Re: Fr/lat/ru tu-vous/tu-vos/ - : etymology ?

"Franz Gnaedinger" <frgn@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
On Oct 3, 1:35 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Franz" wrote:

> Did you ever read an English novel where the accent
> of an English speaking German is mimicked by a lot
> of k-words such as kan and kome etc.? Well, I did.

Name it.

A Scottish novel I read some years ago, and an English
novel from the 1910s I found on a table with free books
to take home. It was a best-selling novel by then, but
awful schmock, I couldn't read more than a few pages.
Yet one of the main characters was a German, and
a positive figure in the novel. The author (a woman)
made him speak with a horrible accent which she
indicated with a lot of k-words. Phonemes are good
enough to render a language but not sufficient for
rendering a dialect, so you have to use other means,
like for example a rough 'k' instead of a soft 'c'.

Assuming what you say about the author's practise in this book is correct (yes, I know, a big assumption), it's likely that indeed she's using <k> instead of <c> to indicate the character's German accent. But that's because she knows German is WRITTEN with <k> where many English words have <c>, not because she thinks these letters are PRONOUNCED differently. This is common in eye-dialect -- like <was> being spelled <woz> to indicate a speaker of non-standard English, even though <was> and <woz> are pronounced exactly the same in all varieties of English.

Similarly, there was once a fashion in some left-wing circles to spell "America" as "Amerika", to make it look more "German" -- with the intention of suggesting that the military-industrial complex in the USA resembled the Nazi regime in Germany.

> And the Krazy Kat cartoon's name sounds to me
> as if it were inspired by a German's pronounciation
> of English.

No, it's inspired by a German's SPELLING of English.

The sound of "Krazy Kat" is identical to the sound of "Crazy Cat."

It still sounds German to me.

No, it LOOKS German. (Well, not really. That <-zy> is hardly common in German, is it?) It SOUNDS just the same with <k> as it does with <c>.

Some Germans would
pronounce crazy cat as krazy kat.

Any German that knows English would know that the <c>s in crazy cat are pronounced exactly the same as the <k>s in krazy kat. And any German (though not all Swiss) would pronounce <k> in German the same way as both <c> and <k> in English.

I know that you
Americans can't discern between f and ph, now
you also kan't discern between c and k ?

For ALL English speakers (not just Americans), the sounds represented in spelling by <f> and <c> are EXACTLY the same as those represented by <ph> and <k> respectively. Why can't you accept that English spelling often represents the same sound by different letters?

John.

.

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