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

From:Tristan Mc Leay <kesuari@...>
Date:Saturday, July 17, 2004, 23:44
Christian Thalmann wrote:
> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Tristan Mc Leay <kesuari@Y...> wrote: > >>Christian Thalmann wrote: > >>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
I said most ... :)
>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.
GTK+2 apps and Mozilla can generally do it by typing CTRL+SHIFT+hex-code-for-unicode-character-in-question, if you assume a usual accent-less keyboard mapping. I don't use that too often though; I have a remapped keyboard. Windows uses the alt+decimal-code-for-ansi-character-in-question method I mutilated above.
> 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.
I'm sure if the Germans were considerate enough to make sure that ü looked enough like 'ue' that 'ue' for 'ueber' is an intuitive change, then we'd do it :)
>>>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)
Yeah, but Schröder doesn't look much like Schroeder unless you have that dodgy old German handwriting that makes 'e' look like a 'u'. Asciification isn't a part of the curriculum. At least not the Victorian curriculum. Maybe some obscure county in the US... :)
>>[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.
Yet you've still spelt some silent final -e's there...
>>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. ;-)
Nice to know that's not completely wrong. I was a bit worried by my German pronunciation (or what exists of it :) when I came here and heard people describing one as /E:/ and the other as /e:/...
>>ö was pronounced like (English) er, > > > Certainly the closest available English approximation.
Probably closer than you think; Australian er is rounded and has wandered further forward. I doubt it's /2:/, but it's getting there. Certainly doesn't sound like a British /3:/ in spite of the Macquarie Dictionary's pronunciation guide. (The MD's pronunciation guide is more like 'Let's pretend Australian English phonemes are a conservative form of RP. Yeah, let's! Yeah, that's a great idea! Yeah!', which is pretty appalling since ed. 1 of said dictionary was published in 1981. In fact, in the introduction they even observe that Australians pronounce 'bear' as a monophthong but we *really mean* to use a diphthong. We're just incompetent.)
> I'm getting the feeling that that particular guy I > chatted with just didn't take the course very seriously > ...
OTOH, I wasn't in that particular guy's class. Perhaps it was stupid like that. -- | Tristan. | To be nobody-but-yourself in a world | kesuari@yahoo!.com.au | which is doing its best to, night and day, | | to make you everybody else--- | | means to fight the hardest battle | | which any human being can fight; | | and never stop fighting. | | --- E. E. Cummings, "A Miscellany" | | | | In the fight between you and the world, | | back the world. | | --- Franz Kafka, | | "RS's 1974 Expectation of Days"