Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 12:31:50 +0930 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> Cc: David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU>, Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@FreeBSD.ORG>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Language in danger: Language loss Message-ID: <20020529123150.F82424@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <20020528104311.A37937@lpt.ens.fr> References: <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> <20020528104311.A37937@lpt.ens.fr>
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On Tuesday, 28 May 2002 at 10:43:11 +0200, Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > 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). Yes, French is different in that way. One of the reasons is that they're accents, not different letters, and there's little ambiguity if you leave them out. That's not the case in German: they are different letters, and changing the letters makes the words ambiguous. For example, "Rachen" means "throat" and "Rächen" (or "Raechen" if you don't have the characters) means "Avenge". > It makes sense to me. "Godel" is the normal spelling in English. It's not an English word. >> 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. It may be obvious, but that makes it neither correct nor desirable. Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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