Re: silly question
On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 06:29:11PM -0500, Michael Z Daryabeygi wrote:
> Dave Sherohman wrote:
> >On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 05:23:40PM -0500, Michael Z Daryabeygi wrote:
> >
> >>What are you talking about??
> >>how do you pronounce bed, Fred, fed, federal, Ned, debit, credit, ... I
> >>could go on.
> >>
> >>I can think of fecal...., oh and legal, I like to pronounce special
> >>speecial, but that is just me.
> >>I can think of far more examples where e is pronounced with a short
> >>sound than examples where an "e" says "ee" on it's own.
> >
> >
> >Well, there's just about every case where you're removing something
> >from something else - de-flate, de-burr, de-toxify, etc. But I don't
> >have any idea what a "bian" is, so how you would de-bian something is
> >a complete mystery.
> >
>
> Ah! So true. I knew I was missing something. That might explain it.
> But like you said, I never heard of no "bian".
>
>
In de-flate, de-burr, and de-toxify, the de- derives from Latin. Debra
derives from the name of a Biblical prophetess (I guess). That name was
originally rendered in ancient Hebrew. With the simplification of the
spelling there was quite likely a drift in the pronunciation of the name.
So, again, the final arbiter of this issue should be Debra herself, or,
maybe, Ian, if we are sure the separation was amicable.
--
Paul E Condon
pecondon@mesanetworks.net
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