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

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"