At 18:30 -0500 2002-01-22, Patrick Andries wrote:
>
>Obviously (I advocate in French changing the spelling of common
>foreign words so that there would be more consistency).
Le ouiquende?
>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.
The rule is, for words which have the diacritic, to pronounce them
more or less as they are in the original language. "Naïve" is
disyllabic [na'i:v]. "Façade" is [fa'sa:d] while "facade" implies
[f@'keid].
>>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).
Webster's Third New International (1961): garçon
Supplement (n.d.): garçonnière.
Oxford New Dictionary of English (2001): garçon, garçonnière.
>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 first would be OK, but the second would still be [f@'seid]. You'd
need *fasaad or *fasahd.
>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.
English spelling rather accurately evinces pre-Great Vowel Shift
Middle English pronunciation. At least for the set of irregularities
that are usually put forward as being problematic.
-- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
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