From owner-freebsd-chat Sun Apr 9 17:41:44 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from news-ma.rhein-neckar.de (news-ma.rhein-neckar.de [193.197.90.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6BF7437B5F6 for ; Sun, 9 Apr 2000 17:41:40 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from daemon@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de) Received: from bigeye.rhein-neckar.de (uucp@localhost) by news-ma.rhein-neckar.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with bsmtp id CAA09285 for freebsd-chat@freebsd.org; Mon, 10 Apr 2000 02:41:39 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from daemon@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by bigeye.rhein-neckar.de (8.9.3/8.9.3) id CAA80296 for freebsd-chat@freebsd.org; Mon, 10 Apr 2000 02:00:13 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from daemon) From: naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) Subject: Re: Spellings Date: 10 Apr 2000 02:00:12 +0200 Message-ID: <8cr5ic$2ed0$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> References: <20000404152346.01398@techunix.technion.ac.il> <20000407233952.A1610@theory1.physics.iisc.ernet.in> <8cq06a$1le0$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> <20000410000149.B1241@theory8.physics.iisc.ernet.in> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > What I meant was, a word like "chauffeur" or "chandelier" is spelt the > same way in English as in French (or say "lasagne" in Italian, and so > on), This is no different from German, French, Dutch, etc. Even Italian has "whisky", although the letter "w" doesn't appear at all in native words. Those that use a different script (Greek, Cyrillic) obviously need to come up with a localized spelling immediately. > and pronounced in a fairly similar manner, The pronunciation is *approximated* using the phonetic inventory of the destination language. The English version of "chauffeur" is badly distorted from the French original. This can make for interesting observations, e.g. French and German use different replacements for the English vowel in "cut", although the vowel chosen in the respectively other language would be available as well. > but I don't think that's true of other European languages: imported > words change in spelling, or in pronunciation, or both. Eventually, when a loan word has become solidly incorporated into the language, its spelling is regularized. Examples from German: French "bureau" -> "Büro", French "café" -> "Kaffee" English "cakes" -> "Keks", English "strike" -> "Streik". Some languages go more aggressively about this, some are more conservative. > English also has lots of imported non-European words: I've seen lists, > but offhand can only recall Indian examples, eg bungalow, jungle, > juggernaut, etc. In these cases, of course, the spelling is reasonably > English-sounding since the original words were in a different script. > I don't know how common these words are in other European languages. German French Swedish bungalow: Bungalow bungalow bungalow jungle: Dschungel jungle djungel Those were probably borrowed via English. "Juggernaut" seems to be English only. [reasons for language dominance] > but in the 19th and early 20th centuries, I believe France was > no less dominant politically than England, and far more dominant > culturally. And French was just in a position similar to that of English today. In the 17th/18th century, the court of the French kings was the model for the European high aristocracy who spoke French in imitation, and educated people at the time peppered their speech with gratuitous French loanwords. It isn't as obvious in English due to its older ties with French, but the European languages experienced in influx of French loan words during those times. French's dominant role continued until around the turn of the century. French was the language used by diplomats. Note that even today the postal service still uses French phrases in international contexts (e.g. airmail stickers everywhere saying "par avion" along with the same in the local language). International organizations that are old enough carry French names. Think of the international and European soccer associations: FIFA, UEFA. The extension of English to other countries was a direct result of colonization. Just the same for French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. In ancient times, Greek was spread around the Mediterranean by merchants and settlers. Latin became dominant due to the sheer power of the Roman Empire. Low German was a lingua franca around the Baltic Sea (and influenced the Scandinavian languages as much as French did English) on the heels of the rich Hanseatic merchants. Let me drive this point home: There are many historical examples and associated excellent reasons why a language can become preferred for international communications or as a prestige language. None of these reasons are related to the language itself. If the Kalahari bushmen started to become economically, politically, and/or culturally dominant in the world for some weird reason, we'd all happily learn to meaningfully click our tongues in dozens of different ways. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message