Re: Umlauts (was Re: Elves and Ill Bethisad)

On Friday, October 24, 2003, at 08:27 , Costentin Cornomorus wrote:

[snip]
>> But NoÎl is French!
>
> And so are "vis a vis" and "role". It is
> increasingly common to not put the accent marks
> on such words as are naturalised in English (role
> almost never has it anymore).
I *KNOW* these words are borrowings from French and
that 'role' has now become entirely naturalized.

For your information, the _Old_ French for Christmas
was borrowed and naturalized in _Middle_ English.  It
is now spelled 'Nowel' or 'Nowell'.  Middle English
borrowed and assimilated quite a few others, e.g. table,
chair, pork, veal, beef, faith, loyal, royal, prince,
master, mistress, duke, duchess, count, ounce, ton,
cream, season, reason etc., etc.

In more recent times I know we have borrowed an assimilated
words like 'hotel'.  I do not advocate putting a circumflex
on the 'o' nor pronouncing it without the initial h- .

>
> "Map" is Punic via Carthaginian;
Just supposition! All that we actually know is 'mappa' is Latin.
Yep, I have noticed that we don't write a double 'p' or put -a
at the end in English - duh!

We have only Quintilian's word that it was of Punic origin -
there is AFAIK no corroborative evidence.  As Carthage had been
destroyed long before his time, I think his claim should be
treated with caution

> hell, "via" is Latin; "
Yep - ablative of 'uia' - by way (of).  Tell me something new.

> television" is Latin;
That's new, alright! But it's rot.  What Latin word or morpheme
is 'tele', for goodness sake?  And "vision" is actually English,
derived from Latin 'uisio' (gen. uisionis).

> "charge" is Latin;
No, it is not!  'Charge' is a Middle English borrowing from _Old French_
'charge' = "load, burden", sort of, um, spelled a bit the way we do in
English (and still spelled the same in Modern French, tho the pronunciation
has changed).  The French word, in its turn, is derived from a Vulgar Latin
*carrica, ultimately connected with 'carrus' (wagon).

> etc. etc. We don't ensure that any of those words
> are correct or faithful to their original
> languages!
A bit difficult to write 'television' correctly in the original language
because:
(a) the word is derived partly from Greek and partly from Latin - i.e. no
original
language.  You might as well ask me to write "grandmother", 'beefburger" or
"Christmas" in their original languages.
(b) strange to say neither the ancient Greeks not the Romans took the
trouble to
coin a word for something that would be invented two millennia later.

'television' was coined in 20th century _English_.

Nor do I recall ever suggesting taking 'Nowell' back to its original
language;
it is derived, through French, from Latin 'natalis'.  Maybe I'm entering
senility
and have forgotten that somewhere I wrote that it should be written as
*natale
or 'natal'.  Could you, please, kindly enlighten me where I said we should
"ensure words are correct or faithful to their original languages"?

If you must pick a pointless argument with me, please make sure of your
facts
first:
(a) I have *never* advocated the stupid position that you are attempting to
attribute to me;
(b) some of your etymolgies are faulty.

[snip]

>> If one is going to use French for some supposed
>> glamorous or prestigious reasons (who
>> understands
>> the minds of advertisers?), then one should at
>> least IMHO take the trouble to do so properly.
>
> Sure. But they're not using French. They're using
> English.
Then why did they write it with the trema?

Of course they thought they were using French - even
schoolkids spotted that one, I can assure you.

> Or would you propose a Language Board
> for setting rules on how foreign words can be
.....and the rest of the diatribe is just snipped because
I can hardly believe the pointless folly of what has been
written nor the unwarranted personal attack on me.

For my part, if the advertisers had written 'Noel'
(not uncommon as a name), I'd have written nothing.

The only observation I was making is that if you are consciously
using a _modern_ French word and are attempting to write it with
diacritics, then you might, out of respect for the language and
its people, make sure the diacritics are correct.

As Nik so rightly wrote on Saturday, October 25, 2003, at 04:02:
"Yes, but the trema isn't English.  :-)  If you're going to nativize the
word, which I have no objection to, you do it by dropping the diacritic,
not by placing it at random!  Either nativize it as Noel, or spell it in
the proper French way."

AMEN!

Ray
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