> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>>>     In Finnish, at least, you know how a word is pronounced, regardless of
>>> context. This even in the case that you have never heard or seen that word
>>> before in your life, nor know what it means.
>
>> Now, see, this is how an alphabetic script is supposed to work. That's
>> the whole idea. The fact that English is a random mixture of a dozen
>> incompatible languages with no rhyme or reason such that it fails this
>> basic definition is another matter...
>
>    Btw, Spanish is another language where you know how to pronounce written
> words unambiguously, even without context or previous knowledge.
>
>    OTOH it's slightly "inferior" to Finnish written language in that some
> letters have different pronounciations depending on the surrounding letters
> (which is something almost completely inexistent in Finnish; AFAIK there's
> only one such case). The pronounciation of complete words is still completely
> unambiguous, though. It just means that there's no full 1-to-1 correspondence
> between letters and how they are pronounced.
>

How does Finnish deal with foreign words?  For example, the "ch" in many 
words of greek origin (psychology, chaos, stochiometry, chemistry, 
etc...), are they rewritten or taken as is?

>    (Written Spanish is also slightly "wasteful" in that the letter H is
> completely silent, making it kind of obsolete. It's also a common source
> of grammatical mistakes because the pronounciation of the word does not
> indicate the presence of the letter. Also, there are words which differ
> from each other only in whether they have an additional H or not, which is
> confusing and a source of even more grammatical mistakes.)
>

While it is not as hard as in English or German, the h in spanish is 
still not completely silent.  For example, the s sound of "los" in "Los 
Angeles" carries into the second word, whereas in "Los haciendas", it 
doesn't, and in some words, such as "hombre", it is indeed pronounced.

DISCLAIMER: My knowledge of spanish is limited to having a 
Latin-American neighbor and having been to Mexico a few times.  I may be 
totally wrong.
-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
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Francois Labreque <fla### [at] videotronca> wrote:
> How does Finnish deal with foreign words?

  How does any language deal with foreign words?

  Most loanwords are "finnishized", in both pronounciation and writing
(spoken Finnish doesn't have nearly as many phonemes as many other languages,
including English, which means that most finns can't even pronounce many
English words correctly because of lack of practice).

  If a foreign name cannot be changed (eg. because it's a proper name, eg.
the name of a person or a company), then it's just written as it is (if the
name happens to have some letter not in the Finnish alphabet, then how it's
dealt with varies from medium to medium and person to person).

  Country names are usually "finnishized", with rare exceptions. Other
foreign place names are usually not, but writte as-is, with the exception
of some very known very old place names, like some ancient cities. (Eg. the
city of Rome is written in Finnish as "Rooma". If the city had been founded
last year, it would probably be written and pronounced as-is, ie. "Roma".
Another example is London, which is "Lontoo" in Finnish. If it were founded
today, it would be just "London" in Finnish too.)

  This actually causes some awkward things. For example, to a Finn,
"New York" is not pronounced as it is written. And if you tried to
pronounce as it is written, it would be very awkward and unnatural. It's
known enough that most people get the English pronounciation at least
approximately correctly. It's much harder with lesser known place names.
(Britons would have a fun time watching a Finn trying to pronounce
"Worcestershire".)

>  For example, the "ch" in many 
> words of greek origin (psychology, chaos, stochiometry, chemistry, 
> etc...), are they rewritten or taken as is?

  Common terms are rewritten and the pronounciation made more Finnish.
(Psykologia, kaaos, stokiometria, kemia.)

> While it is not as hard as in English or German, the h in spanish is 
> still not completely silent.  For example, the s sound of "los" in "Los 
> Angeles" carries into the second word, whereas in "Los haciendas", it 
> doesn't, and in some words, such as "hombre", it is indeed pronounced.

  Ok, the H can cause a slight change in rythm in some situations, which
makes it distinguishable from a similar situation without an H. Still feels
a bit "wasteful", though.

