| Author |
Message |
Big Al, (Iso Allo)
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 1:30 am
Post subject: Special letters |
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How must be pronounced of these "special" letters:
Î î
Ï ï
Ý ý
à ã
Ô ô
and:
Ë ë
I'am grateful, if some people(s) can tell me.
--
Iso Allo (Big Al) says:
The male Allosaurus prowls in the gloomy forest,
hoping to find a female to share the journey with. |
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Skitt
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 1:33 am
Post subject: Re: Special letters |
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Big Al, (Iso Allo) wrote:
| Quote: | How must be pronounced of these "special" letters:
Î î
Ï ï
Ý ý
à ã
Ô ô
and:
Ë ë
I'am grateful, if some people(s) can tell me.
|
What language are you talking about? It's not English.
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
www.geocities.com/opus731/ |
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Bill Bonde ('by a commodi
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 1:55 am
Post subject: Re: Special letters |
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Skitt wrote:
| Quote: |
Big Al, (Iso Allo) wrote:
How must be pronounced of these "special" letters:
Î î
Ï ï
Ý ý
à ã
Ô ô
and:
Ë ë
I'am grateful, if some people(s) can tell me.
What language are you talking about? It's not English.
But maybe he means if you are reading a word in English from another |
language that has those letters, how should you pronounce them? Don't
you find it a bit disconcerting when bilingual newsreaders are speaking
in one language and then they jump to a completely different accent to
say some word or name and then go back to the original? I think we could
develop a list of such letters and suggestions as to how to pronounce
them, perhaps giving rules if important from source languages.
--
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two
opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to
function." -+ F. Scott Fitzgerald |
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John Lawler
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 2:09 am
Post subject: Re: Special letters |
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Big Al, \(Iso Allo\) <pauli.kesti.i-like-dinosaurs@pp.inet.nodomain.fi> writes:
| Quote: | How must be pronounced of these "special" letters:
= |
How should these "special" letters be pronounced:
| Quote: | Î î
Ï ï
Ý ý
à ã
Ô ô
and:
Ë ë
I'am grateful, if some people(s) can tell me.
= |
I would be grateful if someone would tell me.
These are not phonetic letters with a constant pronunciation
in any language. Rather they are letters that occur in one
or more languages, denoting various phonemes, depending on
the language and the spelling of the particular word they
may occur in.
For instance, in Russian the letter ë is usually pronounced /yo/,
though the dots are often omitted. That is a letter in the Cyrillic
alphabet of Russian. However, in the Latin alphabet of English,
the same letter is used as a symbol that the vowel 'e' is to be
pronounced, and not combined with the vowel preceding it, so that
the word 'noëtic' is pronounced /no.Et.Ik/ instead of /no.tIk/.
The rest of these letters have similarly odd distributions and
pronunciations in similarly oddly-distributed spelling systems.
In various languages some of the diacritics have specific
meanings, but these vary from one spelling system to another.
For instance, tilde (~) frequently marks nasal vowels, as in
Portuguese 'não', and the acute mark (') often marks the nucleus
of the syllable receiving the stress accent, as in Spanish
'Gómez'. However, in other languages they may well have
other functions, and therefore there is no single answer
to your query.
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler Michigan Linguistics
----------------------------------------------------------------
"A written word is mummified until someone imparts life to it by
transposing it mentally into the corresponding spoken word."
-- Otto Jespersen |
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Big Al, (Iso Allo)
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 2:23 am
Post subject: Re: Special letters |
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"Skitt" <skitt99@comcast.net> kirjoitti
viestissä:YI6dnfMAdO8djI_eRVn-og@comcast.com...
| Quote: | Big Al, (Iso Allo) wrote:
How must be pronounced of these "special" letters:
Î î
Ï ï
Ý ý
à ã
Ô ô
and:
Ë ë
I'am grateful, if some people(s) can tell me.
What language are you talking about? It's not English.
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
www.geocities.com/opus731/
Finnish, sorry my english is so bad. |
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Big Al, (Iso Allo)
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 2:23 am
Post subject: Re: Special letters |
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"John Lawler" <jlawler@umich.edu> kirjoitti
viestissä:aSoQe.372$De1.150@news.itd.umich.edu...
| Quote: | Big Al, \(Iso Allo\) <pauli.kesti.i-like-dinosaurs@pp.inet.nodomain.fi
writes:
How must be pronounced of these "special" letters:
=
How should these "special" letters be pronounced:
Î î
Ï ï
Ý ý
à ã
Ô ô
and:
Ë ë
I'am grateful, if some people(s) can tell me.
=
I would be grateful if someone would tell me.
These are not phonetic letters with a constant pronunciation
in any language. Rather they are letters that occur in one
or more languages, denoting various phonemes, depending on
the language and the spelling of the particular word they
may occur in.
