Date: Sun, 27 Dec 1998 11:23:55 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Mark Ovens <marko@uk.radan.com>, Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@flood.ping.uio.no>, Ollivier Robert <roberto@keltia.freenix.fr>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG, Yvonne Lehey <yvonne@lemis.com> Subject: Re: Regulated names (was: Crazy Laws) Message-ID: <19981227112355.B12346@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <36854A89.B393D402@uk.radan.com>; from Mark Ovens on Sat, Dec 26, 1998 at 08:43:53PM %2B0000 References: <368378AB.969463E2@uk.radan.com> <Your <4.1.19981224112052.05a31740@127.0.0.1> <4.1.19981224174155.03dd8670@127.0.0.1> <368378AB.969463E2@uk.radan.com> <4.1.19981225181200.05a201b0@mail.lariat.org> <xzpg1a3mzhe.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> <19981226131644.I12346@freebie.lemis.com> <4.1.19981226104824.05822710@mail.lariat.org> <36854A89.B393D402@uk.radan.com>
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On Saturday, 26 December 1998 at 20:43:53 +0000, Mark Ovens wrote: > Brett Glass wrote: >> >> At 03:30 PM 12/26/98 +0100, Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote: >> >>> BTW "connoisseur" is a funny example of a French word that has been in >>> the English language for so long that it's no longer spelled the same >>> way in French; most of the "oi" diphtongs have become "ai" (franois >>> -> franais, connotre -> connatre) but the English have kept the >>> archaic spelling in most cases (connoisseur, reconnoitre) but not all >>> (reconnaissance) >> >> The funny thing is that when the English adopt a word from another >> language, they cannot seem to use it as-is. They seem to feel COMPELLED >> to shift at least the accented syllables and often the vowels. > > Whereas Americans simply _remove_ (mainly) vowls from English words :-) Not really. How do you pronounce ``laboratory''. Four syllables, right? The Americans stretch five out of it. Dropping vowels is more common elsewhere (as in French). >> For example, I was recently asked in an English resatuarant if I'd like a >> piece of "GA-teau." > > I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I think the English > pronounciation of "gateau" is identical to the origianal French. It's difficult to know if you're talking about the same pronunciation that we are. As others observe, there's a general tendency in English to place the accent on the wrong syllable. In addition, I've often heard things like ``would you like some Black Forest gæteau'' in England, which is doubly funny: 1. It's a tart, not a gâteau. 2. The æ sound (as in `at') is completely wrong. On the whole, even educated people here perpetuate the same mistakes that the British make. Even those who get French vowels more or less right will consistently put the accent on the wrong syllable, which I find a great source of amusement (my wife, Yvonne, is almost always mispronounced). >> And almost daily, we hear Microsoft referred to as >> a "JUG-ger-naut" (the original Hindi is "ja-ga-NATH," a name for >> the god Vishnu). Well, you could hardly talk about ``original Hindi'' in this context. Obviously it derives from Vedic via Sanskrit, and there's still some dispute about how the accents evolved. And considering it means ``Lord of the Earth'', it's a sobering thought when applied to Microsoft. But in general most languages tend to change the accents of foreign borrowings, and English is a good example. Note the opposite tendency in the US: people automatically place the accent on foreign words on the *last* syllable, which in general is true for French only. > Partly of course this comes about because of sounds in one language > not existing in another and therefore the majority of the population > _can't_ pronounce them properly. I'd consider this a completely unrelated effect. > We had a couple of Spanish students working at my local pub during > their summer holidays and they said that they had a lot of trouble > with words like "shop" because there is no "sh" sound in Spanish, so > they tend to pronounce it "sop". Also the way the same letter is > pronounced in different languages affects it. The letter 'J' has a > soft sound in many languages, e.g. the (male) name Jean in French or > Scandinanians pronouncing "jump" as "yump", whereas in English it > has a hard sound, e.g. the (female) name Jean. Remember that J evolved from I. There are many further pronunciations of the letter, as your Spanish students would tell you. > Additionally we tend to tail-off the ends of words, i.e. hardly ever > accent the last syllable. > > Of course regional accents and dialects play a big part as well, e.g. In > northern England where I'm from words like bath, grass, and glass are > pronounced with a short 'a', as in cat, whereas down south where I now > live they are pronounced "barth", "grarss", and "glarss". Sure. This is a normal tendency, and is the reason why Hindi and English sound so different. Greg -- See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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