Re: Con-Alphabets & Real Languages

From: Steven W. Lytle 
   laokou@MSN.COM writes: 


    . English could have fully 
    adopted/embraced the word "chic" as "sheek" or "sheak"

 In fact, that is the preferred pronunciation, and the only way I have ever
heard it pronounced. What other pronunciation is there?

 Attribution stuff is weird in this email, and I don't have the techno savvy to
correct it. Apologies.

 I wasn't addressing this as a question of pronunciation. Sure, "chic" is
pronounced [Sik] in English. The point I was trying to make, in response to
Imperative's question as to why a langscript might adapt itself to accommodate
other langs, is that English has adopted the French spelling, and thereby,
tweeked its own orthography. "Ch" in English is /tS/, and in Greek loans /k/.
The /S/ development applies to French loans (final "c" without an accompanying
"k" is weird, too [for English]). That Americans don't pronounce this as [tSIk]
(though that has been used in sitcoms as a shibboleth for "rube") means that
English has slightly bent its orthography to accommodate the new loan (German,
I believe, now also has the same three-way distinction for "ch"). If English
were less friendly to loans, the word might have been imported with the meaning
intact, but spelled in English style "sheek" or "sheak" (Cf. Hungarian, where
"chic" is imported as "sikkes" [SIkES], "sikk" plus an adjectival ending "-es".
I should suppose that cosmopolitan Magyars could interpret foreign spellings
without a problem, but whether that's adopted into regular Hungarian spelling
in regular Hungarian written media, I do not know. Post Iron Curtain may have
changed thngs a bit. Ferenc?)

 This is certainly the weakest part of my prior argument, since it doesn't
involve importing foreign letters or creating new letters to be nice to
loanwords. But I think the point still works.

    Kou

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