Re: Unfortunate character name

On Nov 15, 5:54 pm, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)"
<seaw...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
D.F. Manno wrote:
In article <gfmmkb$30...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
 "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)" <seaw...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

archon...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
"Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)" wrote:
D.F. Manno wrote:
Cwm again?
        WTF is CWM?
Welsh.
       But the prior poster was talking about vowels in *ENGLISH*.

Do I really have to quote James Nicoll on the purity of the English
language _here_?

        But we also FIX the other languages. For instance, the insane French
spell it "Parlez", while we made that "Parlay", thus parlaying it into
an English word!


Sometimes, but I'd say it's rare that an English word gets "fixed"
upon adoption and I'd say that it's going to get even rare now that we
have standardized spelling without standardizing phonetics. English
has a long tradition of leaving spelling mostly alone. For instance,
Greek "k" words in English are traditionally spelled with a "ch" if
the "k" orignitates from a chi rather than a kappa (different sounds
in Greek, but they merge into the same English sound since we don't
use the chi sound). Further confusing this, "sh" words if they come
from French also keep the "ch" spelling. Words coming from Spanish
that have a "h" sound also retain the "j" spelling. They usally drop
the tilde over the n if they have it (although not always), but that's
due mostly to a printing limitation.


        This "Cwm" will undoubtedly become either "Coom" (or, IIRC, there's
already an English word "coombe", which may mean the same thing, which
would mean the damn Welsh are trying a second assault!), if the rough
pronunciation is kept, or "kwim" if we try to pronounce the thing as
written.

        W is not a vowel. All dissenters will be forced to read the entire
works of Piers Anthony, in which all the vowels will be replaced with W
and V. You'll be tested on your reading comprehension, and if you fail,
you'll have remedial work with John Norman.


More than you wanted to know about semi-vowels:

I'm guessing you don't speak a second language, because many other
European languages (most particularly the Romance ones) don't use w
except in loan words because it's superfluous. The "w" sound in
English is handled by the letter u. What we call the "w" sound is
usually considered the approximant (semi-vowel) part of a rising
diphthong. The sound "we" would be written "hui" in Spanish (the "h"
is there because it's against the rules to start a word with a "u"
followed by a vowel, but it's silent). This is exactly equivalent to
the role the letter y plays in English filling in for "i" in
diphthongs. I think Portuguese has done away with "y" as well although
Spanish keeps it for historical reasons (transcribing Greek words--
it's even called "Greek i").

As others have pointed out, when "w" ends a word it's filling in for
"u" in a diphthong. This use at the end of a diphthong is more
obviously vowel-like in English because we don't often consider rising
diphthongs dipthongs.

Someone, possibly you, pointed out the "g" in "light" and other words
as a counter-example to the "w as a vowel." In those case the "g"
isn't really a "g," but a "yogh" which is a runic-derived letter that
was used in Old English that fell into disuse because the Normans
didn't like non-Latin letters and replaced it with "gh" (note that in
Scots which escaped the Norman influence yogh was eventually replaced
by "z" because people couldn't tell them apart when written in
cursive). Yogh originally had a "g" sound, but eventually it came to
have a "y" sound in many cases. So whenever you see a "gh" you can
mentally substitute a "y" and you'll do alright phonetically (except
in foreign words like spaghetti).
.

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