Autonym of Mosopeleas-Ouesperies-Ofos

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 5 Mar 2007, David Costa wrote:
> Technically, it's not exactly an '8' the way the French wrote it -- they
> actually wrote it as an '8' with an open top, often a descending character.
> But to make life simple, it's usually printed with plain '8'.

In other words, it's a u stacked on an o:  a sort of ligaturization of two
letters that work together, like the ae or oe ligatures.

Sometimes you get a "funny character" out of this process, like aesc "ae"
or 8, and sometimes a diacritic, like umlaut (stacked e) or cedilla
(subposed s or c, I think) or tilde (stacked n).

I've always wondered what hacek and ogonek were.  Hacek might be a z, so
that s^ = sz, etc.