Re: How to Make Chicken Cacciatore (was: phonetics by guesswork)

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Tristan Mc Leay <kesuari@Y...> wrote:
> Christian Thalmann wrote:
> > Frankly, the obstinate American opinion that "them
> > pesky accents can't possibly be important, because
> > otherwise we'd have them too" strikes me as arrogant.
>
> It's not an 'obstinate American opinion'. Frankly, I'm offended that you
> seem to think all Englishers are American; I thought you were smarter
> than that.
Granted, it's a blanket statement and not very well
researched.  ;-)  I just get the feeling that Americans
tend to be less in touch with the rest of the linguistic
world than, say, the British.  I doubt that the latter
treat umlauts any differently, though.



> Also, it's not an opinion. No-one wants to memorise
> alt+0309252094358204358 to be able to type é (and what if you're typing
> `élite' at the start of a sentence? Then you have to memorise
> alt+439269436898437509283475879, and remember that one's the
> capitalisation of the other), but most keyboards in at least Australia
> and the US lack another way of typing accents.
On my Mac, I can type umlauts with alt-u + vowel using
the standard American keyboard mapping...  I'm pretty
stumped when I have to do it on PC, or worse, a UNIX
machine.

Anyway, my qualm was not with the facts that accents are
not written as such (which, as I said, is commonplace in
many countries when accents are unavailable or when
writing in uppercase), but with the fact that they are
dropped *without replacement* in those cases where
replacements are available.



> > What would you think if we Europeans kept dropping
> > the mute e's in English words?
>
> I would think you're being silly. You have an e on your keyboard, you
> have an e in your native language's alphabet, why not use it?
You mean that same e that you could use to write Fuehrer
and Schroeder?  ;o)



> (OTOH, if
> you decided that 'Time' was such a silly name and you ought to call it
> 'Teim', well, go ahead.)
Now *that* is silly.  =P



> [OTTH, if you did it often enough, perhaps
> English would be forced into rethinking it's spelling.]
That, on the other hand, would be a welcome side effect.



> I was taught that ä was pronounced
> like (German) e (and äu like eu),
That's the case in the spoken High German of many Germans
I know.  It might actually have become the standard
pronunciation nowadays.  Saying /mE:dCn=/ rather than
/me:dCn=/ sounds kinda Swiss to my Swiss ears.  ;-)



> ö was pronounced like (English) er,
Certainly the closest available English approximation.
I'm getting the feeling that that particular guy I
chatted with just didn't take the course very seriously
...



-- Christian Thalmann

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