Re: "to be" and not to be in the world's languages

On 3/29/06, Elliott Lash <erelion12@...> wrote:
> I can't read that.
Of course not.  You're using Yahoo! email.

You may be able to force your browser to display the text correctly
anyway by manually setting the encoding to UTF-8.  Yahoo!'s mail pages
lie to your browser about the encoding, but I don't *think* they
actually munge the content.  I could be wrong, though.  Sadly, there's
definitely no way to *send* Unicode text through Yahoo!'s composer.

But yeah, I had got the transliteration right.   jesm'  = есмь = je,
es, em, mjagkij znak.

> I assume it was pronounced /jes@mj/, similar to:
>
> zizn'  "life"  /Ziz@nj/
Hm.  Good comparison; forgot about that word.  But I don't *think* I
put an epenthetic schwa there.  It's more like the n is syllabic.
Short, but syllabic nonetheless.  Or possibly a combination of the z
and the n being, uhm, half-syllabic each?  If anything, there's a
whispered epenthetic schwa at the end, which shows up mostly due to
the palatalization.  The combination of a voiceless s and a voiced m
is what makes jesm' extra odd, I think.

Those crazy Slavs. :)

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

Reply