Oh, aye! (was: Wofir aka The Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis)

At 12:55 pm -0500 8/9/00, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 8 Sep 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>>
>> > On Fri, Sep 08, 2000 at 06:57:23AM +0100, Raymond Brown wrote:
>> > [snip]
>> > > e.g. drop the {h} in spelling?  Wouldn't a portmanteauization
>> > [snip]                                               ^^^^
>> >
>> > Hey!! a tetraphthong! :-P
>>
>> Don't we wish.  French seems to be chock full of multiple vowels that
>> sound, to my ear, like single-thongs or diphthongs at best, like l'eau.
>
>Oh, they are.  <eau> is the monophthong /o/,
Precisely, tho when anglophones speak French it may get perverted into a
diphthong   - ach!!

>although it does descend
>from a triphthong pronounced like the spelling.
Yep - but that was sometime before the 13th cent. IIRC

>French has one of the
>most conservative orthographies of any European language, along with
>Greek and, of course, English. :)
...and, unlike either English or Greek, continues to write a whole lot of
grammatical endings that fell silent centuries ago  ;)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
At 10:12 am -0400 8/9/00, H. S. Teoh wrote:
[....]
>Hehe, I know it can't be a tetraphthong... at most it'd be a triphthong
>eau + a monosyllable i
In all varieties of English, it's two syllables, therefore can't be a
tetraphthong even if such a beast is possible (which I think it is not).
In most varieties of English it is one diphthong, followed by another
diphthong.

Ray.






=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
=========================================