Re: OT: Another French name pronunciation question

En réponse à michael poxon :


>To me the name looks vaguely Slavonic. Maybe an emigre from the East? In one
>of George Orwell's books there's a funny episode where he's telling the
>story of a French waiter (I think) called M.Merdes, which the gentleman
>always followed by the phrase "of Spanish descent" obviously hinting that
>his name should be pronounced /merdez/ as opposed to /merd/ which you would
>have taken to be the appropriate way to say it! Is there an embarrassing
>word in French that "Niepce" might have sounded like originally (it is an
>anagram of "ce pine" after all).
Except that *"ce pine" is meaningless ("pine" is a feminine noun, "ce" a 
masculine demonstrative. Don't go very well together :)) ), so I don't 
think people ever thought about it. And since anyway in French we don't 
take accents into account when making anagrams, adding an accent wouldn't 
change anything :)) .

>  I'm not sure who Niepce was, but having
>vaguely heard of him, I had a feeling that the first was grave rather than
>acute.
It would look logical to me too.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.