On 2/19/2013 9:35 AM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
Werner LEMBERG, Tue, 19 Feb 2013 10:48:52 +0100 (CET):
Otto Stoltz wrote:
Here is a minimal pair to illustrate that point:
Er hat in Moskau liebe Genossen.
Er hat in Moskau Liebe genossen.
which translates to:
At Moskow, he’s got dear comrades.
At Moskow, he has enjoyed love.
A classical joke are those two newspaper header lines:
Der Gefangene floh
Der gefangene Floh
which translates to
The Prisoner Escaped
The Caught Flea
And in this case, the prosody in German is *exactly* the same.
So in this case, the imaginary newspapers made use of written forms
that they perhaps would not have used orally, if instead of newspapers
they had been Radio channels.
The general subject here is the fact that “outer“ things, such as the
(effect of the) “look“ of the language, affects on the “inner“ things,
namely how we use the language.
In the earlier posts on the readability of road signs there was a link
to a paper that reported a research result that is interesting here.
People read more slowly when a written form has a non-standard
pronunciation (even for well-known words) and faster, when it has
standard pronunciation (even for unknown words).
The example given was "hint/ rint" vs. "pint".
Interesting that.
Also, ransom note capitalization is the hardest to read for all forms of
capitalization. Take that, CamelCase :)
A./
