Re: French spelling scheme

On Mon, 30 Apr 2001 15:01:53 -0700, Frank George Valoczy
<valoczy@...> wrote:


>I think diacritics are nice to an extent. I think latinised
>Serbian/Croatian are the upper extent, Hungarian and Czech are slightly
>over the limit, and Vietnamese is just obscene...As for Icelandic o-umlaut
>(sorry, I can only use 7-bit ascii on this compu...), what would you write
>it with? Maybe that 'o' with the little tail? (O-cedilla?)
That's the problem; I don't have any acceptable solution there. I find the
o-tail prettier. If I were allowed to change it without further ado, I'd
select o-slash, in accordance with most other Nordlangs. The sound of the o-
umlaut, /9/, is btw not just a reflex of the old o-tail, /O/, but rather a
merger of the /O/ and old /9/ (or /2/). The old /9/ is spelled with an o-
slash in regularized Old Norse spellings, though I'm not sure when it
started appearing in manuscripts. Many of the manuscripts had a funny {au}-
ligature, for various sounds, mostly /O/. O-umlaut, in any case, does not
originate in the manuscripts.

>> >So "paille" > "palle"? :) What about words like "ail"?
>>
>> "all"? The advantage is more apparent in "feuille" > "folle" ("foille"
and
>> "foile" being ambiguous, if "oi" is to retain its value).
>
>I think he means garlic, which is pronounced [ai:l], more or less, in my
>bastardised French.
Yes, I'm aware. In my bastardized French, it's [aij]... I don't dare to
make any claims, so Cristophe will tell us how it is in his proper French :p

Regards,
Óskar

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