Date: Tue, 28 May 2002 10:43:11 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> To: David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU> Cc: "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@FreeBSD.ORG>, Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@FreeBSD.ORG>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Language in danger: Language loss Message-ID: <20020528104311.A37937@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <20020527184817.A1485@HAL9000.wox.org>; from dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU on Mon, May 27, 2002 at 06:48:17PM -0700 References: <3CF17486.F06F3E6A@mindspring.com> <20020527005647.A50028@FreeBSD.org> <3CF1CD8C.C3262181@mindspring.com> <20020527014353.B1951@HAL9000.wox.org> <20020528091410.G29491@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020528001001.GA20175@hades.hell.gr> <20020528095208.A16567@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020527175613.A1214@HAL9000.wox.org> <20020528102802.K16567@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020527184817.A1485@HAL9000.wox.org>
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David Schultz said on May 27, 2002 at 18:48:17: > > Anyway, there's an alternative: put an e after the non-umlauted > > letter, like the others have done. Just replacing it with a different > > letter is wrong. > > Forgive my ignorance of diacritical marks; I'm just a stupid American. > Actually, English has dropped the marks from a number of German words. In French it's normal to drop accents when it's inconvenient to write them (and, often, in capital letters even when it is possible to write them). It makes sense to me. "Godel" is the normal spelling in English. > Names like Gödel are not among them, but English still does far better > than languages that insist that all foreign words must be spelled > phoenetically. Was that meant to be "phönetically"? :) I agree, every language distorts foreign words and foreign names. French is by far the worst offender I've seen (eg, "Jean-Sebastien Bach," and I'm not even getting started on names from non-Roman scripts like Indian languages). English by and large is not so bad; it doesn't have accents "natively", so it's not terribly necessary to use them, in my opinion; and unless you're a trained German writer, the most obvious way out is to drop them altogether. - Rahul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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