Re: three questions about alphabet files at Michael Everson site

From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Thu Nov 10 2005 - 16:22:33 CST

  • Next message: Philippe Verdy: "Re: three questions about alphabet files at Michael Everson site"

    Charles Levert wrote:

    >* On Thursday 2005-11-10 at 20:37:05 +0100, Chris Jacobs wrote:
    >
    >
    >>Charles Levert wrote:
    >>
    >>
    >>> maelström (mot néerlandais), also spelled malstrom
    >>>
    >>>
    >>I am dutch and I am rather surprised to see that maelström is a mot
    >>néerlandais.
    >>I always thought it was a scandinavian word.
    >>
    >>
    >
    >So did I! :-)
    >I was blindly citing my trusty (?) old “petit Larousse illustré 1981”.
    >It may have been corrected since.
    >
    >
    >
    >>Is the ö supposed to be an o umlaut or an o diaeresis?
    >>
    >>
    >
    >I don't know for sure, but the absence of another
    >vowel next to it makes me lean towards umlaut.
    >
    >
    Maybe is isn't even pronounced, and is there just as a holdover from the
    foreign orthography. In English people often spell Möbius or even, yes,
    maelström without changing the pronunciation (even Ångstrom, I think!),
    but the accent remains because that's how it was in the source language.

    I suspect the same is true of "volapük" in the list given earlier: the
    name of the language in Volapük itself is spelled with an umlaut.
    French normally shows an IPA /y/, the sound which the u-umlaut would
    represent, as a plain u (at least in some contexts; with things like ou
    for /u/).

    ~mark



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Nov 10 2005 - 16:24:09 CST