For instance, in Russian the letter ë is usually pronounced /yo/,
though the dots are often omitted. That is a letter in the Cyrillic
alphabet of Russian. However, in the Latin alphabet of English,
the same letter is used as a symbol that the vowel 'e' is to be
pronounced, and not combined with the vowel preceding it, so that
the word 'noëtic' is pronounced /no.Et.Ik/ instead of /no.tIk/.
Well, thanks your help! |
No, kiitokset avustasi! (In Finnish)
Big Al |
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Jim Lawton
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 3:40 am
Post subject: Re: Special letters |
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On Sun, 28 Aug 2005 20:23:57 GMT, "Big Al, \(Iso Allo\)"
<pauli.kesti.i-like-dinosaurs@pp.inet.nodomain.fi> wrote:
| Quote: | "Skitt" <skitt99@comcast.net> kirjoitti
viestissä:YI6dnfMAdO8djI_eRVn-og@comcast.com...
Big Al, (Iso Allo) wrote:
How must be pronounced of these "special" letters:
Î î
Ï ï
Ý ý
à ã
Ô ô
and:
Ë ë
I'am grateful, if some people(s) can tell me.
What language are you talking about? It's not English.
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
www.geocities.com/opus731/
Finnish, sorry my english is so bad.
|
Ei niin huonoa - we understand you, but your question doesn't explain enough. -
Those letters don't happen in Finnish - only a" and o" - maybe John Lawler's
answer is enough for you ...
--
Jim
"a single species has come to dominate ...
reproducing at bacterial levels, almost as an
infectious plague envelops its host"
http://tinyurl.com/c88xs |
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Lars Eighner
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 7:04 am
Post subject: Re: Special letters |
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In our last episode,
<5hoQe.405$%A.366@read3.inet.fi>,
the lovely and talented Big Al, (Iso Allo)
broadcast on alt.usage.english:
| Quote: | How must be pronounced of these "special" letters:
Î î
Ï ï
Ý ý
à ã
Ô ô
and:
Ë ë
I'am grateful, if some people(s) can tell me.
|
None of these letters is native to English, so their
pronunciation depends up the language of the word in which they
occur.
Sometimes vowels in English are marked with the diaeresis, which
in most typography is indistinguishable from the umlaut. The
diaeresis is only a reminder that the vowel is pronounced.
This convention is no longer common and it was never
intended to indicate that vowel had a different quality.
--
Lars Eighner eighner@io.com http://www.larseighner.com/
I don't see posts from or threads started from googlegroups.
The surest way to remain poor is to be honest. --Napoleon Bonaparte |
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Mark Brader
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 7:04 am
Post subject: Re: Special letters |
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"Al" asks:
| Quote: | How must be pronounced of these "special" letters:
|
(How should these "special" letters be pronounced?)
| Quote: | Î î
Ï ï
Ý ý
à ã
Ô ô
and:
Ë ë
|
This depends on (1) the situation, and (2) which characters Al means.
As to (1), I think the most likely situation for Al to be asking about
is when you're speaking English and you have to talk about one of
these letterforms that's not in the English alphabet. Either you're
talking about the letter itself ("In the Swedish alphabet, the last
letter is...") or you're spelling a foreign word ("The French word
for summer is spelled..."). This is what I'll assume in my answer.
To English-speakers, all of these forms are modified versions of "real"
letters that are in our alphabet; there is no concept that Ñ or Ö or
Æ might be a separate letter in its own right. So we always describe
them in terms of our letters with modifications. The marks added to
modify the letter are commonly called "accents", especially if they are
written above the "real" letter; another word is "diacritical marks"
or "diacriticals".
(I said "always", but I should add that I'm talking about careful
usage among people accustomed to dealing with foreign languages.
Other people might very well just ignore the accents and say N and O
even if they're talking about Ñ and Ö. Or they might mention that
there are accents on the letters, but not say what kind.)
So, for example, for É we might say "E with an acute accent"; people
who regularly deal with these characters will normally use the shorter
form "E-acute". So the French word for summer is spelled "E-acute, T,
E-acute", or "E-T-E with acute accents on both E's" (or some wording
like that).
There is a particular complication when ¨ is added to a letter, because
this accent has different meanings in different languages. In German it
indicates a modification, called "umlaut", to the vowel sound, and hence
the accent is also called an umlaut. In French, on the other hand, ¨
is named "tréma" and indicates that the accented vowel is pronounced
separately from the previous vowel; some people also use the symbol
in English with this meaning. And when it has this meaning, its name
in English is "dieresis" (also spelled "diaeresis").
So an English-speaker may refer to Ö as "O-umlaut" (correct if it
occurs in German), "O-dieresis" (correct for English or French), or
even "O-tréma" (correct for French, choosing to use its French name).
