Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>>Patrick Andries wrote:
>>
>
>>I must say that I have already seen horrors such as "geüpdated" (the "u"
>>is presumably approximated), again English messing with languages
>>spelling and pronounciation...
>>
>>See http://www.vvb.org/anglowaan/woordenlijst.htm about the feeling some
>>Dutch have about these "barbarisms" (van Dale's Web site word)
>>
>
>*laughs*
>
My humble mission in life.
>
>It isn't as if French hasn't been polluting English for a thousand
>years or anything, is it?!
>
No, no, no. French has enriched English, not polluted it, by bestowing
it a wealth of new words. I wonder if we could start the millenium
celebration of this wonderful hybridization before 2066?
>
>And nowadays, the Europeans are getting their revenge by exporting
>all their accents back onto English letters.
>
Well, the Americans are putting a pretty good fight. Can't see the light
behind façade, cañon and coöperate. Tsk tsk.
Seriously now, diacritics are an excellent idea when you have more
phonemes than graphemes. You could, of course, also create new
graphemes with those "clusters" (complexe graphemes) but it is not easy
to find a sequence of characters that cannot be interpreted otherwise
(hence the diaeresis for vowels, but what for the consonants, a new
letter called dash ?).
>Even the Dutch get
>into the act to help out the French:
>
>http://www.hollandbymail.nl/hbmcom/nivea_care_productlist.html
>
>for "Nivea Crème"
>
>
>
>Crème ?? What's wrong with good old "cream", anyway?
>
Nothing in English (although why is cream pronounced /kri:m/ and not
/kr ?:m/ or /krae:m/ or such things?), time to import an diacritic or
two ? We have a rich stock (^ ¨ ` ´ ~ ¸ ).
But in Dutch cream is certainly not better since crème is in the
dictionary(*) as a common word.
BTW, I think the Nivea marketing guys must be saying "this is a
Trademark, we can impose what we want", they must have thought crème was
passe-partout in Europe (German also OK, Oetkers speaks of its Crème
Fraîche on TV
http://www.bbdo.de/bbdo-group-germany/press-center/729.html). This is
how we get our very sizeable daily ration of English names over here
(some cryptic such as Toys 'R Us).
(*) I believe the Dutch could justifiably write it « kreem » or « krême»
if they wanted.
Patrick Andries
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Mon Jan 21 2002 - 19:34:17 EST