Re: picnic

At 03:57 15.9.2000 +0000, Leo Caesius wrote:

>     Odd... generally speaking, foreign names *are* spelled with a fuller
>orthography (the "dashes" such as qasr are rarely used in practice).
That's true.  My Paula has a necklace made in Saudi where her name is spelled
         pe-alif-waw-lam-alif

while an Algerian writing mine and my father's names came up with
         be-re-te-ye-lam for "Bertil" /"bErtil/
and
         fe-lam-ye-be for "Philip" /"fi:lip/ with a long first /i/ in Swedish!
and
         be-ye-nun-te for "Benct"

So obviously she was thinking in terms of French pronunciation of these names!

>I'm
>willing to wager that most Arabic speakers would probably write your name
>nun-yaa-kaf, unless of course it might conflate with something obscene (as
>it apparently does in Lebanese colloquial Arabic).
>     I'm unable to find anything in Wehr regarding "niik."  So, my best
>guess is that it doesn't exist in MSA.
Nik may still not want the risk of being called F***!  What about nun-kaf
with a hamze below?  Or nun-he havaz-kaf.  I guess he_havaz would be the
closest way to write /e/.



/ B.Philip Jonsson B^)>
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