scaron or whatever (Latin 1)

[Liland Brajant ROS']

Dear Johan Bjornson,

Pardon the delay in this (I saved the note to reply to and then forgot
where I'd saved it...)

Jeffrey Kopp afisxis per la cxinukpigxina listo:

On Fri, 11 Sep 1998 04:46:26 -0700, "Johan Bjornson"
<flodisfont at mailexcite.com> wrote:

[. . .]

> I'm a Swedish student, researching for a project on the prevalence among
> non-Slavists -- that is, speakers of native North American Indian languages
> -- to  use the letter scaron (Š) for the English grapheme /sh/ when that
> diacritic character is coded at ASCII values 138 and 156 in the Latin 1
> (ISO-8859-1) character scheme.

> One of my goals is to get hold on people's thoughts on why this typical
> North American Indians' and Slavists' sign is chosen to be a component of
> the U.S./E.U. character coding Latin 1.

> If the ortography of the Native language(s) You're familiar with employs
> the letter scaron for /sh/, please answer the questions:

> 1) Do You use the letter scaron when writing in a native language on the
> computer, or do You prefer /sh/? Have You ever wondered why scaron
> is a included in Latin 1? Did You "find out" the true reason (does such
> one exist?), or concluded something on Your own?

In writing Lushootseed (aka Puget Sound Salish) on the computer, I prefer
"S", but I sometimes use the (lowercase--Lushootseed doesn't use
uppercase letters except in my preferred ASCII system) s-caron -- see
e.g. on my website at

     http://www.scn.org/~lilandbr/index1x.html

mainly when trying to write the native name of the language, which is

     dxwl at Sucid   (where the w is superscript reduced font, the @ is schwa,
                   and the S is the s-caron).

Yes, I have wondered why Latin 1 includes this letter, especially when
the c-caron, which seems just as useful to me, is omitted.  (To do
Lushootseed properly, though, one needs several other letters *not* in
Latin 1, like x-caron, j-caron, raised w and z, barred l and barred
lambda, not to mention the ubiquitous schwa, whose scarcity in common
type fonts mystifies me, and the undotted-question-mark glottal stop...)

I have no idea why Latin 1 has S-caron and s-caron.

> 2) Is "s with superimposed angle" common in the native language
> handwriting?

Yes, in my limited experience.

> 3) In what terminology do the natives refer to scaron?

Both natives and linguists seem to call it "s-wedge" /'Es ,wEj/.
Personally, I think of it as "s-hacek" (with a hacek on the c, too).  Or,
when I'm thinking in Esperanto (which is often the case) I call it "sxo"
(the Esperanto "sxo" is s-circumflex) or "korna so" (horned s).

> Again, by filling out this query, You hand in invaluable aid for my
> research process.  Many thanks in advance!

No problem! Again, pardon the delay.

Leland Ross

--
Liland Brajant Ros' * UEA-D, Seatlo Usono * FD Baptismo, AA, US-lit-ro
      204 N 39th St / Seattle WA 98103 Usono | tel 206-633-2434
    lilandbr at scn.org / lilandbr at hotmail.com / lbrnpusa at hotmail.com
        webpage "La Lilandejo" - http://www.scn.org/~lilandbr/