Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Mark Newsgroups: rec.autos.sport.f1 Subject: Re: OT: Language etc. Was: British GP Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2024 11:03:41 -0000 (UTC) Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 59 Sender: "Mark P. Conmy" Message-ID: References: <=giaZltMYDe8MVJMa5WJttgkpVLc@4ax.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2024 13:03:41 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="4507c9c96f6fcfcfac66d0ba17958b09"; logging-data="3119213"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+nqJHY58UjD2+j4wvr1szb" User-Agent: tin/2.0.0-20110823 ("Ardenistiel") (UNIX) (Linux/3.10.0-1160.105.1.el7.x86_64 (x86_64)) Cancel-Lock: sha1:hbH90fpBKTSabZfOgyRtivwKNfg= Bytes: 4422 Yazoo wrote: > On Fri, 19 Jul 2024 09:45:47 -0000 (UTC), Mark > wrote: > >>The fact the letters look the same fool us into thinking we know how to >>pronounce the words. > > Well, southern Slavic languages such as Croatian (my native), Serbian, > Bosnian, Montenegrian are much simpler in that regard: the main rule > is "read as it is written", letter by letter. So everything is written > fonetically. > The main complication with those languages is very complicated grammar > and word forms with lots of prefixes, sufixes, etc. > > Aactually all those languages are almost the same with more than 90% > common words and rules, so we can understand each other normally. Only > politicians and nationalists insist on differences (Serbian is not > Croatian and vice versa). We can all agree that English isn't phonetic. Even allowing for regional variations, it shows the thousand years of development and evolution in all of its variants. But take Irish (as that's one I'm familiar with). That's essentially phonetic even though it sounds very different based on which region your spoken dialect comes from[1]. The complicating factors for an English speaker include the rules on slender and broad pronunciation (too complicated to explain right now) which add additional characters to resolve (meaning there are often unspoken vowels included) and digraphs (like mh and bh[2] which are pronounced as "w" when broad, "v" when slender) that don't exist in English. Take Siobhán. If you try to pronounce all of the letters according to English pronunciation rules, you'll come up with something like see-o-barn (the bh doesn't really exist in English...but that is nowhere near the right pronunciation...yet it really is phonetically spelt in Irish. How? Well, the "S" becomes "sh" when before a slender vowel (e or i). The "io" has a number of rules depending on the following consonent, but is normally "i". "bh" is "v" when slender. The "a" is broad and, coming ahead of the "n", pronounced "or". There you have it: Siobhán = sh+i+v+or+n = shivorn Ta-da! 1 Irish was almost killed off by the British, but survived in small pockets of native speakers. That has led to there being some significant differences between Standard Irish (defined to support Irish language use in Ireland generally) and the versions that have been spoken natively throughout in Connacht (especially in Mayo and Galway), Munster (Cork and Kerry) and Ulster (Donegal). 2 In the traditional Irish writing, these were (amongst others) wholly different letters to m and h, but had a "dot" (the "séimhiú") above them. That's not very common in languages, so one of the many changes to Irish orthography was to eliminate the accent and instead use "mh" (also "bh", "ch", "dh", "fh", "gh", "ph", "sh", "th") to make typing easier.