Re: tossing out the garbage
Tadas Blinda
> In article
> <696d9994-e5ff-47a7-90d5-34bc096d3...@n11g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>, Tadas
>
>
>
> Blinda <tadas.bli...@lycos.es> wrote:
> > On Aug 21, 8:40=C2=A0am, hol...@mappi.helsinki.fi (Eugene Holman) wrote:
> > > In article
> > > <81853a73-0e7d-4552-ac81-bb6863ab5...@d21g2000vbm.googlegroups.com>, Tada=
> > s
>
> > > Blinda <tadas.bli...@lycos.es> wrote:
> > > > "When the Soviet Union collapsed and Azerbaijan gained its
> > > > independence, one of the first laws passed in the new Parliament was
> > > > the dropping of Cyrillic and the adoption of a Latin-based alphabet."
>
> > > The Cyrillic alphabet was specifically designed for sibilant-rich
> > > languages. An elaboration of the Greek alphabet, it certainly is not
> > > garbage.
>
> > It is garbage when it is imposed on others by force, against their
> > will.
>
> Isn't that a classic case of confusing the message with the messenger?
Can you be serious? What was the message? Are you trying to say that
when the Russians banned the Latin alphabet in Lithuania (1864–1904)
they were somehow trying – out of pure kindness – to save us from the
backward Latin script, used by so few people in the world? It's not
like there was anything wrong with the Latin-based Lithuanian
alphabet. It is up there with the most phonetic on Earth. Our one
idiosyncrasy – and I kind of like it – is that we use a different
grapheme to represent a feature of morphology (not phonetics) in a
couple of cases. Namely, the use of -ą to distinguish the feminine
nominative (e.g. Lietuvà) from the accusative (e.g. Lie~tuvą) and the
use of ų (instead of ū) to represent an accusative singular case of
certain nouns and the genitive plural of all nouns. By the way, that
last item is a terrific example of morphological and (almost) phonetic
correspondence between Lithuanian and Latin. All Latin genitive
plurals end in -um; all Lithuanian genitive plurals end in -ų.