Latin alphabet uniting nations !

Guest   Tue Feb 07, 2006 2:15 am GMT
I pronounce ache: "akh-ee" with the Scottish "akh" [x] sound and "ee", to rhyme with Billy Ray Cyrus's: "achy breaky heart".
someone   Tue Feb 07, 2006 2:28 am GMT
you're giving me a head"akh-ee" !
Tom K.   Tue Feb 07, 2006 10:37 pm GMT
"But of course, the use of the Latin alphabet today in Turkish actually supports your point.

Ataturk quite deliberately imposed the Latin alphabet as one of his many measures to modernize Turkey and move it away from being an Islamic state to a secular republic. "

"And of course, Greek is not an exception either.

You've got it back to front: Cyrillic was developed from the Greek alphabet by St. Cyril and St. Methodias (two Greeks) to accommodate the different phonetics of the Slav languages. "

Good points. Perhaps a better exception would've been the aforementioned Romania, or perhaps Indonesia: the worlds most populous Muslim country, whose language uses the Latin alphabet.
Publius   Thu Nov 08, 2007 11:41 am GMT
> think of the insane "through" and "enough" spellings that don't make any sense!

There are lots of odd G's hiding in the middle of English words. Consider the word "sign". Crazy, right? Until you remember where it comes from, and then you can hear the G's: you must ignite your signal on a hill top, so it may be seen from afar.

The German word for "enough" is "genug", where you can hear both G's, though they do not sound the same. Similarly, German for "through" is "durch", which is pronounced like "dursh". Borrowing from all over does rather wreak chaos on any spelling rules.
Guest   Thu Nov 08, 2007 5:58 pm GMT
Publius: engl. sh = germ. sch! Durch is pronounced durch in Hochdeutsch. Yes, you also can hear ''dursch'', but it would be very very very familiar speach.
Lo   Fri Nov 09, 2007 5:57 pm GMT
I would just like to point out that countries that are Orthodox nowadays used to be Catholic, bear in mind that the Orthodox Church broke with the Catholic Church in the First Great Schism of 1054. I believe that those countries used the Cyrillic alphabet even when Catholicism was dominant in all of Europe.
Lo   Fri Nov 09, 2007 6:02 pm GMT
Moreover, I forgot to mention it my other post, Romanian is a language of Latin origin, being it descendant of Latin and Latin obviously using the Latin alphabet, it makes sense they don't write in Cyrillic.