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Re: Cyrillic for English

From:Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Saturday, December 11, 1999, 11:09
At 8:52 pm -0500 10/12/99, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Roland Hoensch wrote:
[....]
>> n in new has no letter. > >Hunh? It's the same as in "no" or "never", at least in my dialect.
In all dialects in both hemisphere IME.
>Some have /nj/, I suppose, but that's because the <ew> = /ju/.
I have /nj/ in /nju:/ - but it /nj/, not the palatal nasal of Italian 'gnocchi' /Jokki/. Indeed, IME anglophiles find the correct pronunciation of /J/ difficult & tend to substitute /nj/ so that, e.g. Italian 'signor' gets pronounced as /sin'JOr/ or, more often in my neck of the woods, /'sinjO:/
> >> Even if it is to be digraphs; why not at least have letters for all >> the consonants sounds? > >Except for /Z/, we do. Consonants are almost totally predictable. A >bit complex, yes, but predictable. The few exceptions are things like ><gh> which can either be silent or /f/.
...or /T/ in the placename 'Keighly' /'ki:Tli/ :)
>But, I think that those are >naturally disappearing. Just look at "tho", "thru", "nite", "lite" and >the like. Perhaps in a generation or so, <gh> will be lost.
Could well be - or the older spellings kept for special effect - as I've occasionally met 'theatre' & 'gaol' in America to give 'quaint' or 'olde worlde' effect. Ray. ========================================= A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language. [J.G. Hamann 1760] =========================================