Subj : Cough
To   : Paul Quinn
From : Ardith Hinton
Date : Sat Aug 12 2017 23:56:13

Hi, Paul!  Recently you wrote in a message to Alexander Koryagin:

 PQ>  I had a compulsion to have a bit of fun with your outline.
 PQ>  I'm sorry for mangling it.  Guilty as charged, I am.


           Hey, there's a good example of an uncommon but quite correct turn of 
phrase.  I think you know far more about English than you think you do....  :-)



 ak>  Maybe I was tired and mu sense of humor was dull. ;)


           Wrong mental gear?  AFAIC that's not uncommon.  Here we are, talking 
seriously about English language & literature... and somebody slips in a little 
joke.  I often wonder how many readers pick up on mine... [grin].



 PQ>  Not at all.  There's no getting around my ineptitude.
 PQ>  I am not a writer.  Just a failed student, in fact.


           Hmm.  It seems to me that in the course of your police work you must 
have been called upon to make sense of eyewitness reports & write them down, in 
much the same way as I deciphered grade eight English papers.  I don't see your 
chosen career as very different from mine in that regard... particularly if one 
takes into account "kid-wrangling", as folks in the movie biz describe it.  You 
may not see yourself as a writer, but I think you have a lot of related skills.

           WRT your fate at the hands of Miss Stickler, when you moved from one 
English-speaking country to another, I could tell a lot of stories.  Awhile ago 
I alluded to a Canadian whose instructor at a US university didn't like the way 
she spelled certain words.  She later became a university instructor herself... 
and co-authored a grammar text which I still refer to from time to time.  I had 
similar experiences because my parents relocated to Vancouver when I was a babe 
in arms.  It's often said that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger....  :-))



 PQ>  I'm afraid I don't have enough marbles to fill my mouth
 PQ>  with, in order to pronounce such a compound Greek word.


           But you're not losing your marbles.  That's what matters to me.  ;-)



 ak>  What word did you mean? "Ahem"?

 PQ>  It was onomatopoeic.  I meant to convey to you that it
 PQ>  defies pronunciation by this native English speaker.


           Ah... if that's the problem, maybe I can help.


        onomatopoeia  (n.)      ON oh MAT oh PEE + the sound of the final
                                "a" in banana, Obama, and Canada

        onomatopoeic  (adj.)    ON oh MAT oh PEE + ick


So far I've just been "sounding it out" slowly.  I can hear you protesting that 
you didn't ask for one of those do-it-yourself face lift exercises... and I can 
well imagine others protesting that we don't enunciate the "oh" or the "a" very 
clearly when we're comfortable enough with the word to speed it up.  The latter 
may describe the vowel sound there as a "schwa", and most dictionaries will use 
an upside-down "e" to represent it.  That's right, folks... in English we get a 
bit lazy about the pronunciation of vowels on unstressed syllables.  No special 
equipment needed & no undue cause for alarm WRT what Miss Stickler thinks.  :-)


           In written English vowel combinations like the above are quite rare. 
I'm sure you don't miss a beat if you see words like "furious" or "courageous", 
however, because you know "ou" represents a single vowel sound... and since you 
live in Australia, I imagine you are familiar with [esp. UK] spellings of words 
such as "encyclopaedia", "gynaecology", "diarrhoea", and "foetid".  The "a" and 
"e" or "o" and "e" were smushed together in these words years ago, so one could 
easily figure out that they represented a single sound.  As a student I learned 
to duplicate the effect on a manual typewriter with some clever half-spacing... 
but, like you, I've been involved in Fidonet for +/- 25 years and that's not an 
option here.  The problem I have with these words nowadays is typing the vowels 
correctly, although I was once rather good at spelling... [wry grin].  WRT your 
comments, I recognize words in print which I've never heard anybody say aloud & 
I imagine many of our friends from SomePlace Else are in the same boat....  :-)




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
 * Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)

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