David Starner wrote:
>On Mon, Jan 21, 2002 at 08:09:17PM -0500, Patrick Andries wrote:
>
>>Seriously now, diacritics are an excellent idea when you have more
>>phonemes than graphemes.
>>
>
>Only when used consistently.
>
Obviously (I advocate in French changing the spelling of common foreign
words so that there would be more consistency).
> At the time "The Family Man" came out
>(Winter of 2000), during the credits, my father asked me how you
>pronounce "Téa" and what the accent meant.
>
The Japanese also love accents even if only to give some cachet
(Protegé), they could have got twice as much distinction with a
"correct" Protégé.
> I didn't know. As both of us
>are very intellegent people with some college education at the time, I'd
>say that accents in English are useless for the vast majority of
>Americans.
>
The problem is not that diacritics are useless, but rather that English
has no rule on how to use them: one just has to learn the pronunciation
[but pronOunce] and spelling of far too many a word.
> Their meaning isn't covered in schools, and ç is used in one
>English word that I know of,
>
Garçon in Oxford English Dictionary but garconnière (bachelor's housing)
in my Webster's New Lexicon (no cedilla, grave accent).
Personally -- and I do not want to go on with this off-topic thread --
I would understand "garson" and "fasade" if those words were to be used
commonly and people were ready to accept it. The Anglo-Iranian "shawl"
has spread through European languages (cf. German "Schal", Italian
"scialle" and Dutch "sjaal") but is now written using the language
natural spelling conventions. French now writes it "châle" after having
written it mostly "schawl" in the18th century and "schall" until 1860, I
approve of such simplifications.
> which means I have to memorize façade's
>pronounciation just as if it were facade.
>
Yes, the cedilla is not really useful in English. It only makes sense
(well, slightly) when one wants to preserve the relationship of words
as they take different suffixes (trace, traçage), cf. the German umlaut
(nah, näher but alt, Eltern).
The ç does not add a grapheme that can solve the root "challenge" in
English spelling(*): more phonemes than graphemes and hence added lack
of relationship between the current graphemes and phonemes.
Patrick Andries
(*) "s" does the job, although "s" is obviously pronounced in different
ways [z,s, silent in island/isle/Carlisle/aisle (with contamination)].
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