Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 08:26:39 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> Cc: David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU>, Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@FreeBSD.ORG>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Language in danger: Language loss Message-ID: <20020529062638.GA8243@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <20020529123150.F82424@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <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> <20020529123150.F82424@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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Greg 'groggy' Lehey said on May 29, 2002 at 12:31:50: > > 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". Well, in French "ā" means "at" and "a" means "(third person) has". "Parle" (speak, present tense) is different from "parlé" (participle). The slogan of the bus company in Grenoble, "Nous allons oų vous allez" means "we go where you go", but if you dropped the accent it would mean "we go or you go". That doesn't stop people from dropping the accent when on an inappropriate keyboard, or when writing in capitals unless they badly want to avoid confusion (eg the Grenoble bus company uses the accent even in capital letters). > > It makes sense to me. "Godel" is the normal spelling in English. > > It's not an English word. He lived in America for the latter part of his life, and chose that spelling (at least the evidence suggests so). Many people choose to spell their names explicitly with "oe" when writing in languages other than German (the drug company Hoechst does so consistently, even in Germany, I think), but that really became common only in recent decades. > > 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. You're suggesting that everyone who refers to a German name should know the rules of German spelling, which is ridiculous in this globalized day. Either Gödel himself should have spelt it "Goedel" (he did not), or the rest of us should feel free to drop the accent. It's the same with "Schrödinger" which is often written without the accent but almost never written "Schroedinger." As for Handel being written "Händel", that may be true in Germany but not in English-speaking countries. - Rahul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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