Re: CHAT: On the term 'engelang'

Carlos:
> And Rosta wrote:
>
> > The pronunciation of "engelang" is obvious once you know the
> > etymology -- as is often the case with English spelling. And <enge>
> > is the natural spelling, given the pronunciation; cf. henge, sprenge,
> > revenge.
>
> But this is kind of a "ghoty" thing, as those examples of "enge" for
> /EndZ/ are all word final.  I would have pronounce engelang as /EN@l{N/.
> Probably enge-lang would work better.
The various X-lang words are, morphologically, compounds, the components
of the compounds being clippings. Each element within a compound has
the phonological and orthographic properties of independent words.
So once you realize that "engelang" is a compound -- i.e. once you
know its origin -- you know to read "enge" as according to the
orthographic conventions of independent words.

> But, of course, I am not a native English speaker.
Being a native speaker makes no difference to judgements of
orthography. Nobody is a native speller.

--And.

Reply