> most of us anglo-saxon types have trouble with the distinctions between some of the french vowels.... in practice, when I lived in Paris years ago I had trouble telling if someone had gone north, east, or west for their weekend getaway (Reims, Rennes, or Rouen...the last consonant is rarely fully pronounced in any of them from what I can tell....I keep meaning to add this into a Gloranthan adventure some day)
>
> /// Most of us French types have trouble with the distinction of many english vowels as well !
Oh, this concerns most of anybody in the world... and it is not just
about vowels. I don't want to spill oil... somewhere, but actually it is
the English people, when they took over the latin alphabet, that did not
understand this is a *phonetic* spelling. This means: One letter (or
combination thereof, we don't mind the TH, PH and so on), one sound!
While we (I am) Germans have our - you may think funny - umlauts, French
has these vast amounts of accents ยด`^ , Scandinavians murk letter the
way they seem to like, Spaniards and Portuguese add some funny hooks to
their letters, we ALL cling to it: one letter, one sound. I didn't want
to, but I can't help it: How can anybody write a word that a Roman
(inventor of the Latin alphabet) would have written "Wuster" write
Worcester?!
http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&lang=de&searchLoc=0&cmpType=relaxed§Hdr=on&spellToler=&search=worcester
If an S and an I and an O and a U
With an X at the end spell Su;
And an E and a Y and an E spell I,
Pray what is a speller to do?
Then, if also an S and an I and a G
And an HED spell side,
There's nothing much left for a speller to do
But to go commit siouxeyesighed.
Thanks for all the phish!
Oh, there is another one about Linguistics:
It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much
importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the
Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink
called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one
of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks
themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian
'chinanto/mnigs' which is ordinary water served at slightly above room
temperature, and the Gagrakackan 'tzjin-anthony-ks' which kill cows at a
hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them,
beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all
invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any
other worlds.
What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as
any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the
graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when
young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists
get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that
they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up
becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry
with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and
unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too
many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.
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