# Which languages use only the English alphabet?



## prost

The 26 letters of the English alphabet?


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## Rallino

If you don't consider "ij" as a separate letter, Dutch has the exact same alphabet as English.

I think the African Language *Xhosa* also uses the same alphabet.


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## Tjahzi

Out of curiosity, why are you asking this question?


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## prost

Thanks.

I'm trying to set up website guest books for various countries. I thought that it allows foreign characters, but in fact it only allows English characters. Of course this forum allows foreign characters.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_modern_Latin_alphabet
Malay uses only English characters.


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## prost

In fact, it allows character from the German, Swedish, French, Spanish etc. alphabet too. But not arabic, cyrillic, urdu, greek etc.


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## Geo.

_*In current German, there remain the accented letters Ä ä Ö ö Ü ü and the ligature ß* — and in old German type (Fraktur) add to that the ligatures for ch ck st and sch — however the following convention is used to write when only the 26-letter (expanded) Latin Alphabet is available:- _
_Write *Ä ä Ö ö* & *Ü ü* as *Ae ae Oe oe* & *Ue ue*, respectively, and for the surviving *ß* ligature write *ss*. _
_(The only exception being the modern German military where *SZ* is used, at least when writing in block capitals). _

_Thus, for instance, the name Jürgen Weißenborn could be written Juergen Weissenborn _
_(with the possible exception that WEISZENBORN can be used by the military). _
​This formula, for writing German in a fairly clear and standard way, is well known and long used; it would be an alternative format — albeit only when necessary — for at least 100 years.


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## sakvaka

prost said:


> In fact, it allows character from the German, Swedish, French, Spanish etc. alphabet too. But not arabic, cyrillic, urdu, greek etc.



If it allows Swedish (é must be included), it'll mostly allow Finnish, too... unless the letters š and ž don't work.


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## Tjahzi

Ehm, you don't use _š_ and _ž, _do you? I thought [s] was your only (non-glottal) fricative? 

(Although it seems Karelian has the full "Slavic set"...)

On topic: I think the topic starter meant that it allows for all _latin based_ alphabets, but not for other writing systems (such as the Greek or various Cyrillic alphabets, Arabic abjad etc...).


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## sakvaka

Tjahzi said:


> Ehm, you don't use _š_ and _ž, _do you? I thought [s] was your only (non-glottal) fricative?



You're right. We have them... but we don't use them. Words like "šakki" and "džonkki" are frequently spelt "shakki" and "dzonkki", because our Finnish MS-OS keyboards lack the two characters. They are also becoming outdated in the minds of the latest generations.

(They're still pronounced as [š] and [ž], respectively. Here I didn't take into consideration words that have been simplified: šampoo has already become sampoo.)

Some people say that the sound and letter will eventually disappear from our language. It may be so, but as long as the countries Tšekki and Azerbaidžan exist...


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## Tjahzi

Oh, that's interesting. (And humorously put, I must say. )

No offense, but do you (Finns in general, that is) _really_ pronounce them as as [ʃ] and [ʒ]? My experience of Finnish speakers is that they have problems voicing their obstruents (in the "wrong" positions) and also producing non-glottal fricatives other than [s] and as such, I'm having a hard time imagining the average Finn producing a [ʒ] (which obviously contains both of the above mentioned difficulties) correctly. Most Swedes fail to do it, and then we even have both voiced stops (although this is somewhat debated) and a voiceless fricative of which [ʃ] is an allophone (normally transcribed as [ɕ]).

When I say _Swedes_ and _the average Finn_, I refer to people without any knowledge of phonology.

Also, for the record, assuming my translations are correct, we pronounce the examples above as: [ɧakʰ:], [djɔŋ:k], ['ɧamːpʰʊ], ['ɕɛkɪjən] and [asərbad'jan:]. Interesting that while /dž/ goes [dj], [š] becomes either [ɕ(/ʃ)] or [ɧ]. (Got more examples? )

(My transcriptions are non-standard and indicate aspiration as I've recently become aware of its phonologic importance.)