  I have never heard "hombre" pronounced any differently from (the
fictitious word) "ombre". (I have lived in Spain for 12 years.) I don't
know if it's different in Latin America.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 12/07/2011 12:32 PM, Warp wrote:

> (spoken Finnish doesn't have nearly as many phonemes as many other languages,
> including English, which means that most finns can't even pronounce many
> English words correctly because of lack of practice).

Egg flied lice, anyone?

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On 08/07/2011 07:15 PM, nemesis wrote:

> Oh, and BTW, those verses... yeah, I can now understand why you can't stand
> poetry if such obtuse lines are all you can grasp of it...

As should be obvious, this is not poetry. This is lyrics. ;-)

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> On 08/07/2011 07:15 PM, nemesis wrote:
>
>> Oh, and BTW, those verses... yeah, I can now understand why you can't
>> stand
>> poetry if such obtuse lines are all you can grasp of it...
>
> As should be obvious, this is not poetry. This is lyrics. ;-)

And the difference is?

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/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
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On 12/07/2011 04:22 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:

>> On 08/07/2011 07:15 PM, nemesis wrote:
>>
>>> Oh, and BTW, those verses... yeah, I can now understand why you can't
>>> stand
>>> poetry if such obtuse lines are all you can grasp of it...
>>
>> As should be obvious, this is not poetry. This is lyrics. ;-)
>
> And the difference is?

Lyrics can be in an unintelligible language and still be delightful.

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On 12-7-2011 10:09, Warp wrote:
> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> No, see, you're thinking that the English language follows some kind of
>> *logic*.
>
>    The most logical aspect of English is the pronounciation.
>
>    For example, how do you pronounce the word "read"? Impossible to say all
> by itself. It depends on the context. (Or, more precisely, it depends on the
> tense of said verb, both present and past tenses being written identically
> but pronounced differently.)

How about 'leading', is that always pronounced the same? You might think 
that is a leading question, but I always had a suspicion that in 
typography it might be pronounced different because of a different, 
heavy, origin.

... GIYF, yes that seems to confirm my suspicion.

There are brilliant poems and songs about consistent english 
pronunciation, I am sure they have been pointed at before in p.o-t

-- 
Apparently you can afford your own dictator for less than 10 cents per 
citizen per day.

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On 12-7-2011 13:32, Warp wrote:
> Francois Labreque<fla### [at] videotronca>  wrote:
>> How does Finnish deal with foreign words?
>
>    How does any language deal with foreign words?

We do it different. We import English (and other) words as is and they 
are pronounced as much as possible like in the original country. That 
becomes fun if it is a verb. Take for instance that you want to say that 
you saved data. Although we now have a Dutch word for it often the word 
'save' is used here too to describe this action. 'save' is in 
pronunciation close to the dutch 'zeef', the present perfect of which is 
'gezeefd', hence we say and write that 'we de data hebben gesaved', so 
we have an english word with Dutch inflections. That means that in the 
middle of a word we switch pronunciation rules from dutch to english and 
back. Even if the english word contains e.g. vowels that would be 
pronounced different in Dutch, like in this case.

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> On 12/07/2011 04:22 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:

>>> On 08/07/2011 07:15 PM, nemesis wrote:
>>>
>>>> Oh, and BTW, those verses... yeah, I can now understand why you can't
>>>> stand
>>>> poetry if such obtuse lines are all you can grasp of it...
>>>
>>> As should be obvious, this is not poetry. This is lyrics. ;-)
>>
>> And the difference is?
>
> Lyrics can be in an unintelligible language and still be delightful.

And poetry can't?

-- 
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>> Lyrics can be in an unintelligible language and still be delightful.
>
> And poetry can't?

I can only say this: I've yet to find any poetry that evokes anything 
other than boredom. This does not preclude the possibility of good 
poetry existing; it just makes me rather disinclined to search for it.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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