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Do you know what a doppelganger is? More accurately, how troubled should I be that many of my rabbinical school classmates a. don't know what a doppelganger is, and b. try to spell it as two words?
Just a thought from the insane place in my mind that is me trying to avoid exams...
Just a thought from the insane place in my mind that is me trying to avoid exams...
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Good luck on exams!
(FYI, if you're in a font or system in which it's unwieldy to include the umlaut, the convention is to replace |ä| with |ae|, not just |a|, so: doppelgaenger. Oh, look, Wikipedia says that your spelling is also an acceptable alternative in English. OK.)
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(And it's pretty clearly a German word. When in doubt, assume that a German noun is one word. I thought that was fairly well-known, too, if only as something to mock the Germans about.)
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On another note,
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:goes to figure out how to add accents on her computer:
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You would even ASK?!
MAC, of course!!
Chas veSHALOM I would never use a pc!!!!
;o)
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ë = ALT+0235
ï = ALT+0239
ö = ALT+0246
ü = ALT+0252
My fingers know these combinations by heart, except the ï (which hardly ever has a use in any language which I would be typing).
Is that an odd metaphor, for fingers to have a heart?
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The annoying bit is that I've so far only seen one "celebrity doppelgänger" posting in which the resemblance really is that good.
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The really close resemblance I noted is, in fact, between a friend and Lea Michele.
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Oh, you did not just do that.
I'll give you four stars out of five for the Kate Maberly photo. With Red it's more of a spiritual connection, I think.
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I so did just do that.
You didn't see the pigtail pic? I'm SO Red!!
And Kate Maberly, back when I had bangs, it was unCANNY.
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Also, just to be snarky, let me point out that there are no ümläuts in English. No accent marks of any kind. Granted, admittedly, I am a stickler for correct romanization of Japanese (ningyo にんぎょ and ningyô にんぎょう are different words with different meanings). But when it comes to words fully absorbed into the English language, I don't think there need to be diacritics. If you wouldn't italicize it as a foreign word, then it doesn't get diacritics IMHO.
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One of my goals before leaving NY is to go to Ellis Island and demand my umlaut back. I explained this to my mother, who not only didn’t get the joke but also disagreed with my assertion that they probably have boxes and boxes of them stored somewhere in the building.
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Also, I've been to Ellis Island several times, and while there were plenty of staff only areas I couldn't get into, I do think I may have once spied some staff members moving around suspicious looking boxes labeled "weird symbols." If I were you, I'd go and demand it back.
As long as we're on the subject, there's a scholar whose articles I often read named Kären Wigen. How is that supposed to be pronounced? How is it different from just plain old Karen?
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My first teach-yourself-Japanese book and CD set was in Kunrei-shiki and it drove me bonkers. Much prefer Modified Hepburn.
Still, there's a limit to how much trouble you can get into romanizing Japanese. I found Chinese romanization much more confusing my freshman year. Before my TA explained Wade-Giles and Pinyin, I read about Ssu Ma Ch'ien in one text book and Sima Qian in another with no clue they were the same guy. They seemed to be doing a heck of a lot of the same stuff...
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Also, I do firmly believe that whoever invented Wade-Giles (presumably two guys by the names of Wade and Giles) need to be shot. Sure, pinyin includes some bizarre things, like the Qi in Qian, and sure, Chinese has some truly bizarre sounds that can't really be expressed properly in English/Roman letters at all, but Ssu? Really? Pinyin looks so much cleaner and more straightforward. (Disclaimer: I've not yet studied Chinese, so if someone who better understands the pronunciation says Wade-Giles better represents the sounds, I'll believe them.)
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If you have plenty of time, a good dose of stubbornness, and a)someone to explain it to you, or b)a good understanding of IPA, Pinyin is much more precise. It has better diacritics for indicating tonality, and a nearly one-to-one correspondence for both consonants and vowels. Trouble is, there are way more than 5 vowel sounds, and the correspondences are idiosyncratic, and it's crazy-making to memorize all of them. That said, it's the closest we can get without actually learning Chinese.
There are also hefty political implications behind Pinyin and Wade-Giles, worse than behind Hepburn and Kunrei-shiki, if I am not mistaken.
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As far as I know, there aren't really any political implications behind Hepburn vs Kunrei... it's more of a linguistic and cultural thing. Hepburn is much better from an English speaker's point of view, as spellings like chi, tsu, and shi much better indicate to an English speaker how these sounds should be pronounced than ti, tu, and si. Kunrei, on the other hand, is preferred from the Japanese point of view, as it more cleanly follows the kana system, spelling out ta chi tsu te to (in Hepburn) as ta ti tu te to, without acknowledging, understanding, or caring one whit how counter-intuitive that is for anyone native to a Romance/Germanic language.
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There's also a convention, mostly disused today (though The New Yorker still employs it) of writing diaereses to avoid compound vowel confusions. To boot: coöperateinstead of cooperate, since the latter looks as if it ought to be pronounced KOO-pə-rate.
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