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## sakvaka

Tjahzi said:


> When I say _Swedes_ and _the average Finn_, I refer to people without any knowledge of phonology.



Well, yeah, "if you don't know about pronunciation, you don't know about pronunciation". That's it by definition.

I represent the "younger" Sega-GameBoy generation and am very aware of problems that some older generations bump into when trying to pronounce, for instance, /ʃ/. However, I don't think we children of globalisation anymore regard it as an oddity, since English and other languages (especially Russian here in Eastern Finland) can be heard anywhere we go. So, now my point is: younger Finns are _capable_ of pronouncing it correctly, there's nothing in our mouths to prevent doing it (a little practice won't do harm); but they may not necessarily _want_ to do it, for various reasons (ie. "why do it the difficult way if you can do it easily").

But now we're going deep off course, that is, topic.

Ps. Your /ɕ/ and /ɧ/ are way weirder than /tʃ/ and /ʃ/. This is purely my opinion, but you must already have noticed that the Finnish Swedish dialect realizes sj- and tj- in the latter way.
Ps2. Even I pronounce Azerbaidžan as "Azerbaitšan".


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## Tjahzi

Fair enough.

The most extreme case that I remember was a woman in her forties whom I encountered at my Russian class. She realized /с/, /з/, /ц/, /ш/, /ж/ and /ч/ as [s]. 

For the record, would you please disclose your age? 

PS1. Is that so? That /ɕ/ -> /tʃ/ and /ɧ/ -> /ʃ/? I just assumed they both went -> /ʃ/, but then of course, I'm technically not familiar with affricatives. 

To us, those are usually described as the "front" and "back" versions of _sje-ljudet_ (obviously the loose categorization originates from the fact that neither of them has a coherent and defined spelling, as such many speakers are technically unaware of the fact that there are actually two sounds and how they differ). 

PS2. Even with the voiced /z/ and /b/? Would non educated do that as well? (As in, do you know it because you know it's "right", despite the fact that those are alien phones, or because that's how it's in fact most naturally realized?


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## sakvaka

Jag påminner dig om att väggarna har öron här. 

That's so. Finnish Swedish people also realise "djur" as /dju: r/, not /ju: r/. So, they don't necessarily do it the easy way.

Oops, I forgot the other letters! Naturally it would rather become "Aserbaitšan/Aserpaitsan" in fast speech. (Oh no, I'm contradicting myself...! ) 

But I find š easier to pronounce than b, z (or even d!) and am not yet willing to accept that it would in effect be highly individual. (I've noticed that if some consonant creates problems, it's the English "*th*in"/"*th*ough".)


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## Tjahzi

Indeed, I've noticed quite a few peculiar pronunciations among Finnish Swedish speakers. 
For the record, are you aware of whether they do in fact pronounce /djur/ as [dju:r] or [djʉ:r], which would be the standard pronunciation (after all [ʉ] and  are different phonemes that exist independently in Swedish).

It makes perfect sense that š is easier than b/z/d/ž (and g?). Consonant tone _is_ tricky. 

It's also further interesting that [θ] and [ð] are problematic considering that they are, historically, native phonemes.


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## sakvaka

Tjahzi said:


> Indeed, I've noticed quite a few peculiar pronunciations among Finnish Swedish speakers.
> For the record, are you aware of whether they do in fact pronounce /djur/ as [dju:r] or [djʉ:r], which would be the standard pronunciation (after all [ʉ] and  are different phonemes that exist independently in Swedish).
> 
> It's also further interesting that [θ] and [ð] are problematic considering that they are, historically, native phonemes.




No, they use ʉ as well in the word. Note that I used the format /-/ instead of [-]. Put that way, accuracy of vowel qualities isn't so strict, I think: even English can be transcribed like this: 

/fri: k/ (freak)
/ka: / (car)

(But why? Because I wrote that post on my iPod Touch, the keyboard of which doesn't support IPA!)

