Re: Spelling rules in old languages

Neeraj Mathur wrote:
> Latin: again, for a long time it was written as it sounded with somewhat
> fixed values for the letters; the language was then fixed for literary
> purposes, and the spellings were frozen at that time. The process seems to
> have been one based on consensus of the intellectual class; there is a
> record of various people wanting to perform reformations at one time or
> another (I think it was Augustus who wanted to add a new letter to represent
> the unstressed high middle vowel that occured in labial environments; he was
> unsuccessful, and this vowel was sometimes written with <I> (maximus) and
> sometimes <U> (postumus)). Many other changes that developed in the spoken
> language were left out (such as the loss of /h/ in many peoples' speech)
> because the conservatism of the written idiom had fixed the spellings.

Orthographiam, id est formulam rationemque scribendi a grammaticis
institutam, non adeo custodit ac videtur eorum potius sequi opinionem,
qui perinde scribendum ac loquamur existiment. Nam quod saepe non
litteras modo sed syllabas aut permutat aut praeterit, communis hominum
error est. Nec ego id notarem, nisi mihi mirum videretur tradidisse
aliquos, legato eum consulari successorem dedisse ut rudi et indocto,
cuius manu "ixi" pro "ipsi" scriptum animadverterit.

- Suetoni Tranquilii uita diui Augusti, 88
Source: http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/suetonius/suet.aug.html

.

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