Re: M

On Thu, 5 Jul 2001 20:01:58 +1200, andrew <hobbit@...> wrote:

>is <ër> used for agent nouns? -er, -or, -our.
Yes, although since it's unstressed, it's written without the dots. Also in
words like "beggar" -> <beger>.

>> "Orange" might be one of those irregular words, then. How about "fOrest"?
>>
>Hmmm.  Sounds like /fVUr@st/ to me.
Does "fOrest" have the same sound as in "stOry"? Does "or" always sound
like /VUr/ if another vowel comes directly after the "r"? I'm thinking that
this might be the kind of variation that the system can tolerate, much like
the way that <ü> is pronounced in two different (but predictable) ways in
American dialects. After labials and velars, Mârshen <ü> is pronounced like
/ju/, but it's plain /u/ in American English after alveolar consonants
(new, due, Tuesday).

>I don't find initial <ü> ugly.  It happens in Russian.  <ü> for eu-
>looks right to me, and probably not unknown in Martian nomenclature for
>the classic placenames given before colonization on the planet.  I
>suggest that <yü> might become used as subject form and <Ü> as the
>object form, except among those lowlives who think it is 'cool' to write
><Ü> all the time.
There's another question, would <yü> or <yû> be preferable? I like the idea
of using variant spellings to distinguish different words, but I'm not sure
that monolingual English speakers who aren't linguists would consistently
distinguish subject "you" from object "you". For that matter, unstressed
<ye> might become the norm. But if there are enough native speakers of
other languages who learned English as a second language, their usage might
prevail.

Maybe <yû> = "you" and <yü> = "yew"?

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