Native phonemes... before the Middle Ages!  Notice that even d is difficult for Finns even though it belongs to the "native" Finnish alphabet (a, d, e, h, i, j, ...)! _Kedon kukkia kasvaa kadulla_ - flowers of the field grow in the street. Actually, the sound D is just an approximation to simplify a great dialectal and historical variation: _karulla_, _kavulla_, _kaulla_...


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## Nanon

French .
It is written everywhere that the French alphabet has 26 letters. Officially, the *13* accented vowels + *ç* + ligatures *æ* and *œ* don't count as letters. The moral is, don't trust what they teach you in school.
Which doesn't mean that diacritics should not be used in French - on the contrary! French without accents is very unclear and unpleasant to read (at least, to my taste).


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## Tjahzi

From my experience, that is, at my university, I learned that phonemes are written within /slashes/ whereas phones are written within [parentheses]. I don't know to what extent this is official (although I find it being followed quite often), but it seemed logical enough for me to adopt (and since vowel length is normally not indicated in these "phonemic transcription", I wasn't aware of whether you were in fact making a phonetic or phonemic transcription). That said, there is of course nothing stopping you from indicating vowel length as such, after all, every possible information is always welcome. 

Hehe!  Swedish, too, lost them at about the same time. And I meant interesting in the sense of "amusing", obviously neither of us are in any way helped by the fact that [θ] and [ð] were piece of cake for our ancestors (interestingly, these sounds seem to be the most troublesome for everyone to whom they are not native, but I suppose you already noticed that). 

Do you mean "native" alphabets, in the sense that its letters occur in native words? If so, I find it very interesting that you do in fact use /d/, but it makes sense that it far from always corresponds to [d] (my very personal opinion is that Swedish /d/ corresponds to [t~d] (where as /t/ corresponds to [tʰ])).

Regarding your example sentence (this is really just for fun), I recognize: a genitive + a plural noun not in the nominative case (partitive?) + a 3rd. person plural verb + adessive, which would give...{field-GEN. + flower+PL. + grow+PL(present+indicative?) + street+AD.}, does that make sense?


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## Orlin

Nanon said:


> French .
> It is written everywhere that the French alphabet has 26 letters. Officially, the *13* accented vowels + *ç* + ligatures *æ* and *œ* don't count as letters. The moral is, don't trust what they teach you in school.
> Which doesn't mean that diacritics should not be used in French - on the contrary! French without accents is very unclear and unpleasant to read (at least, to my taste).


I think it's simply a matter of convention whether accented characters are considered "compounds" of "normal letters"+orthographical signs or letters separate of the respective unaccented letters. The same is if the ligatures are compounds of letters or separate letters. "(Non)independence" of accented characters & ligatures has nothing to do with if accents are obligatory in writing or not either - the use of accents is determined by the rules of the respective language and as far as I know, in almost all languages that use accents they're mandatory at least in formal writing; they can be dropped informally if they don't make understanding more difficult.


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## Tjahzi

Good point Orlin. 

For instance, in German _ä_,_ ö _and _ü_ are considered accented variants of _a_, _ö_ and _u_, respectively, whereas in Swedish _å_, _ä_ and _ö_ are all very independent letters. Hence, in a German dictionary, you find words beginning _with ä/ö/ü_ listed among those beginning with _a/o/u_ while Swedish dictionaries have words beginning with _å/ä/ö _grouped separately (in that order, after _z_, for the record). 
Worth noting as well that in both languages, the letters (or accented variants) represent independent phonemes (and _å_ and _ü_ is in no way the same phoneme) and as such, can never be replaced by a/o/u. 

I find it interesting that in Russian, it's not at all uncommon to find _ё_ written as _е_, but _й _is never _и_. Maybe this is due to _ё_ being a more recent invention? Personally, as a not overly confident Russian reader, I find the omission of the diacritics a bit confusing, but natives seem not to notice it.

