Re: OT: Re: Why do people in the UK put a u in the word color?
Mike McCarty <Mike.McCarty@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Andrei Popescu wrote:
> > On Sat, 15 Apr 2006 21:32:48 +0300
> > Andrei Popescu <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>I agree. And the resulting text is not so unintelligible if you are
> >>used to phonetic spelling.
> >
> >
> > Like the Romanian language has. (Just to be clear)
>
> Are you sure? Many native speakers of languages *think* they have
> phonetic spelling when they do not.
[snip]
>
> Mike
I'm pretty sure. When I started learning english, the phonetic spelling
was "a joke" to learn. Apart from some symbols, which I could very
clearly associate to Romanian letters, the rest of them are identical
to the Romanian letters. For example the Romanian 'ă' (it's an 'a' with
a "hat") is *always* identical to the second sound from 'learning' (in
phonetic spelling it's an 'e' upside-down).
a is phonetic a
e is phonetic e
i is phonetic i
...
And I could go on with the whole alphabet. A Romanian person without
any knowledge of English, reading the resulted piece of text would
sound like English (with a pretty harsh accent, but still). Romanian is
a Latin language with Slavic influences, but not so much from the
nort-eastern Slavic (like Russian), but more from Serbian, which is
also a phonetic language, not like Russian. I can speak a bit Serbian,
and I can tell you the difference between Russian and Serbian is
significant, even if they are closely related.
Andrei
--
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
(Albert Einstein)
Reply to: