zompist bboard

don't forget the acute to mark that a word-final e isn't silent (and doesn't ~lengthen the preceding vowel), which is regular enough that it sometimes gets analogized to loanwords where the original spelling didn't have it

Nortaneous wrote:don't forget the acute to mark that a word-final e isn't silent (and doesn't ~lengthen the preceding vowel), which is regular enough that it sometimes gets analogized to loanwords where the original spelling didn't have it

Can you give an example? Every instance I can think of--e.g., résumé, exposé, rosé, café, émigré, etc.--is a loan from French...

Thry wrote:Catalan: uses ü like Spanish (also with qü, for analogous reasons, cf. que vs. pasqües /k@/ vs /"pas.kw@s/), and ´ and ` for stress accents (also marking stress patters that are not considered "natural stress"), using ´ for close vowels (ú, í, ó, é) and ` for open vowels (à, ò, è). Also has the cedilla in the letter ç (again considered a separate letter, to separate the /s/ sound from the /k/ sound; i.e. caçar /k@."sa/).

Catalan doesn't count <ç> among the letters of the alphabet (a, be, ce, de, e...), and in good dictionaries you'll find it considered as a variant of c: C – ca, ça, cabal, càbala...

Zaarin wrote:Can you give an example? Every instance I can think of--e.g., résumé, exposé, rosé, café, émigré, etc.--is a loan from French...

Saké. This seems to be falling out of use nowadays now that the word has become more generally familiar. I've been reading a lot of literature translated from the Japanese lately and I know one of the texts also used it on proper names (e.g. "Ofuné") but unfortunately I can't recall which one this was so I couldn't tell you the year of publication.

I was thinking of reading a certain novel translated from Japanese (can't remember what but it was quite famous), but the main character's name was written "Shinsuké" and I couldn't.

Not to mention "pokémon".

finlay wrote:I was thinking of reading a certain novel translated from Japanese (can't remember what but it was quite famous), but the main character's name was written "Shinsuké" and I couldn't.

野間 宏の「暗い絵」?

No idea. Doesn't look familiar.

And there's Elric of Melniboné.

(Unfounded speculation: I bet Moorcock started with "Melnibone" until some early reader pronounced it like "bone". More unfounded speculation: the term "boner" wasn't popular in his school.)

linguoboy wrote:

Zaarin wrote:Can you give an example? Every instance I can think of--e.g., résumé, exposé, rosé, café, émigré, etc.--is a loan from French...

Saké. This seems to be falling out of use nowadays now that the word has become more generally familiar. I've been reading a lot of literature translated from the Japanese lately and I know one of the texts also used it on proper names (e.g. "Ofuné") but unfortunately I can't recall which one this was so I couldn't tell you the year of publication.

The Michael Gallagher translation of Runaway Horses does that, but my copy doesn't say when it was published.

I was thinking of yerba mate, a Spanish loan that sometimes takes the acute, though it's not written with it in Spanish.

zompist wrote:And there's Elric of Melniboné.

(Unfounded speculation: I bet Moorcock started with "Melnibone" until some early reader pronounced it like "bone". More unfounded speculation: the term "boner" wasn't popular in his school.)

Further unfounded speculation: he didn't use the diaresis instead because Tolkien did that, and Moorcock needed to make sure he never did anything Tolkien did.

If we're doing fiction, though, there's also Wolfe's "Caldé of the Long Sun".

zompist wrote:And there's Elric of Melniboné.

(Unfounded speculation: I bet Moorcock started with "Melnibone" until some early reader pronounced it like "bone". More unfounded speculation: the term "boner" wasn't popular in his school.)

His name's "Moorcock," and you're worried about something that may sound similar to boner?

Priorities!

Salmoneus wrote:

zompist wrote:And there's Elric of Melniboné.

(Unfounded speculation: I bet Moorcock started with "Melnibone" until some early reader pronounced it like "bone". More unfounded speculation: the term "boner" wasn't popular in his school.)

Further unfounded speculation: he didn't use the diaresis instead because Tolkien did that, and Moorcock needed to make sure he never did anything Tolkien did.

He did use diaresis in another character's name, Erekosë.

Izambri wrote:Catalan doesn't count <ç> among the letters of the alphabet

And neither does German usually count <ä, ö, ü, ß> among them. So even though we use all of A-Z plus 4 special letters, our alphabet still only has 26 letters.

