen - which frequently sounds more like sen-yen than sen-en).

And then there's を (wo), which is only used as a particle/suffix indicating a direct object. The "w" sound has long since faded away, but the old kana was kept for some reason, and occasionally you can hear a "w" sound slipping out in some dialects and syllable combinations. But in almost all cases, it's pronounced exactly the same as お and オ (o).

What were we talking about again?