I happened upon a passage bolstering Mario's point that the English
pronunciation of long "U" (as "yoo", /ju/) does derive from it's being the
closest pronunciation that the English could make to the French
pronunciation of "U" (as /y/).
That passage is in "Honni soit qui mal y pense : L'incroyable histoire de
l'amour entre le français et l'anglais". It is on page 158, in "Pourquoi
dit-on « miouzik » en anglais ?" (I recommend the book: the writing is clear
and accessible even for someone (like me) of limited French.)
I put a link to the book on my booklist
(http://www.macchiato.com/books/nonfiction.html).
Mark
—————
Ὀλίγοι ἔμφονες πολλῶν ἀφρόνων φοβερώτεροι —
Πλάτωνος
[http://www.macchiato.com]
----- Original Message -----
From: "Marco Cimarosti" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Unicode List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, January 15, 2001 01:15
Subject: RE: Transcriptions of "Unicode"
> Mark Davis wrote:
> >Much as I admire and appreciate the French language (second only to
> Italian),
> >the proximate derivation of "Unicode" was not from that language, and the
> >transcription should not match the French pronunciation. Instead, it has
> >solid Northern Californian roots (even though not exactly dating from the
> >Gold Rush days).
>
> Of course, my comment about French pronunciation was only partially
serious
> -- I should have added as smiley. But I think that /ynikod/ is the actual
> pronunciation of "Unicode" in French (as opposed to most other European
> language, that simply approximate the English pronunciation). So, as you
> explained that you are listing languages, and that you accept more than
one
> language for each script, you might consider a second IPA example.
>
> >According to the references I have, the prefix "uni" is directly from
Latin
> >while the word "code" is through French.
>
> I wonder what "directly from Latin" may mean in the case of English.
Because
> of some timing problems, I would say it means: "through direct knowledge
of
> *written* Latin".
>
> A direct derivation from Latin of English "uni-" would imply that, at some
> age, English scholars used to read Latin with a pronunciation influenced
by
> French. In fact, the initial [ju:] is the regular English approximation of
> French vowel [y]. (Is this likely?)
>
> >The Indo-European would have been *oi-no-kau-do ("give one strike"): *kau
> >apparently being related to [...] caudal, [...]
>
> Wow! So Unicode also means "single tail", after all... What would that be
in
> Chinese? :-)
>
> Marco
