by James McGillivray
(Collingwood ON. Canada.)
I loved this page also. I am an old surgeon, born 1929, and I was in conversation with my friend who speaks Italian as well as English and knows Latin. I was telling him that the circonflex accent and the other diacritical marks were signs of missing letters and useful in translation.
I was looking for an authority and this page provided it. Teachers need to be told of this, and should tell students, and not leave them to find out by themselves 70years after I was studying French. Also the accent grave marks the d that the French drop off words that we use in English.
ALSO": Look up Grimm's Law, about the consonant shift from Greek to Gothic to German. It applies wider than Brother Grimm stated. Exemplo gratia: Smith, Smythe, Smit, Smid, Schmidt, etc. This would be a suitable subject for a thesis. it has been neglected.
Vowels exchange with vowels and consonants with consonants in patterns which are predictable and in groups which have reasons to form.
Examples: Blanco bianco poor writers or poor eyes
s,c,x,z these make hissing sounds
H,K, they look similar
yzjgpq in cursive script they have tails that hang below the line
b,v, in Gaelic and Spanish and Greek and Russian they are mixed up or similar sounding.
I HOPE that someone will do this as I am unlikely to get around to it,