Toledo

[ualarauans]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, macmaster at ... wrote:
>
> 
> Why couldn't they be borrowed in the way that modern English has 
borrowed
> words with sounds not found in it?  
ie., 'qat', 'hannukah', 'challah',
> 'sheikh', etc ...

But English doesn't pronounce these words exactly as they are 
pronounced in the donor languages. Their sounds are anyway adapted 
to the phonetic skills of English speakers. And besides, these loans 
were made into a worldwide spoken language with a millennium-long 
tradition of writing and opportunities to take the new words 
directly and to spell them after the existing conditional 
transliterations. E.g. you don't pronounce the second /h/ in 
Hanukkah? Just imagine what would have become of Hanukkah or sheikh 
in a language spoken mostly by illiterate peasants, like Vulgar 
Latin was, without a lasting intercourse with Hebrew resp. Arab 
speakers. Or what would be the result if English would have taken 
sheikh from a language which has no [sh] sound and substitutes it 
regularly with [s]. You'd have now *seikh.

BTW, does anyone know why they say Godzilla, not Godzira after the 
Japanese pronunciation (Japanese has no [l] sound)?

Ualarauans

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