29-03-2026, 10:21 AM
(27-03-2026, 08:17 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This "spelling conventions" did not come suddenly after 1438 or whenever VMS was finished. You will find lots of German writing of 15th, 14th or 13th century showing masses of double consonants without any conventions, sometimes even changing whitin the text from one and the same author.German has many roots in Latin where geminized consonants were a standard and standardized by finalisation of Latin at least 1,000 years before VMS.
Yes, sure, in German standard spelling the "little break" before a consonant sound has always been conventionally encoded by doubling the consonant.
But, in case you haven't noticed, the VMS is not written in the German standard spelling.
Japanese hiragana script, for example, encodes that same "little break" by adding a っ before the (non-doubled) syllable gliph: ぽ = "po", っぽ = "ppo".
Quote:We had the double-consonants-discussion already about Venetian: it leaded to a moment when I just posted random screenshots of Venetian texts showing dense appearances of Geminis, while you insisted that there are no doublings at all in this language.
And I still insist.
As I explained, in the standard Italian script, consonant doubling is used for three distinct things:
- with many consonants, to denote a "little break" before the consonant, as in "note" = /'nòte/ vs "notte" = /'nò<break>te/; or the lengthening of the consonant, it it can be sustained, as in "anno" or "bello";
- to turn the simple "r" sound into the trilled "rr" sound, as in "caro" vs "carro", and
- to prevent the letter "s" between vowels to be read as "z", as in "casa" = /'kaza/, "cassa" = /'kasa/
The spoken Venetian language does not have those "little breaks" or lenghtened consonants that spoken Italian and other "dialects" have. The verb "to strike" is written "battere" and pronounced /'ba<break>tere/ in Italian, but pronounced /'bater/ in Venetian. Spoken Venetian also lacks the trilled "r" sound.
But when it is written, Venetian uses basically the Italian orthography, which is usually read according to the Italian orthography rules. Thus, in written Venetian, you will not see any doubled consonants, except "ss" between vowels -- which does not mean a doubled /s/ sound, not a break before the /s/, but just a single /s/ sound rather than the /z/ that Italian speakers would read there.
All the best, --stolfi