Re: orthographical question.
| From: | Roger Mills <romilly@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, April 1, 2001, 0:02 |
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Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>On Sat, 31 Mar 2001, Frank George Valoczy wrote:
>
>> Speaking of breves, can anyone explain how it is used in German over "u"?
>
>Breves are used in German?
>I'd love to know about this too. <sigh> One year of college German is
>so pitifully inadequate it isn't even funny. But I suppose that's true
>for any fragment of language you pick up in a class.>
The only breve-like thing I've ever seen in German is a sloppily written
umlaut.
During colonial days, Indonesian used e-breve for schwa (vs. {e} for [e,
E]). Somewhere in the 40s they switched to {e} schwa vs. {é}, much more
sensible since {e} is very frequent, {é} not. Then in 1972 they eliminated
all diacritics, so now you just have to _know_ which is which. Hmmph.
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