Slavic squiggles
From Mr Christopher Butler Sir: No self-respecting Baltic or Slavic lan- guage would be without its diacritics (Mind your language, 7 August); largely, it seems to me, because the orthography was devel- oped to allow the languages to be written phonetically. I find that to understand how to pronounce a word in, say, Polish, is much easier than physically to get your tongue around it.
The Lithuanians (whose language I am presently, by dint of marriage and resi- dence, attempting to master) neatly solve the problem of what to call their diacritics by reference to their shape. Thus the ha- check is known as a paukkukas, bird') and the squiggle under the vowels 4 9 is known as a nosine, or handkerchief.
A neat solution, wouldn't you agree?
Christopher Butler
Vilnius, Lithuania
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