On 8/16/06, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 07:27:40PM +1000, Andrew Dunbar wrote:
This kind of thing interests me greatly. I just did some Google searches for Neapolitan OR napolitano with alphabet OR spelling OR orthography OR apostrophe OR quote. I couldn't find anything. So instead I'll ask here in which kinds of cases this occurs. Does it represent a certain sound or omitted letters?
Check the archive, last month; there was an *extensive* thread on this.
I took part in that thread and then, as now, as have not received a definitive answer and certainly no references at all to explain the orthography or the grammatical reasons for it.
My main question is does Neapolitan use a) a single character that looks like an English double quote mark or two adjacent apostrophes or b) a character that looks like an English apostrophe which in certain situations can occur as a "double letter"?
In the thread people describe the situation both ways and nobody clarifies it.
For instance, does Neapolitan use '' in contractions the way other languages use just ' ? Does Neapolitan use ' for something like palatalization or glottal stop and can that occur at the same place where a contractin occurs, thus necessitating '' ?
In Hebrew there is a single character "gershayim" which looks a bit like an English double quote character and it is not present on Hebrew keyboards though it is present in Unicode. People often use the English double quote character is place of gershayim.
In Amuzgo, an indigenous language of Mexico, there is a letter which looks like the English apostrophe which functions as a glottal stop. All consonants can be geminated in Amuzgo, and when they are they are written double - including the glottal stop. Unicode provides a character which looks like an English apostrophe but functions as a letter but again it's not present on keyboards so people use the English apostrophe (which can lead to an ugly mess if Word's Smart Quotes is not turned off).
Is the Neapolitan case more like the Hebrew case or more like the Amuzgo case, or unlike either case?
Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)
Cheers,
-- jra
Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274
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