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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: +1 434 924 6066 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