Link to the thread referred to by Orlin.


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## Orlin

Tjahzi said:


> I find it interesting that in Russian, it's not at all uncommon to find _ё_ written as _е_, but _й _is never _и_. Maybe this is due to _ё_ being a more recent invention? Personally, as a not overly confident Russian reader, I find the omission of the diacritics a bit confusing, but natives seem not to notice it.


As far as I know, in Russian the dots in _ё _are normally optional and their use is restricted to avoiding ambiguity (sometimes in proper names and rare words too) or in writings for small children and foreigners. There is a thread for this phenomenon in the Russian forum - see there.


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## Nanon

Orlin said:


> I think it's simply a matter of convention whether accented characters are considered "compounds" of "normal letters"+orthographical signs or letters separate of the respective unaccented letters. The same is if the ligatures are compounds of letters or separate letters.


True, it is a matter of convention and regulation. A couple of examples with the Latin alphabet: the Spanish alphabet has more than 26 letters, but the RAE decides which letters to include (there are numerous discussions such as this one about the change in number of letters in the Spanish alphabet). And the Polish alphabet has 32 letters (not counting digrams). So if the French count letters according to, let's say, Polish rules, that should make a total of 40. Or 42 including ligatures. Hence my .
I will limit myself to the Latin alphabet in this reply - we are talking about the English alphabet after all .


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## Rallino

Turkish alphabet considers some of the accented letters as actual letters, some, not.

The alphabet is said to have 29 letters:

a b c *ç* d e f g *ğ* h *ı* i j k l m n o *ö* p r s *ş* t u *ü* v y z

However, the following three vowels are not counted in the alphabet: *â*, *î* and* û*. I've got no idea why.


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## Tjahzi

Rallino said:


> Turkish alphabet considers some of the accented letters as actual letters, some, not.
> 
> The alphabet is said to have 29 letters:
> 
> a b c *ç* d e f g *ğ* h *ı* i j k l m n o *ö* p r s *ş* t u *ü* v y z
> 
> However, the following three vowels are not counted in the alphabet: *â*, *î* and* û*. I've got no idea why.



Do *â*, *î* and* û *represent independent phonemes or do the diacritics just mark stress or something similar?


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## Rallino

Tjahzi said:


> Do *â*, *î* and* û *represent independent phonemes or do the diacritics just mark stress or something similar?



We don't show stress. The stress is always in the end. They represent different sounds than do their accentless counterparts.


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## sakvaka

Tjahzi said:


> Do you mean "native" alphabets, in the sense that its letters occur in native words?



Exactly that.



Tjahzi said:


> Regarding your example sentence (this is really just for fun), I recognize:...



In fact, {field_GEN. + flower_PART._PL. + grow_PRES._SING._3RD + street_AD.}

Partial subject takes a singular verb. Compare with the total subject, which takes a plural verb:

_Kedon kukat kasvavat kadulla._

But totality and partiality is too long a matter to be discussed here. There are some nice threads in the Finnish forum.


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## Tjahzi

Ahh, indeed. Well, that really does make sense. 

My assumption was based on your signature, from which I failed to realize that _toukka _can neither be a nominative plural (no _-t_) nor a partitive plural (no _-i/j_)!


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## Black4blue

Rallino said:


> Turkish alphabet considers some of the accented letters as actual letters, some, not.
> 
> The alphabet is said to have 29 letters:
> 
> a b c *ç* d e f g *ğ* h *ı* i j k l m n o *ö* p r s *ş* t u *ü* v y z
> 
> However, the following three vowels are not counted in the alphabet: *â*, *î* and* û*. I've got no idea why.


 
They're not counted cause they are not different letters. (I guess I said that in another thread) They are just the letters that we put "^" onto. They're still a, i and u. 
What does TDK say?


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## Rallino

Black4blue said:


> They're not counted cause they are not different letters. (I guess I said that in another thread) They are just the letters that we put "^" onto. They're still a, i and u.
> What does TDK say?



