At 06:16 15-01-2001 -0800, Charles wrote:
>Michael Everson wrote:
>
>"The pronuncuation ['juni:ko:d] with [i:] or [i] instead of schwa irritates
>me a lot. No one would pronounce "universe" with an [i]."
>
>I beg to differ; "universe" is commonly pronounced with a short [i] in the
>English Midlands.
Besides, the name of an international standard will be pronounced
internationally.
For example, my native tongue, Slovak, does not even have the English
schwa sound. It would be ridiculous to expect Slovak Unicode users
to learn a new phoneme just so they pronounce Unicode properly. They
will pronounce it ['uniko:d], like it or not. :) And they will not turn
the [o:] into an [ou] (as the English speakers do) either. Plus the [i]
will be somewhere halfway between the English [i] and [i:].
I would not be surprised if speakers of certain Slavic languages even
changed the SPELLING to Unikod (with an acute over the [o]), as they
have done with other imported words (such as futbal for football). This
is simply because they follow the write-as-you-hear rule. Insisting
that they keep the original spelling would be linguistic imperialism,
hardly appropriate for the makers of Unicode.
Adam
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:18 EDT