From owner-freebsd-chat Fri Apr 7 4:30: 7 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from flood.ping.uio.no (flood.ping.uio.no [129.240.78.31]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EC47D37BA87 for ; Fri, 7 Apr 2000 04:30:04 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from des@flood.ping.uio.no) Received: (from des@localhost) by flood.ping.uio.no (8.9.3/8.9.3) id NAA75686; Fri, 7 Apr 2000 13:30:02 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from des@flood.ping.uio.no) To: naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: BSDCon East References: <20000404152346.01398@techunix.technion.ac.il> <8cgj1a$313f$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> <8cj1cg$1gse$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> From: Dag-Erling Smorgrav Date: 07 Apr 2000 13:30:01 +0200 In-Reply-To: naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de's message of "6 Apr 2000 23:59:44 +0200" Message-ID: Lines: 36 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0802 (Gnus v5.8.2) Emacs/20.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) writes: > Admittedly the reverse direction is something of a problem, since > there are often many (combinations of) letters that map to the same > sound as well as all those silent final consonants. You can observe > the difficulties this causes for native speakers over on the French > language newsgroups (fr.*). It's only a problem if they didn't pay attention in class. Bar a few exceptions, there are good ethymological reasons for most spellings, and given a rudimentary knowledge of latin (which is complusory in French schools) and a sufficient base of other words to compare with, it shouldn't take more than a few seconds' thought to determine the correct spelling of a word with which you're not yet familiar. Even English and German are useful to understanding French... for instance, the circumflex (which seems to be the most confusing diacritical mark for most non-native speakers) nearly always indicates an elided s in the latin root of the word, and the corresponding English or German word usually still has that s (host / hôte, feast / fête, paste / pâte, etc.) - unless it is used on the letter u, where it indicates a contracted -urus (sûr, from securus; mûr, from maturus). Acute and grave accents, when used on the letter e, have more complex ethymologies, but are easily deduced from pronunciation (as long as you remember when *not* to use them - briefly, don't put a grave accent on an e followed by two consonants). Diareses have the same function in French as in English - to quote the Webster: "a mark {umlaut} placed over a vowel to to [sic] indicate that the vowel is pronounced in a separate syllable (as in naïve, Brontë)" DES -- Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@flood.ping.uio.no To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message