Kenneth Whistler wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]">My humble mission in life.Patrick Andries wrote:I must say that I have already seen horrors such as "geüpdated" (the "u"
is presumably approximated), again English messing with languages
spelling and pronounciation...
See http://www.vvb.org/anglowaan/woordenlijst.htm about the feeling some
Dutch have about these "barbarisms" (van Dale's Web site word)
*laughs*
[EMAIL PROTECTED]">No, no, no. French has enriched English, not polluted it, by bestowing it a wealth of new words. I wonder if we could start the millenium celebration of this wonderful hybridization before 2066?
It isn't as if French hasn't been polluting English for a thousand
years or anything, is it?!
[EMAIL PROTECTED]">Well, the Americans are putting a pretty good fight. Can't see the light behind façade, cañon and coöperate. Tsk tsk.
And nowadays, the Europeans are getting their revenge by exporting
all their accents back onto English letters.
Seriously now, diacritics are an excellent idea when you have more phonemes than graphemes. You could, of course, also create new graphemes with those "clusters" (complexe graphemes) but it is not easy to find a sequence of characters that cannot be interpreted otherwise (hence the diaeresis for vowels, but what for the consonants, a new letter called dash ?).
[EMAIL PROTECTED]">Even the Dutch get
into the act to help out the French:
http://www.hollandbymail.nl/hbmcom/nivea_care_productlist.html
for "Nivea Crème"
[EMAIL PROTECTED]">Nothing in English (although why is cream pronounced /kri:m/ and not /kr Ɛ:m/ or /krae:m/ or such things?), time to import an diacritic or two ? We have a rich stock (^ ¨ ` ´ ~ ¸ ).
Crème ?? What's wrong with good old "cream", anyway?
But in Dutch cream is certainly not better since crème is in the dictionary(*) as a common word.
BTW, I think the Nivea marketing guys must be saying "this is a Trademark, we can impose what we want", they must have thought crème was passe-partout in Europe (German also OK, Oetkers speaks of its Crème Fraîche on TV http://www.bbdo.de/bbdo-group-germany/press-center/729.html). This is how we get our very sizeable daily ration of English names over here (some cryptic such as Toys 'R Us).
(*) I believe the Dutch could justifiably write it « kreem » or « krême» if they wanted.
Patrick Andries
