On 7/16/2018 10:25 PM, Tim Chase wrote:
On 2018-07-17 01:08, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
In English, I think most people would prefer to use a different
term for whatever "sh" and "ch" represent than "character".
The term you may be reaching for is "consonant cluster"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonant_cluster
Sibilant (soft) ch (as opposed to hard aspirated chi as in Greek letter
khi (visually like X)) and sh are single consonants, single phonemes in
spoken language. In less parsimonious writing systems than Latin, they
are often represented by single characters. When transliterated into
Latin characters, both decorated c and s and ch and sh are used.
'str', as in string or street is a consonant cluster. It might be
represented by a single ligature, but I would not expect any
phoneme-based writing system to consider the result to be a single
character. (Given that the sound of X (hard chi) mutated into 'ks', the
latter is not impossible.)
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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