Blinky the Shark wrote:
> Dave Bell wrote:
>
>> Tracy wrote:
>>
>>> Weird. When you put your pointer over it in the boston.com story it says
>>> "vietmarketbag" but when you look at in the seller's website it says
>>> "Cambodian". I don't know what Cambodian or Vietnamese looks like....
>>> -Tracy
>> This being Usenet, I *know* someone will correct me if I'm wrong...
>> That looks clearly Vietnamese, to me. Cambodian uses a non-Western
>> alphabet, while Vietnamese adds a lot of diacrits to what's basically a
>> Western alphabet.
>
> Catholic influence:
>
> http://www.omniglot.com/writing/vietnamese.htm
>
>
Of course! Same thing St. Cyril accomplished for the Slavs, long ago.

As a side note there, I recognized most of the Cyrillic alphabet as
deriving from Greek (learned alongside Latin, back in the Dark Ages of
the 1950's and '60s.) But a few characters were distinctly different,
particularly those for ZH, SH, SHCH, CH, and TS. A few years ago the
penny dropped: The SH (a square-bottomed W) is just a Shem - the "extra"
letters were probably all borrowed from Hebrew...

Dave