Talk:Apex (diacritic)

Merge?

Should this be merged into acute accent? The acute accent must have derived from the apex... FilipeS 11:16, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Usage?

How widespread was use of the apex? Is it found in a majority of documents? A significant minority? The Jade Knight (talk) 19:30, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

I don't know if it's quantified , but there's e.g. "A lectional sign which occurs fairly frequently in the tablets is the apex mark, made as a more or less oblique stroke." http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/tablets/TVII-4-4.shtml 2A01:C22:A474:C700:D0CA:9ACD:8DAB:9527 (talk) 20:24, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Since the Vindolanda tablets are written in Latin, that doesn't seem particularly surprising? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 22:55, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Good illustration

I happened upon this stone in Nîmes:

This inscription (CIL XII: 3203) was one of several in the museum with very clearly marked apices. I wonder if it would be worth using it instead of the current photograph, on which the apices show up a little less distinctly? Q·L·1968 ☿ 03:16, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

Great indeed. Can we create a gallery? -DePiep (talk) 23:37, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

They use a tall I for í. Is that normal? Did i continue to be written double after that convention was dropped for other vowels?

I see we were missing it in the existing illustration as well, with what we transcribed as ⟨j⟩. Added a note, though I don't know how general it was. — kwami (talk) 11:07, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Not in Unicode?

I did not find the word "Apex" in Unicode character names. Is it encoded in Unicode at all, possibly under another name? Has Unicode published anything about the acute-resemblance? -DePiep (talk) 18:42, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Nearly ten years later and still not there: I suspect that it never will. For a guess I would say that the Consortium would treat it as just an alternative name for the same thing. They had fried a far bigger fish when they said that many Chinese and Japanese ideograms are allographs and don't need unique code points. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 22:53, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

We definitely need Unicode representation of Vietnamese apex, as it was used contrastively with acute, breve or horn. ◌᷄ COMBINING MACRON-ACUTE is only a bad approximation. I suggest COMBINING CURVED APEX ABOVE or such. Perhaps some need to make a proposal... Ultima Thulean (talk) 10:42, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

Looks like a good idea. All you need now is the get it adopted and documented by Vietnamese language experts and then we can cite it. Wikipedia can't set a standard, only document what exists according to reliable sources.--John Maynard Friedman (talk) 14:25, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

Why did vowel length marking stop?

Why is it that although double consonants are always marked, marking long vowels has fallen out of use? Did vowels eventually lose their length? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.139.81.0 (talk) 12:26, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

Diacritics are less conspicuous then full letters, I guess. The vowels did lose their length and, in some cases, change their quality, but this change didn't make it into the prestigious dialect. It was considered proper to spell as closely to the Classical Latin as possible, but the pronunciation diverged significantly, and even if the diacritics hadn't been lost, they likely wouldn't have kept their exact function. 89.64.26.192 (talk) 20:00, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

More references needed.

This article makes a lot of claims that amount to "modern experts are stupid and don't know what they're doing". That sort of claim requires a large number of good references. (Actually, even with a large number of good references, I think some of these claims would need to be toned down; but first, references.) —Ruakh_TALK 16:06, 14 November 2012 (UTC)