But what if the foreign language doesn't have the concept that ¨ by
itself means anything, because it doesn't see ¨ as a separate thing
added to a letter at all, like Finnish or the Scandinavian languuges?
What, in English, is the last letter of the Swedish alphabet?
Well, for myself, I say "O-umlaut" when I'm talking about Swedish even
though the ¨ is not really an umlaut mark; this is partly because it's a
conveniently short name, and partly because "O-dieresis" would, as I see
it, be even more wrong. But I think some people would say "O-dieresis";
and there are also people who choose to fall back on "O with two dots".
Of course, if you're talking about the official names of characters
in a computer character set, then Ö will have only one name in a
particular character set matter no what language it occurs in --
this will be either O-umlaut or O-dieresis.
Now to (2). Al's posting did not specify a character set, so it's
not entirely clear what letters he's asking about -- I know what they
look like on *my* screen because my environment assumes the character
set is ISO 8859-1, but he might have intended something different.
He said something elsewhere about Finnish, and I don't think all of
the characters I'm seeing are used in Finnish. For this posting
I have specified the character set as ISO 8859-1, so when I say ¨,
you should see ¨ -- that is, you should see two dots over a blank space.
If not, this reply may be a little difficult to read!
Anyway, if the characters Al intended are in fact the same ones I'm
seeing, and if he meant the question in the way I have assumed, then
the (short form) names are:
Î î - I-circumflex
Ï ï - I-dieresis (also spelled diaeresis)
Ý ý - Y-acute
à ã - A-tilde ("tilde" is pronounced with two syllables)
Ô ô - O-circumflex
Ë ë - E-dieresis
Hope this helps.
--
Mark Brader, Toronto "More importantly, Mark is just plain wrong."
msb@vex.net -- John Hollingsworth
My text in this article is in the public domain. |
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Areff
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 11:01 pm
Post subject: Re: Special letters |
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|
Mark Brader wrote:
| Quote: | I (Mark Brader) wrote:
... like Finnish or the Scandinavian languuges?
Jim Lawton:
I think the Finns will take offence if you exclude them from Scandinavia.
Actually, that's the other way about, When I was in school I did learn
that Finland was a Scandinavian country, but that usage is now considered
at best imprecise. The actual peninsula named Scandinavia is the one
that extends southwest from the north end of Finland and belongs to Norway
and Sweden, and when the term is used more widely (as it often is),
Denmark and perhaps Iceland are more likely to be included than Finland.
If you do want to count Finland as well, you're supposed to say "the
Nordic countries".
In any case I was speaking of languages, not countries, and Finnish is
nothing like the Scandinavian languuges -- they're Germanic, and Finnish
isn't even Indo-European.
|
I'd use "North Germanic" if speaking of languages -- that group
encompassing Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic. |
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Big Al, (Iso Allo)
Guest
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| Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2005 1:17 am
Post subject: Re: Special letters |
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|
Lars Eighner wrote:
| Quote: | In our last episode,
5hoQe.405$%A.366@read3.inet.fi>,
the lovely and talented Big Al, (Iso Allo)
broadcast on alt.usage.english:
How must be pronounced of these "special" letters:
Î î
Ï ï
Ý ý
à ã
Ô ô
and:
Ë ë
I'am grateful, if some people(s) can tell me.
None of these letters is native to English, so their
pronunciation depends up the language of the word in which they
occur.
Sometimes vowels in English are marked with the diaeresis, which
in most typography is indistinguishable from the umlaut. The
diaeresis is only a reminder that the vowel is pronounced.
This convention is no longer common and it was never
intended to indicate that vowel had a different quality.
|
Tarkoitin siis sitä, miten nämä äänteet lausutaan.
Big Al
--
Iso Allo (Big Al) says:
The male Allosaurus prowls in the gloomy forest,
hoping to find a female to share the journey with. |
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| Back to top |
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Big Al, (Iso Allo)
Guest
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| Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2005 1:17 am
Post subject: Re: Special letters |
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|
Jim Lawton wrote:
| Quote: | On Sun, 28 Aug 2005 20:23:57 GMT, "Big Al, \(Iso Allo\)"
pauli.kesti.i-like-dinosaurs@pp.inet.nodomain.fi> wrote:
"Skitt" <skitt99@comcast.net> kirjoitti
viestissä:YI6dnfMAdO8djI_eRVn-og@comcast.com...
Big Al, (Iso Allo) wrote:
How must be pronounced of these "special" letters:
Î î
Ï ï
Ý ý
à ã
Ô ô
and:
Ë ë
I'am grateful, if some people(s) can tell me.
What language are you talking about? It's not English.
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
www.geocities.com/opus731/
Finnish, sorry my english is so bad.
Ei niin huonoa - we understand you, but your question doesn't explain
enough. - Those letters don't happen in Finnish - only a" and o" -
maybe John Lawler's answer is enough for you ...
|
Näitä kirjaimia ei ole suomen kielessä.
