[Sca-cooks] Wine names

[Laura C. Minnick]

At 12:02 AM 6/25/02 -0400, you wrote:
>
>> Why, particularly, do you think that Americans should be able to pronounce
>a
>> word they rarely, if ever hear?  If it is not spelled in American English
>> the way it is pronounced, why do you think it should be obvious and
>required
>> to pronounce it as some other language does?
>
>
><< is is common knowledge that if you say any american word loud enough and
>often enough any of them forginers should be able to understand it. Vice
>versa if you have any forgien word on a bottle of wine it must be good
>wine:)

You know, I live with Regina, and I can tell you the attitude implied here
is not the case. Not to mention that she lived for years abroad and has
never behaved that way as long as I've known her. (and the guard hairs go up!)

>I gues the best reasonis that if your going to drink wines that orginate in
>different countries you could at least learn enough of the language to
>pronunce the name correctly:) Even a small education in forgein languages
>permits youto proonounce the name of most things correctly. Or is that
>considered a cosmoplotian attitude?
>
>ELric

Nice theory, but it does require that you know the origins and/or context
of the word. It shows up on labels here as 'shiraz'. No clue where the word
came from. The wines are usually Australian. Would you care to educate me
in Australian? Is it an inflected language? Is it Indo-European?  Germanic
or Romance? Surely not- maybe related to one of the language groups in
Indonesia? ;-D) ;-D)

Just looking at the word, not knowing it was a wine, I would guess it was
maybe... Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, maybe from one of the many 'i-stan'
countries in Central Asia.

I don't know much about forgein ;-) languages, but what I know of Latin,
several forms of French and English, a little Italian, teeny Spanish, and a
sliver of German due to OE studies- was of absolutely no help whatsoever here.

But a spell-checker might. ;-D

'Lainie
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