On Saturday 17 March 2007 3:46 pm, Maciej Hanski wrote: > John Jason Jordan napisa??(a): > ---snip--- > > > Everyone knows that English orthography > > went into the dumper after the Great Vowel Shift of the 1600s, and has > > been there ever since. We're 400 years late for spelling reform. We're > > so past due I'm surprised the rest of the world hasn't foreclosed and > > evicted us from the planet. > > > :) This is most interesting and I like your narrative style, I didn't > > know of the English Great Vowel Shift, I only knew German speakers had > managed to shift their vowels too (apart from some resistant Alemanni > people), but caution, spelling reforms are very controversial, this is > what German speaking countries did to their children and us, foreign > German speakers, throwing us back into illiteracy after years of learning:)
That's alright, we're already illiterate. > > > Re how it otter be pronounced in English: > > (In the following all vowels in [] have the values of the International > > Phonetic Alphabet. If some of the characters are not appearing > > correctly you may have to set your e-mail client to use UTF-8 and a > > font containing IPA characters.) > > Before the Great Vowel Shift i was pronounced [i]. After the Great > > Vowel Shift it had fallen and diphongized so it is now pronounced [aj], > > [??j] or [??j], depending on your dialect. However, this occurred only > > when the syllable was stressed, and this was most common when the vowel > > in the following syllable was (originally) [??], which at that time was > > usually spelled e. Thus before the Great Vowel Shift "scribe" was > > pronounced [skrib], the final [??] having been lost earlier during the > > Middle English period. (From rhymes in Chaucer we know that pronouncing > > the final [??] was already optional in his time.) After the Great Vowel > > Shift it had become [skrajb] or [skr??jb] (the dialectal variant [??j] > > occurs only before voiceless stops). > > > > The problem with "Scribus" is that the vowel of the second syllable is > > not silent as it is in "scribe." If it were the i should be pronounced > > [aj] or [??j], depending on the speaker's dialect. That the e is not > > silent means that the i must be pronounced [??] or [i]. However, we > > generally use the [i] pronunciation only for words that have been > > borrowed recently. Thus, I can just about guarantee you that if you put > > the word "Scribus" in front of a hundred native English speakers and > > ask them how to pronounce it, the response will be overwhelmingly > > [skr??b??s], with a few choosing [skrajb??s]. > > Wow, thank you, I learned a lot from these explanations. And you are my > hero, since you obviously did find a way to type IPA characters with > your keyboard -- I gave up before even trying. > > M. > > > > > > > ___________________________________________________________ > Der fr?he Vogel f?ngt den Wurm. Hier gelangen Sie zum neuen Yahoo! Mail: > http://mail.yahoo.de