These letters is not use? in Finnish language.
Because Finland is bi-language country, there is some people who speaks
in Swedish and this (selittää sen? Help! I don't know right words!) why
Finnish alphabets contains Åå which pronounced like O.
--
Iso Allo (Big Al) says:
The male Allosaurus prowls in the gloomy forest,
hoping to find a female to share the journey with. |
|
| Back to top |
|
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Jim Lawton
Guest
|
| Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2005 2:47 am
Post subject: Re: Special letters |
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|
On Mon, 29 Aug 2005 19:17:13 GMT, "Big Al, \(Iso Allo\)"
<pauli.kesti-i-like-dinosaurs@pp.inet.fi> wrote:
| Quote: | Jim Lawton wrote:
On Sun, 28 Aug 2005 20:23:57 GMT, "Big Al, \(Iso Allo\)"
pauli.kesti.i-like-dinosaurs@pp.inet.nodomain.fi> wrote:
"Skitt" <skitt99@comcast.net> kirjoitti
viestissä:YI6dnfMAdO8djI_eRVn-og@comcast.com...
Big Al, (Iso Allo) wrote:
How must be pronounced of these "special" letters:
Î î
Ï ï
Ý ý
à ã
Ô ô
and:
Ë ë
I'am grateful, if some people(s) can tell me.
What language are you talking about? It's not English.
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
www.geocities.com/opus731/
Finnish, sorry my english is so bad.
Ei niin huonoa - we understand you, but your question doesn't explain
enough. - Those letters don't happen in Finnish - only a" and o" -
maybe John Lawler's answer is enough for you ...
Näitä kirjaimia ei ole suomen kielessä.
These letters is not use? in Finnish language.
"These letters aren't in the Finnish language" is what you wrote in Finnish, but |
"These letters aren't used in the Finnish language." is nice in English.
| Quote: | Because Finland is bi-language country, there is some people who speaks
in Swedish and this (selittää sen? Help! I don't know right words!)
|
"explains [it]"
| Quote: | why
Finnish alphabets contains Åå which pronounced like O.
|
I never thought about the alphabet having Å before, for all those Swedish
speaking Finns.
--
Jim
"a single species has come to dominate ...
reproducing at bacterial levels, almost as an
infectious plague envelops its host"
http://tinyurl.com/c88xs |
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Jim Lawton
Guest
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| Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2005 2:56 am
Post subject: Re: Special letters |
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On Mon, 29 Aug 2005 04:59:19 -0000, msb@vex.net (Mark Brader) wrote:
snip
| Quote: |
So an English-speaker may refer to Ö as "O-umlaut" (correct if it
occurs in German), "O-dieresis" (correct for English or French), or
even "O-tréma" (correct for French, choosing to use its French name).
But what if the foreign language doesn't have the concept that ¨ by
itself means anything, because it doesn't see ¨ as a separate thing
added to a letter at all, like Finnish or the Scandinavian languuges?
|
I think the Finns will take offence if you exclude them from Scandinavia.
ä is called in Finnish "a pilkku" and ö is "o pilkku" - pilkku means "spot" :
which does not detract from your general argument, but means that Finnish is not
a language which you can use as an example.
snip
--
Jim
"a single species has come to dominate ...
reproducing at bacterial levels, almost as an
infectious plague envelops its host"
http://tinyurl.com/c88xs |
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Jim Lawton
Guest
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| Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2005 3:01 am
Post subject: Re: Special letters |
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On Mon, 29 Aug 2005 19:17:13 GMT, "Big Al, \(Iso Allo\)"
<pauli.kesti-i-like-dinosaurs@pp.inet.fi> wrote:
| Quote: | Lars Eighner wrote:
In our last episode,
5hoQe.405$%A.366@read3.inet.fi>,
the lovely and talented Big Al, (Iso Allo)
broadcast on alt.usage.english:
How must be pronounced of these "special" letters:
Î î
Ï ï
Ý ý
à ã
Ô ô
and:
Ë ë
I'am grateful, if some people(s) can tell me.
None of these letters is native to English, so their
pronunciation depends up the language of the word in which they
occur.
Sometimes vowels in English are marked with the diaeresis, which
in most typography is indistinguishable from the umlaut. The
diaeresis is only a reminder that the vowel is pronounced.
This convention is no longer common and it was never
intended to indicate that vowel had a different quality.
Tarkoitin siis sitä, miten nämä äänteet lausutaan.
|
"What I meant then, was how does one sound these letters." (I think)
I don't think that as English speakers, we do ever.
If you had some words in which the letters occurred, then we would know what
language they were in, and might suggest the right sound.
--
Jim
"a single species has come to dominate ...
reproducing at bacterial levels, almost as an
infectious plague envelops its host"
http://tinyurl.com/c88xs |
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| |
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