Contrastive use of kratka and breve

[Leo Broukhis]

И with lunate breve is not a letter of the alphabet, the breve is just an
indication to the reader of the dictionary that the И in this particular
word is pronounced short. While there may be homographs that differ in
pronunciation only by the vowel length, the alphabet doesn't provide for
that distinction.

Leo


On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 3:43 PM, Richard Wordingham <
richard.wordingham at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 2 Jul 2014 13:08:42 -0700
> Leo Broukhis <leob at mailcom.com> wrote:
>
> > The difference is real and intentional, but isn't it akin to the
> > difference between (IIRC a discussion several years ago) the
> > Polish/Czech acute and the French acute - the former is more
> > vertical?
>
> Not really.  Look at the third entry at
> http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/Forest_Nenets_short_i_1.jpg , where
> the two occur side-by-side.  Unification should depend on their being
> contextual variants or one another, and difficult in laying down rules
> is the justification for U+017F LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S being a
> separate character.
>
> Richard.
>
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