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Re: CHAT letter names (was: CHAT Etruscana etc)

From:John Cowan <cowan@...>
Date:Monday, March 1, 2004, 14:50
Tristan McLeay scripsit:

> It's not as if h-dropping dialects say aich and > h-keeping ones say haich, so it can't be ignored in > the same way that /Ar/ vs /a:/ is.*
The reason for aich's popularity, though, is that the dominant dialect (back when we had such a thing) used to be h-dropping, and still is, though it is no longer dominant. Haich is surely derived from other dialects that were not h-dropping.
> * Another change to letter names is that it's become > quite common to say [a:r] even when there isn't a > conveniently placed vowel after the letter.
People will do very odd things in the name of disambiguation. The names of the German vowels are their "long" sounds, as in English, but the name of "ä" is [&:] even though [e] is the normal "long" pronunciation, because of course [e] is used as the name of "e".
> So if upsilon is a simple y, what's a complicated one?
I think that better translations of epsilon and upsilon are "e by itself" and "o by itself", as opposed to their use in the digraphs ei and ou.
> Bah. Silly E-o. Only fools give letters such similar > names. What happens what tso, tSo, so and So merge > word initially but remain distinct word-finally? (I > guess we get haich, don't we?)
Lojban is even uglier: the consonant letter names are [b@] [S@] [d@] etc. -- "You're a brave man! Go and break through the John Cowan lines, and remember while you're out there jcowan@reutershealth.com risking life and limb through shot and shell, www.ccil.org/~cowan we'll be in here thinking what a sucker you are!" www.reutershealth.com --Rufus T. Firefly

Replies

Tristan McLeay <kesuari@...>
Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>