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

Christian Thalmann wrote:
> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Tristan Mc Leay <kesuari@Y...> wrote:
>>Just like English writes <cafe>, <facade>, <Sao Paulo>,
>><Fuerher>/<Fuhrer>.
>
>
> The former few are probably acceptable renderings in
> their respective languages if accents are unavailable.
> For Führer, however, only Fuehrer is a correct
> transliteration.
In German, of course. In English, for many words, ae/oe/ue is used for
ä/ö/ü, but especially for newer borrowings like uber-, the ue-form is
totally bizarre (though <über> appears, too). (Names seem to keep
getting an -e, though.)

>I would parse Fuhrer as an uncommon
> word for truck driver or ferry worker, from Fuhre
> "load of cargo" (cogn. to fahren "to drive").
I doubt you would when seeing Hitler described as the Fuhrer (Fuhrer in
English tends to get a capital letter not because it's a german noun,
but because it's a proper noun).

> 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. 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.

Personally, I have a re-mapped keyboard that lets me use a compose key
so I can type [menu], ['], [a] and get á or [menu], [a], [a] and get å
or [menu], [a], [e] to get æ, but most people don't know how to do
things like this (and anyway, Windows US-International gets in the way;
last time I used it, typing <"and> was difficult because you had to type
<""and>, otherwise you'd get <änd>). I do this because (a) I want to be
able to type foreign languages and my conlang properly/easily and
(b) using accents in English is *quaint* (some people say it's pedantic;
some people might even do it because it satisfies some PC notion of
correctness, but I've never met one who claims it!).

After getting rid of the 'opinion', I'm not sure that 'obstinate' means
anything, but I don't suppose it's going to change much. People will
keep not bothering, and other people will keep trying and so you might
see _á la_, and others will know what they're doing...

> 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? (OTOH, if
you decided that 'Time' was such a silly name and you ought to call it
'Teim', well, go ahead.) [OTTH, if you did it often enough, perhaps
English would be forced into rethinking it's spelling.]

> Then again, it's certainly mostly a matter of lack of
> information rather than a conscious decision to do
> so.  Many just never get told what these dots and
> squiggles mean.  I even met someone on IRC who had
> taken some German in school, and when I pointed out
> he left away an umlaut, he said: "It's been a while,
> I don't remember all the accents."  When I told him
> that they actually changed the pronunciation and
> meaning, he was like, "Oh, really?"  ::sigh::  I
> wonder what they do all day in those German courses.
> Probably watch B movies about Nazis.
If it helps, when I learnt German in year 9 from someone I presume was
an Austrian (she had an icky dialect, if it helps, but the presumption
comes from the name she gave to ß), I was taught that ä was pronounced
like (German) e (and äu like eu), ö was pronounced like (English) er,
and normal instructions were given for mastering ü. I never watched a
B-grade movie about Nazies. (She learnt German in Australia, though, but
as a first language from her German-speaking parents, much the same as
my mother learnt Dutch as a first language from her Dutch-speaking
parents or some of my friends learnt various Asian languages as first
languages from their parents.)

--
| 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"

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