Re: Tactics to bringing a language to life

Joachim Pense wrote:

Am Wed, 05 Apr 2006 19:39:42 GMT schrieb Peter T. Daniels:

phoglund@xxxxxx wrote:

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Ruud Harmsen wrote:

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 13:33:56 GMT: "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

phoglund@xxxxxx wrote:

FYI, Coptic is not an invented language. It is an Afro-Asiatic
language, the daughter language of ancient Egyptian, written in a
Greek-based alphabet rather reminiscent of Cyrillic, and including a
heavy admixture of Greek loanwords.

What's cyrillic-looking about the Coptic alphabet?

Anybody can judge for themselves:
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/coptic.htm
I see some slight similarities myself too.

Um, because they're both derived from Greek uncials?

AFAIK some of the non-Greek letters of Cyrillic were derived from the
Coptic alphabet.

There are all sorts of theories about where the extra letters come from,
but the most parsimonious is that they're all adapted from Glagolitic.

"parsimonious"? My online dictionary translates it as "sparsam, knausrig"
which means "unwilling to spend money". Again, I seem to have missed a joke
:-(

No joke. If your dictionary doesn't know that theories that obey Occam's
razor, as it were, are called "parsimonious," then you need a better
dictionary!

In the literal sense, it doesn't have a negative overtone; it means
thrifty, economical, not a spendthrift.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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