Nothing actually, it just states some irregular rules about when to use it (which aren't very logical, so one has to memorize separately all the words that have it). 
But, these letters are pronunced slightly differently than their original counterparts, so _in my opinion_ they should be counted as separate letters. I've also thought of the possibility that they weren't counted because they weren't used very often. However, we have the letter: _*j*_ - which is used even more rarely, and it's in the alphabet.


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## Alxmrphi

West Greenlandic uses only letters in the English alphabet.
However, its sister language Inuktituk, uses a completely different system derived from the syllabary that Cree is written in, that is quite unusual (at least to me).


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## Montesacro

Alxmrphi said:


> However, its sister language Inuktituk, uses a completely different system derived from the syllabary that Cree is written in, that is quite unusual (at least to me).


 
Thank you, very interesting!
It is quite strange that those two English missionaries felt the need to introduce a syllabary in order to write Inuktituk, that was adapted from another syllabary invented in 1840 by another Englishman!
Was it really that hard to use the English alphabet for Cree and Inuktituk?
Judging by their sound inventories the answer would be "no".


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## Tjahzi

Hm, how so? Apparently, they found the Cree syllabary to fit in well with the needs of Inuktituk, so why shouldn't they use it? 
Or, maybe more importantly, why on earth use the _English_ alphabet, of all writing systems? The only reason the English are using it themselves is because it would be too much of an effort to change. 

To me, it makes perfect sense to get a decent writing system once one has the opportunity, because you really don't get a lot of "fresh starts".


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## Montesacro

Tjahzi said:


> Hm, how so? Apparently, they found the Cree syllabary to fit in well with the needs of Inuktituk, so why shouldn't they use it?
> Or, maybe more importantly, why on earth use the _English_ alphabet, of all writing systems?


 
By English alphabet I actually mean the Latin alphabet, which is by far the most widespread writing system in the world.
It is only too obvious (at least to me) that a man coming from a country where the Latin alphabet is in use would never think of using another existing writing system to write down a previously only oral language.



Tjahzi said:


> To me, it makes perfect sense to get a decent writing system once one has the opportunity, because you really don't get a lot of "fresh starts".


 
But in the case of Cree and Inuktituk their writing systems were not invented by native speakers.
Those Englishmen could have used the English (or Latin, or Swedish, call it what you like) alphabet adding, if necessary, a few diacritic marks. That would have been the most natural choice for them.


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## Tjahzi

Ok, Latin, fair enough. 

However, I'm not really sure what you mean with "It's too obvious that a speaker of language with a Latin based alphabet would never think of using another existing writing system to write down a previously only oral language". Do you question the claim that the Cree/Inuktituk syllabary was created by an Englishman?

Also, how does it matter whether a writing system was/was not created by natives? As I see it, as long as a person has a decent knowledge of the language in question as well as sufficient linguistics skills, he or she is suitable to create a writing system.

That said, of course those (who ever they were) _could_ have used a Latin based alphabet. Then again, they apparently decided there was a better solution (that is, the Cree/Inuktituk syllabary). Although I'm no expert on neither Cree nor Inuktituk, and as such cannot make an assessment of my own), I see no reason to doubt it. Some languages are best suited to be written with an alphabet, some with an abugida, some with an abjad and some using syllabaries. (Personally, I'm doubtful in the case of logographics, but that's just me.) 

However, in case I somehow overlooked your arguments for writing Cree and/or Inuktituk with an alphabet, I apologize.


