Re: Why "kompressor" in German?


Thomas Carter kirjoitti:

On Thu, 07 Dec 2006 02:36:58 -0800, phoglund wrote:


Thomas Carter kirjoitti:

On Wed, 06 Dec 2006 06:32:31 -0800, phoglund wrote:


Thomas Carter wrote:
Why do Germans spell kompressor with a k? Is it to make it look
more Germanic?

Why do you spell Russian names with Latin letters, instead of Cyrillic?
Is it to make it look more Latin?

Is this not a different case? I mean, is the letter "c" not part of
the alphabet used in German? All literate Germans know about "c", but not
all literate users of the Roman alphabet know the details of the Cyrillic
one.

Well, if you didn't get it: different languages do things differently,
because that is their tradition.

I understand substituting "k" for "c" in words of Latin origin in German
is a relatively recent phenomenon, not a tradition many hundreds of years
old, right?

The tendency to use the native K has been there for a long time,
although obviously learned or "hard" words have resisted it longer than
more integrated loan-words.


Or are we supposed to think there is any other reason than tradition
behind the pronunciation of "Featherstonehaugh" as if written "Fanshaw"?

Again, I believe that both cases are not really comparably. The latter
does seem to be tradition, whereas the former does seem to be politics.

Of course. For you monolingual English-speakers, the scourge of the
multilingual world, the very fact that funny foreigners speak and write
languages other than English is politics and nationalism, while the
normal and unmarked way is the English way, and the English language.

FYI: my native language, which is entirely unrelated to German and
Germanic languages, writes it as "kompressori". Is that politics, too?

.

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