[Scribus] How to pronounce Scribus

Wesley T Allen wezlo
Sun Mar 18 00:35:05 CET 2007


On Saturday 17 March 2007 3:46 pm, Maciej Hanski wrote:
> John Jason Jordan napisał(a):
> ---snip---
>
> > Everyone knows that English orthography
> > went into the dumper after the Great Vowel Shift of the 1600s, and has
> > been there ever since. We're 400 years late for spelling reform. We're
> > so past due I'm surprised the rest of the world hasn't foreclosed and
> > evicted us from the planet.
> >
> :) This is most interesting and I like your narrative style, I didn't
>
> know of the English Great Vowel Shift, I only knew German speakers had
> managed to shift their vowels too (apart from some resistant Alemanni
> people), but caution, spelling reforms are very controversial, this is
> what German speaking countries did to their children and us, foreign
> German speakers, throwing us back into illiteracy after years of learning:)

That's alright, we're already illiterate.


>
> > Re how it otter be pronounced in English:
> > (In the following all vowels in [] have the values of the International
> > Phonetic Alphabet. If some of the characters are not appearing
> > correctly you may have to set your e-mail client to use UTF-8 and a
> > font containing IPA characters.)
> > Before the Great Vowel Shift i was pronounced [i]. After the Great
> > Vowel Shift it had fallen and diphongized so it is now pronounced [aj],
> > [ɑj] or [ǝj], depending on your dialect. However, this occurred only
> > when the syllable was stressed, and this was most common when the vowel
> > in the following syllable was (originally) [ǝ], which at that time was
> > usually spelled e. Thus before the Great Vowel Shift "scribe" was
> > pronounced [skrib], the final [ǝ] having been lost earlier during the
> > Middle English period. (From rhymes in Chaucer we know that pronouncing
> > the final [ǝ] was already optional in his time.) After the Great Vowel
> > Shift it had become [skrajb] or [skrɑjb] (the dialectal variant [ǝj]
> > occurs only before voiceless stops).
> >
> > The problem with "Scribus" is that the vowel of the second syllable is
> > not silent as it is in "scribe." If it were the i should be pronounced
> > [aj] or [É‘j], depending on the speaker's dialect. That the e is not
> > silent means that the i must be pronounced [ɪ] or [i]. However, we
> > generally use the [i] pronunciation only for words that have been
> > borrowed recently. Thus, I can just about guarantee you that if you put
> > the word "Scribus" in front of a hundred native English speakers and
> > ask them how to pronounce it, the response will be overwhelmingly
> > [skrɪbǝs], with a few choosing [skrajbǝs].
>
> Wow, thank you, I learned a lot from these explanations. And you are my
> hero, since you obviously did find a way to type IPA characters with
> your keyboard -- I gave up before even trying.
>
> M.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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