Dave Bell wrote:

> 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...

You'd have thought the Hebrews would've asked for them back by now.


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