John Jason Jordan wrote: > Why must it have the same pronunciation in all languages? If Polish > speakers want to pronounce it [skribus], that's their affair. In fact, > that's probably how speakers of most European languages would interpret > the pronunciation. But none of that has any bearing on how English > speakers will pronounce it. 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. > > 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]. > And here I thought I was asking a question with a simple answer...
So it seems that Scribus is an existential word. Greg
