About Harmonics

What I would like to is how come those foreign dudes in the distant past used our English names like Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, instead of Abdul Mohammad?

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture, Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

It's an oyphemism, Oygene. If you're in Oyrope, I'll meet you at Oyston. Oy vay!!!

Not round here they don't- it rhymes with 'stern tube'. Pronounce 'plastic plant stand'.

Paul Burke

Ummm - I'm entirely lost now

Graham

Euler and Einstein are a few germans whose names are correctly pronounced in the anglosaxon world.

Euclid is a totally different animal linguistically, it is an english pronounciation of an ancient greek name.

--
 Roger J.

You expect historical accuracy in a 'holy' text ? ;-)

I assume you've seen 'Life of Brian' ?

Graham

No, actually what I wanted to hear was, "" :-)

This, I might take exception to - in the USA, I was taught that "alternative" is a noun. But that's a different topic. Then again, maybe not - the topic, upon reflection, is "About Harmonics." Which, I presume, in England (and probably other parts of the UK), is pronounced, "Hahmonics." ;-) Did you ever put a mic on a spectrum analyzer and tawk into it? ;-)

Someone sent me a .wav file from somewhere in the UK, indicating that 'ar' in English is pronounced the way we'd pronounce 'ah' in American. But in America, 'ar' is pronounced 'are'. (like the letter, 'R', which explanation probably doesn't help, since you presumably pronounce it, 'Ah'.) Except in Bahstan, wheya ya pahk yeh cah and go to the pahty. ;-) ) Anyway, the fellow pronounced the English 'arse', which presumably the reason it's spelled wrong is because it's pronounced 'ahss'.

But I ain't got no clarse. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

One of the things I wonder about is, howcome Romanji has so phew phonemes? ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Thanks, but I think the thing I was getting at is, why is it that in ASCII, "Oyler" is spelled "Euler," while "Yooclid" is spelled, "Euclid?" Do youse guys have yoocaliptus trees? ;-)

Oh, well. Uncle Al had too much medicine last night. (And to think, I yoosta win spelling contests!)

Thanks, Rich

Most written languages are using signs for sounds. The exceptions are languages which use pictures, signs, to mean words. They need a lot of signs in languages which have a sign for every word.

Ideally we should have one sound for every sign, and one sign for each sound. That would make it easy to learn for kids and foreigners.

English is not a well-behaved language in this respect. Most letters of the alphabet can be pronounced in different ways, and most sounds can be written in several different ways.

If we take the wowel in sir first girl hurled pearl herd, that sound can only be written in one way in swedish, (that is the O with two dots over it) but can be spelled in several different ways in english.

Now, to get back to your question, eu is usually pronounced yuu in english, it is pronounced oy in german, and ev in greek, I think.

Euler is correctly pronounced as Oyler, because it is a german name.

Euclid "Yooclid" is maybe correctly pronounced in english, but not in greek. And it has nothing to do with any german sounds or names.

We see a tendency in the world of correcting names which have been different in different languages. Like Peking has changed to Beijing.

--
 Roger J.

And Bombay is now Mumbai.

Graham

read "the cuckoos egg" by Clifford Stoll. Apparently the sky is blue because of a PhD thesis involving dipole moments.

Cheers Terry

ROTFLMAO!

Cheers Terry

Peking and Beijing are two different transliterations for the same Chinese characters (bei3 jing1 = Northern Capital). "Peking" isn't a standard transliteration under any of the common systems, it was a historic English spelling. "Beijing" brings it into conformity with the Pinyin system used in modern mainland China** and some other countries, and ISO (1979). The US dragged its feet for a couple of decades, with the Library of Congress only accepting it in 2000.

But "Peking" only became in need of correction when *they* changed their preferred system of romanization in China, and all the classification schemes used by libraries etc. therefore got into more and more trouble over the years.

OTOH, the *characters* never changed (well, since the mid-1400s, when the city got its current name) , although some foreigners insisted on using "Peiping" for many years after 1949 for political reasons (to denigrate the legitimacy of the mainland Chinese government they preferred to omit the "capital" part). (The simplified characters are the same as the traditional in this case.)

** Taiwan uses a 37-character phonetic alphabet called bopomofo (looks a bit like the simple Japanese katakana characters) to describe pronunciation, so its of little help to round-eyes wanting roman characters. Where English is used they have a mix of at least two schemes (Wade-Giles and, recently, their own version of Pinyin)

Things are even more confusing for the dialects such as Cantonese (spoken by many emigrants) or the colloquial Taiwanese subdialect of Fujianese, but it matters less, since the native speakers generally don't have any truck with such things anyhow.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
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Except Euclid would have pronounced it, perhaps, "Eyueclid" where "ue" represents the German umlauted u.

Paul Burke

I wonder how the people in Beijing pronounce the city's name.

When I was very young, 16-17, I lived in a university town, Uppsala, and I had a used book store across the street.

The owner was a legend in the town. He usually stood outside the shop in the summer. He had very old and dirty clothes, He stood there, fat and in a sloppy t-shirt, worn out wooden clogs, and talked to people, students, smoking on a stump of a cigar.

His friend who helped take care of the shop was his opposite, he was always correctly dressed as an english gentleman, in black suit and rounded hat. He was tall and thin and reminded me of an undertaker.

Anyway, I found a beginners course in chinese in the back rooms of the book shop, so I started learning chinese.

It had ep-records and text books etc.. so I only had to work through it.

I got bored after a short while and traded it in for a course on special relativity, but I learned some basics of the chinese language(s). That there are four different pronounciations for every word, and they mean totally different things, for example.

The only sign I remember from that course is the sign for man, it looks like an A without the horisontal part. Like a mans two legs. It is pronounced Ren, with a buzzing R, kind of.

--
 Roger J.

Interesting.

I wonder if electronic keyboards mimic this behaviour.

Graham

Modern keyboards usually have a variety of selectable tunings. By default its usually straight. This stretch tuning, is a bit bogus really. Sure, it might be done on real pianos, but in practice, it makes things out of tune when playing with other instruments.

Maybe the physical mechanics in the ear analyse frequency with similar end correction errors, such that the stretch tuning compensates for these errors, sending a net exact octave to the brain.

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture, Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

When I lived in the west and we had European visitors I always laughed at the way they pronounced "Yosemite".

To some extent, the closer they are, the funnier it is, because then they get the accents all wrong.

Tim.