RE: China

[C C Magnus Gustavsson <mag@lysator.liu.se>]

On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Andrew Draper wrote:

> do all languages which use u-umlaut
> pronounce it as "ue"?

No. On the contrary, I don't know about a single language that pronounce
u-umlaut as "ue".

Swedish and German pronounce u-umlaut as "y" in "very" but with a longer
sound (although Swedish normally uses "y" for that sound). I can't think
of any english word that uses the exact same sound. A better example is
a-umlaut, pronounced as "a" in "mad" or "sad", while "a" is pronounced
as "a" in "bar" or "hard" (in Swedish as well as German).

Anyway, u-umlaut should *not* be considered equivalent to "ue". Period. 
Forget that you ever heard about it. It's not language dependent. It
doesn't have any anything at all to do with languages or pronounciation.

It just a sort of "encoding convention" for ASCII, like QP. Nothing more.
The only reason that "ae" is used for a-umlaut rather than just "a" is
to avoid conflicts with other words. In Swedish, for example, "bar" is a
word but there are no words with "ae", i e "baer".

/Magnus