On 2012-10-12, Paul Hodges wrote:
Melee (no accents in English)
This remark surprised me, so I checked.
In English foreign spelling and articulation for loans is often retained
for a considerable time. That's precisely the mechanism by which it has
gathered such a stupendous vocabulary and even phonetic inventory; for
some reason English speakers like to keep their words foreign sounding,
whereas in comparison Finnish (Japanese evenmore) speakers quickly
nativize the spelling and the sound of pretty much any word.
Thus, the native version of melee in English really is "melee". It's
just that the alternative, original forms still live beside it, after
the word has already been domesticated. It's the polar opposite of what
has happened e.g. to the word "pizza" in Finnish: everybody pronounced
it from the start as "pitsa" but continued to write it as "pizza" (where
z is a letter which is not a part of the usual Finnish orthography, but
a concession to loan words). Melee in English, is still supposed to be
pronounced the way it originally was, even if orthographically
simplified.
Might I say, that's fucked up, and leads to groups like mine: with
English you most certainly never get what you bargained for. Or did any
one of you ever know how to properly accentuate something like
"accentuation" at first try when you saw it on paper? I think not, and
Finnish is a helluva lot easier in that regard. ;)
The same goes for melee.
--
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - de...@iki.fi, http://decoy.iki.fi/front
+358-50-5756111, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
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