Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt

[Vidhyanath Rao]

Sheila Watts <sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

>If anyone is working in linguistics who finds it a problem when an
>orthographical symbol has different phonetic value in different languages,
>he or she should get out fast and try maths instead.

As a mathematician, I resent that remark, especially since I have finally
gotten used to z being used for palatal sibilant in the Harvard-Kyoto
convention for Sanskrit e-texts and zh for the final consonant in
``Tamil'':-)

Actually context dependent meaning is rife everywhere. Math papers
in different specialties use the same grapheme in very different
meanings. However, we don't have amateurs trying to read math papers,
they just write and try to publish them :-)