Re: cvs commit to ddp/manuals.sgml/faq by toff
On Wed, 22 May 2002, Chris Tillman wrote:
> Well for non-English speakers, the first change is only half the
> story, they still don't know the pronunciation of the last half
> because it really wasn't given phonetically. That was made clear
> later, but why not be consistent? Then for the -an to -en, that's
> because a non-English speaker could easily mistake it to be a short a
> 'Deb - e - Ann'. But it ain't.
>
> The dictionaries use an upside-down e for that sound, but I don't have
> that on my keyboard...
Problem is, it's not easy to represent English pronunciation with
quasi-phonetic spelling because so many English spellings can be
pronounced more than one way. There is a convention for ASCII
transcription of pronunciation used on sci.lang and elsewhere according to
which Debian would be transcribed as /'dEb i @n/, but how many people
would understand that?
The ideal thing would be to come up with a common rhyme for "Debian" so
you could write "'Debian' is pronounced like 'X'", but the only word I can
think of ending in the correct -ebbian sound is "Entebbean" (as in the
city in Uganda), which isn't much help. "Amphibian"? (not quite)
"Lesbian" (?!?!)
Other trivia question: the only common English word I can find ending in
-ebian is "plebian", which is pronounced entirely differently. Are there
others?
> > -<p>The kernel (filesystem) in &debian; systems supports replacing files even
> > +<p>The kernel (Filesystem) in &debian; systems supports replacing files even
> >
> > This one I don't get :) You've properly fixed filesystem -> file system
> > everywhere else, why not here?
But see the manpage for fs(5).
(Do the LDP folk have any kind of document listing agreed-upon spellings
for various terms? I don't see anything like that mentioned in the LDP
Author Guide.)
--
David Sewell, Project Editor
The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 400318, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
Email: dsewell@virginia.edu Tel: +1 434 924 6066
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