Xref: utzoo comp.fonts:2563 soc.culture.german:4379 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!lll-winken!sun-barr!newstop!sun!amdcad!sono!fog!holley From: holley@sono.uucp (Greg Holley) Newsgroups: comp.fonts,soc.culture.german Subject: Re: Umlaute [was: naive (...question about uncial...) ] Message-ID: Date: 23 May 91 23:04:13 GMT References: <1991Apr24.152455.22367@engage.enet.dec.com> Sender: holley@sono.uucp (Greg Holley) Organization: Acuson; Mountain View, California Lines: 34 In-Reply-To: tmb@ai.mit.edu's message of 22 May 91 14:27:57 GMT In article tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) writes: > > In article holley@sono.uucp (Greg Holley) writes: > > Do you also want to force the Spanish, French, Dutch, and Danish > (who already have too many vowels for their alphabet) to use the > "standard 26 letter alphabet"? > > No country can be "forced" to give up their orthograpy. > > In any case, I believe most dialects of English already have more > vowels than any of the languages you mention (certainly more than > Spanish). English has somewhere around 14 vowels. I meant the parenthetical remark to apply only to Danish, which seems to have more vowels than all the rest of the Western European languages put together (either that, or it's a tonal language :-) ). As far as I can tell, Danish packs five vowels where any sane language would have only three, and then records them with a mystic code understood only by the true descendants of Vikings. The orthography is already so screwy that you have to memorize the pronunciations of half the words (as if any non-Dane could ever hope to pronounce them). If you took away the strange letters, even the Danes would probably find it hard to speak Danish. Ob. German: Has anyone noticed that the quality of Doener Kebabs in Berlin has improved over the last six years? -- Greg Holley sun!sono!holley holley@sono.uucp "My tale is so strange that, were it written with needles on the interior corner of an eye, yet would it prove a lesson to the circumspect."