On 2 July 2012 11:03, John Gilmore <[email protected]> wrote: > My gut reactions to things linguistic are usually much like Bill's, > but I have two problems with his position here. > > How does one pronounce QANTAS without suggesting to a naif anglophone > that it contains a 'qu'? Kantas?
Since native* English words do not contain q without an immediately following u, one might reasonably suggest that QANTAS indeed be pronounced Kantas, by analogy with recently borrowed words like qat, which no one but the naif turn into quat, and which often have alternative spelling in k. But of course the QANTAS name is established with the qu pronunciation, so why muck with it? If people spell it with qu, they will be quickly enlightened or chastised. *For some relatively recent value of "native", of course. > More important, the ubiquity of homonyms makes the whole net-driven > practice of spelling things phonetically highly problematic. It leads > to abominations like "His curiosity was peaked" and 'She has a 24-inch > waste!" Neither of these sentences, while improbable, is impossible, or inherently devoid of meaning. More than one bank has used the slogan "this will really peak your interest". Corny, but not unreasonable. While it's not Friday here, it is a national holiday, so please forgive the digression. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
