Court enforces letter of the law
Oct 25, 10:03 AM (ET)
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) - A Turkish court fined 20 people for using the letters Q and W on placards at a Kurdish new year celebration, under a law banning characters not used in the Turkish alphabet, rights campaigners said Tuesday.
The court in the southeastern city of Siirt fined each of the 20 people 100 new lira for holding up the placards, written in Kurdish, at the event last year. The letters Q and W do not exist in the Turkish alphabet, but are used in Kurdish.
Court enforces letter of the law
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- Great Grand Panjandrum
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Court enforces letter of the law
It was a toss-up as to whether to post this here in the Spelling forum or in the Languages of the World forum.
Regards//Larry
"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
-- Attributed to Richard Henry Lee
"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
-- Attributed to Richard Henry Lee
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- Grand Panjandrum
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It's interesting how letters can have such a powerful influence. The Spanish Accademy and other Spanish media use the ñ to advocate the use of Spanish as a (second/foreign) language or sign of Spanish pride. I hear the Danes didn't like it very much when Swedish å's were substituted for aa's. I wonder which letter we would use to represent Portuguese. Ç couldn't be it, because other languages use it too. Ão maybe?
Brazilião dude
Brazilião dude
Languages rule!
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- Grand Panjandrum
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Talking about laws, I'm in the middle of an article that describes a bill that attempts to abolish the ` over the letter a in Portuguese when crase is at play. Crase refers to the blending of two a's: the preposition a (to, for), and the feminine article a (the). The proponent of the law says this rule is humiliating because, according to him, eight people out of ten don't know how to apply it (I wonder where he got that statistic from). Anyway, the phenomenon will never cease to exist, whether he likes it or no. Besides, what does a congressman have to do with matters linguistic?
Brazilian dude
Brazilian dude
Languages rule!
Welcome, J!
We do have some unique consonant combos, for example -- gh for [f].
-Tim
It's one of the beautiful things about English, really. We mostly use letters that everyone else (who uses the Roman alphabet) also uses -- this makes for really difficult spelling, because we have to make up for the fact that we don't have unique letters for certain things, and we borrow so many words from everone else.Do we anglos have any unique letters?
No.
We do have some unique consonant combos, for example -- gh for [f].
-Tim
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- Grand Panjandrum
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- Great Grand Panjandrum
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Not to be confused with tuff . . . which is not to be taken for granite . . .. . .
How do you pronounce «tough», Katy ?...
Henri
Regards//Larry
"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
-- Attributed to Richard Henry Lee
"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
-- Attributed to Richard Henry Lee
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- Grand Panjandrum
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Good point. Prounounced "thu", was it not? I can't rememberWe used to have the three letters þ, ð and æ. They are all still used in Icelandic.
A variant of þ looked like <y>, and this is the <y> we see in signs like "ye old shoppe".
þ and ð were eventually replaced with <th>.
Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots! Knife no one, fink!
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- Lexiterian
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Far as I remember, the "hard" one was called "thorn" and pronounced as an unvoiced labio-dental fricative (like th- in today's three. The "soft" one (a voiced labio-dental fricative) was pronounced like the th- in today's the.Good point. Prounounced "thu", was it not? I can't rememberWe used to have the three letters þ, ð and æ. They are all still used in Icelandic.
A variant of þ looked like <y>, and this is the <y> we see in signs like "ye old shoppe".
þ and ð were eventually replaced with <th>.
-- PW
"Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention to arrive safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: Wow!!! What a ride!"
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