At 12:45 -0500 2002-02-18, <jarkko.hietaniemi@nokia.com> wrote:
> > Most Samis live in Norway. In Norway, the Germanic language there
>> borrowed the word Sápmi, Sámi, as "same" with an adjective "samisk".
>> In Finland, where there are not very many Sami speakers compared to
>> Norway, particular orthographic practices of that language write long
>> vowels with double letters, hence "saami".
>
>I don't know how much the relative number of Sami speakers in
>Finland contributed to the spelling; my guess is that the "long
>vowel -> double vowel" rule was much stronger in this case. Any
>kind of diacritics very rarely survive when words are "finnishized"
>(made to agree with Finnish ortography) (In fact, I can't think of
>any examples right now where the diacritics would survive, but I'm
>certain there are counterexamples...)
But the point is that -aa- is unnecessary in English. Sami rhymes
with swami. Saami looks bad in English, and there's really no
motivation to prefer it.
-- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Mon Feb 18 2002 - 13:24:32 EST