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Assume v. Presume

Mmm - doesn't have a lot to say about it though, does it. Almost a throw away remark (with some illustrative waffle in the rest of the paragraph)
The Latin names of some of the letters are disputed. In general, however, the Romans did not use the traditional (Semitic-derived) names as in Greek, but adopted the simplified names of the Etruscans, which derived from saying the sounds of the letters
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Black Hole said:
This is apropos to what? The phonetic alphabet is a completely different concept to what I am discussing.
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I'm sorry, but how is it different? You were asking about systems that name the letters of the alphabet in a manner other than their sounds.
 
I see it as completely different. The Phonetic Alphabet is artificial, an invention for communicating symbolic representations by speech over channels with a poor signal to noise ratio. What I am trying to get at is whether the Latin characters have names separate from their sounds, and if not why not... but I guess maybe you are postulating the Greek letter names are on a similar basis?
 
Yes. We tend to use onomatopoeic words where applicable, so to give something a name beyond its sound is to me an artificial construct. That implies a purpose beyond just spelling.
 
MikeSh said:
Yes. We tend to use onomatopoeic words where applicable, so to give something a name beyond its sound is to me an artificial construct. That implies a purpose beyond just spelling.
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I see nothing wrong with acrophony, apart from it failing on eff, em, en, ess, etc.

In the case of ancient greek, phoenician and egyptian, it is debatable that the names preceded the use as letters with a single sound, eg, alep meaning ox, bet for house, etc. The genius was the move from an ox hieroglyph to a letter representing an A sound
 
But we don't have a 1:1 correspondence between letter names and letter sounds. If the names were the sounds, we would say a, b, c, d (think the short phonems) and presumably settle for just the symbol/character to spell them. But the names are not the sounds the letters make in words - and a is not pronounced Ay except in rare circumstances. So we have a set of letter names... but no idea how to spell them. But we do know how to spell the names of the Greek letters, and they are in the English dictionary!
 
Well, if Wikipedia is correct I've found out why Greek letters have names ... "When the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet, they took over not only the letter shapes and sound values, but also the names by which the sequence of the alphabet could be recited and memorized."
So blame the Phoenicians :)
 
Okay, so we need names for teaching purposes (seems fair enough).

Anybody here got kids at school (or in the recent past)? Is there a standardised spelling for the English letter names that I don't know about?
 
Mike0001 said:
Very interesting question. Greek was derived from Phoenician, which had letter names, possibly with a meaning derived from hieroglyphs that preceded them. Phoenician was the first alphabet to have vowels.
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Mike0001 said:
In the case of ancient greek, phoenician and egyptian, it is debatable that the names preceded the use as letters with a single sound, eg, alep meaning ox, bet for house, etc. The genius was the move from an ox hieroglyph to a letter representing an A sound
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MikeSh said:
Well, if Wikipedia is correct I've found out why Greek letters have names ... "When the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet, they took over not only the letter shapes and sound values, but also the names by which the sequence of the alphabet could be recited and memorized."
So blame the Phoenicians :)
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Keep up, MikeSh!
 
At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.

So the whole world sleeps together at the same time? What happened to time zones?
 
I am a point???

Trev said:
Fastidiousness is a noun. The noun 'belongs' to the man so the possessive apostrophe is required, thus "man's fastidiousness" etc.:p
Go on. Prove me wrong.;) I very dare you.
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If that's what Mike was on about, he's being very cagey about it - possibly to get somebody else to spring the trap.

Its / It's
Ones / One's
Mans / Man's​

See a pattern?
 
Black Hole said:
See a pattern?
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Only one of exceptions.

From a discussion of Tesco less and fewer:

It's not as bad as a sign I saw in Sainsbury's, TODAYS MANAGER IS...

I asked said manager if she could see anything wrong with the notice. She looked at it for a full 30 seconds before squawking: "Well, I spose it is leaning to the left a bit."
 
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