From: Chris Harvey (chris@languagegeek.com)
Date: Fri Jul 02 2004 - 17:55:30 CDT
> "Tōkyō" is not an English transliteration of Japanese, as it uses diacritics not found
> in English. The correct English transliteration is in fact "Tokyo", which does not
> round trip.
My mistake, I meant Latin/Roman transliteration.
> > or Kahnawake (English/French) for Kahnawà:ke
>Errr - didn't the Emglish/French useage predate the Mohawk alphabet? Pretty perverse
> case there.
Not as such. The previous English/French spelling of the community was Caughnawaga, pronounced in the local English as [kɑgnǝwɑgǝ]. As society has changed somewhat, there has been a trend for Canadian society to go back to using the original Native names (which the Native people have been using all along). So what happened was, the government looked at the way the Mohawk name was already spelled "in Mohawk", Kahnawà:ke [kɑhnɑwɑ̀ːke], and modified it to suit English/French orthographical practice. My point here was that the Mohawk language uses a grave accent and long vowel marker, which are discarded in English and French. Today, the local English speakers still by and large call the town Caughnawaga, but the English speakers call the golf course (which uses the new name) [kænǝwæki]. So for people living in that part of Québec, you could say that the word Kanawake is treated like Paris.
Chris Harvey
languagegeek.com
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