WeepingElf wrote:

Salmoneus wrote:

zompist wrote:And there's Elric of Melniboné.

(Unfounded speculation: I bet Moorcock started with "Melnibone" until some early reader pronounced it like "bone". More unfounded speculation: the term "boner" wasn't popular in his school.)

Further unfounded speculation: he didn't use the diaresis instead because Tolkien did that, and Moorcock needed to make sure he never did anything Tolkien did.

He did use diaresis in another character's name, Erekosë.

coughBrontëcough

The Brontës were real people, though, not Moorcock characters.

Yes; their original name was Prunty.

Because I majored in Russian, I always get the urge to pronounce their name Bront-yó..

Izambri wrote:

Thry wrote:Catalan: uses ü like Spanish (also with qü, for analogous reasons, cf. que vs. pasqües /k@/ vs /"pas.kw@s/), and ´ and ` for stress accents (also marking stress patters that are not considered "natural stress"), using ´ for close vowels (ú, í, ó, é) and ` for open vowels (à, ò, è). Also has the cedilla in the letter ç (again considered a separate letter, to separate the /s/ sound from the /k/ sound; i.e. caçar /k@."sa/).

Catalan doesn't count <ç> among the letters of the alphabet (a, be, ce, de, e...), and in good dictionaries you'll find it considered as a variant of c: C – ca, ça, cabal, càbala...

typographically, maybe I should've said "character"

linguoboy wrote:

Zaarin wrote:Can you give an example? Every instance I can think of--e.g., résumé, exposé, rosé, café, émigré, etc.--is a loan from French...

Saké. This seems to be falling out of use nowadays now that the word has become more generally familiar. I've been reading a lot of literature translated from the Japanese lately and I know one of the texts also used it on proper names (e.g. "Ofuné") but unfortunately I can't recall which one this was so I couldn't tell you the year of publication.

Now that you mention it, I have seen that spelling, along with animé--just not recently.

Zaarin wrote:

linguoboy wrote:

Zaarin wrote:Can you give an example? Every instance I can think of--e.g., résumé, exposé, rosé, café, émigré, etc.--is a loan from French...

Saké. This seems to be falling out of use nowadays now that the word has become more generally familiar. I've been reading a lot of literature translated from the Japanese lately and I know one of the texts also used it on proper names (e.g. "Ofuné") but unfortunately I can't recall which one this was so I couldn't tell you the year of publication.

Now that you mention it, I have seen that spelling, along with animé--just not recently.

I went through the list of Japanese borrowings in English but couldn't find any other examples. Interestingly, though, I did come across the word "bokeh". (New to me; apparently a technical term in photography.) I'm willing to wager that a generation or two ago you would've seen a variant in "é".

I suppose the h in Noh could be looked upon as a diacritic. I don't think it's there to indicate vowel length (since a "short" pronunciation isn't really an option in this position in English orthography) but just to avoid confusion with the common word no. (Cf. the use of acutes in Spanish.)

I've been Reading Shogun lately, and seen saké.

Remember that even today in the age of Unicode, people still use fonts that don't have ē. It's vastly more likely their font will have é. And before Unicode? You only saw ē in scholarly works on Greek.

Shm Jay wrote:Remember that even today in the age of Unicode, people still use fonts that don't have ē. It's vastly more likely their font will have é. And before Unicode? You only saw ē in scholarly works on Greek.

But ē wouldn't've been correct here either. The vowel isn't long in these words, it just isn't silent. As more than one person has pointed out, the traditional convention for indicating this was ë--a character that their fonts most likely did allow. (It was included in Part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, for instance.)

Pokémon

linguoboy wrote:Interestingly, though, I did come across the word "bokeh". (New to me; apparently a technical term in photography.) I'm willing to wager that a generation or two ago you would've seen a variant in "é".

"Bokeh" is an extremely obnoxious word! I have cried many tears over its nonsensical spelling, particularly since "eh" parses as /ɛʰ/ as far as I'm concerned.

As for what it means—it's the shape that light is distributed in when it's blurry and out of focus. Most cameras produce hard polygons; our eyes produce retina-shaped blobs; Photoshop produces a perfectly smooth Gaussian fuzz. As for the recent popularity of the term—it dates to 1996, and the first articles actually used "boke" but provided "bokeh" as an alternative, which apparently proved more popular. I'd put my money on lack of linguistic expertise to explain the lapse in accentuation, although ASCII-fueled apathy seems plausible too.