From: John Cowan (cowan@mercury.ccil.org)
Date: Sun Dec 28 2003 - 14:52:05 EST
Philippe Verdy scripsit:
> I know some exceptions in proper names like "Saül" (which "could" be
> written "Sauel" in German, but not in French where it would be read
> as "sau-el" i.e. "so-el" or "soël"). But if this was written with
> a combining e above in "Sau(e)l" there would not exist such false
> reading because any diacritic added above a vowel in French disables
> the formation of single-phoneme digraphs containing that accented vowel.
This makes no sense. "Saül" is indeed an exception, and the " is a
diaeresis in this case, showing that "au" is not pronounced in the usual
German fashion but as two separate vowels. (In English, this is not done,
and "Saul" is pronounced in the usual fashion.) "Sauel" would be an error.
This particular use of diaeresis cannot be confused for an umlaut mark,
because umlauted "au" is written "äu".
> For the same reason, why is the German "ess-tsett" (sharp S) given a
> compatibility decomposition as <s><s> instead of <long-s><s>?
Because in modern German orthography, the sharp-s is replaced by "ss" if
the sharp-s is not available.
-- A witness cannot give evidence of his John Cowan age unless he can remember being born. jcowan@reutershealth.com --Judge Blagden http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
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