Date: Fri, 24 May 2002 17:33:31 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> To: Marc Ramirez <mrami@mrami.homeunix.org> Cc: "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@FreeBSD.ORG>, Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: French, Flemish and English (was: cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha clock.c) Message-ID: <20020524173331.A5683@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <20020524110009.T21090-100000@mrami.homeunix.org>; from mrami@mrami.homeunix.org on Fri, May 24, 2002 at 11:12:40AM -0400 References: <20020522182914.I45715@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020524110009.T21090-100000@mrami.homeunix.org>
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Marc Ramirez said on May 24, 2002 at 11:12:40: > If we're talking about repeating a spoken word, it again goes through two > filters: 1) what sounds am I used to differentiating, and 2) what sounds > am I used to making. To demonstrate #1, my Dad cannot hear the difference > between Sri Lanka (pronounced 'sree') and Sri Lanka (pronounced 'shree'). > He is not used to trying to tell the difference, because that is not a > minimal pair in his ideolect of American English, the only dialect he > speaks. Therefore when he says Sri Lanka, it always comes out 'shree', > which is one of the many differences from what a native would say. I don't know how Sri Lankans say it, but most people in India would say "shree". In the devanagari script (which is used for Sanskrit, which is where the word originates) the corresponding letter is one of the two "sh" letters to which I referred earlier (the "s" letter is different). In the Tamil script, the same letter serves for "s", "sh", and "ch" (though there is are special letters sometimes used for "s" and "sh" in words imported from Sanskrit), and Tamil speakers tend to use the three sounds interchangeably. I don't know about Sinhalese, which uses a quite different script, though (visually, at least) closer to Tamil than to Devanagari. - Rahul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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