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## Montesacro

Tjahzi said:


> Ok, Latin, fair enough.
> 
> However, I'm not really sure what you mean with "It's too obvious that a speaker of language with a Latin based alphabet would never think of using another existing writing system to write down a previously only oral language". Do you question the claim that the Cree/Inuktituk syllabary was created by an Englishman?
> 
> No, I don't. That Englishman invented the Cree/Inuktituk syllabary. But certainly he never thought of using the Devanagari or the Arabic script.
> 
> 
> Also, how does it matter whether a writing system was/was not created by natives? As I see it, as long as a person has a decent knowledge of the language in question as well as sufficient linguistics skills, he or she is suitable to create a writing system.
> 
> My point was that a native speaker, theoretically with no knowledge of any existing writing systems, would indeed try to invent one that suits his language best, whilst a non-native speaker would be much more likely to simply apply the one already used for his own language.
> 
> 
> That said, of course those (who ever they were) _could_ have used a Latin based alphabet. Then again, they apparently decided there was a better solution (that is, the Cree/Inuktituk syllabary).
> 
> That's what happened, however strange it may seem to me.


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## Tjahzi

Hm, maybe he did but decided they were not as suitable?

I actually think you are underestimating linguists here. With _no_ previous knowledge of linguistics or writing systems (I assume the former based on the latter), I'd say a native would have a very hard time coming up with a decent writing system. 
A competent linguist however would have the ability to analyze the language and then decide upon which system would serve its needs the best (which I believe was how the Cree syllabary was selected as the writing system of the Inuktituk).

That said, such decisions can always be questioned (since, obviously, all types of writing systems _can_ of course be used for all languages). As such, why does it appear strange to you that they decided upon a syllabary for Inuktituk?


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## Montesacro

Tjahzi said:


> Hm, maybe he did but decided they were not as suitable?
> 
> I actually think you are underestimating linguists here. With _no_ previous knowledge of linguistics or writing systems (I assume the former based on the latter), I'd say a native would have a very hard time coming up with a decent writing system.
> A competent linguist however would have the ability to analyze the language and then decide upon which system would serve its needs the best (which I believe was how the Cree syllabary was selected as the writing system of the Inuktituk).
> 
> That said, such decisions can always be questioned (since, obviously, all types of writing systems _can_ of course be used for all languages). As such, why does it appear strange to you that they decided upon a syllabary for Inuktituk?



Because it's hard for me to believe that the Latin alphabet wouldn't have had a satisfying degree of suitability for those languages.
And above all for practical reasons: choosing the Latin alphabet would have been the easiest solution, though certainly not the best since they decided otherwise.


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## Tjahzi

I get the impression that you advocate that since a Latin alphabet _could_ be used, it also _should_ be used, or at least that it's very strange that those missionaries did not think so. 
Sorry in case I appear overly inquisitive, but I'm very curious. If the above is correct, you either have a personal preference for the (Latin) alphabet (which is just fine), or you have some reason, that is, information/knowledge about Inuktituk, which indicates that it would do better with an alphabet, that I don't. 
And then I want that information too.


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## Alxmrphi

> I get the impression that you advocate that since a Latin alphabet _could_ be used, it also _should_ be used


I have followed the conversation and I didn't get that impression.

What I understood was, it would have been natural for them to frame a new language within the parameters of the writing system that the creators themselves were most familiar with, rather than opting for a completely new system. There was no "_should_" that I can see. But I guess only Montesacro can confirm that.


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## Montesacro

Alxmrphi said:


> Tjahzi said:
> 
> 
> 
> I get the impression that you advocate that since a Latin alphabet _could_ be used, it also _should_ be used
> 
> 
> 
> I have followed the conversation and I didn't get that impression.
> 
> What I understood was, it would have been natural for them to frame a new language within the parameters of the writing system that the creators themselves were most familiar with, rather than opting for a completely new system. There was no "_should_" that I can see. But I guess only Montesacro can confirm that.
Click to expand...

 
Montesacro confirms that


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## Tjahzi

Fair enough. 

Sorry, I just got lost in this conversation:

_- As such, why does it appear strange to you that they decided upon a syllabary for Inuktituk?_
_- Because it's hard for me to believe that the Latin alphabet wouldn't have had a satisfying degree of suitability for those languages._

as I didn't understand how "no arguments against a syllabary" became "an argument for an alphabet". 
However, I believe I see your point.

(Thanks Alex)


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