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I grew up on a street named after him, but I had no idea who he was until now. Fascinating.
I’m rather surprised he might not be not better known here. Kropotkin is a major figure of anarchism that you’ll found revered even in some Russel's books. Surely hackernews readership red all Russel works — both color, didn’t it? Don’t you search for a Wikipedia biography each time you cross an antonomastic street, creating it if needed?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually like it, it's a great idea. You wouldn't be surprised if you saw words like Köln or Malmö (or even Malmø) in an English text, right, so how is this different?
Well it’s different as in this case it’s translated from a Cyrillic alphabet. Also, I would be surprised to read Köln in English as an English name exists for the city: Cologne.
I grew up on a street named after him, but I had no idea who he was until now. Fascinating.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually like it, it's a great idea. You wouldn't be surprised if you saw words like Köln or Malmö (or even Malmø) in an English text, right, so how is this different?
It's different because in English, a diacritic of two dots (diaeresis) is used to show that a vowel is pronounced separately from the vowel that came before it, not as a mix. Naïve is one example, where it is pronounced na-ive, not nive. That said, I also like it, but it means something different here.
You've correctly defined diaeresis, but it's not actually used in English except in articles that get published in The New Yorker. There is a reason the common English name for the diacritic is "umlaut".
The normal use in English is to show that a word comes from German. There are some old relics like naïve (commonly spelled naive, now) and Laocoön (again, now usually spelled Laocoon). To the best of my knowledge a diaeresis has never been applied to the name "Menelaus" even though it "needs" one just as badly as Laocoon does.
> Naïve is one example, where it is pronounced na-ive, not nive.
The diaeresis there really just shows you that the word is borrowed from French, where it has a diaeresis for internal French reasons. (Because, again, English spelling does not include the concept of diaeresis.) It certainly doesn't tell you not to pronounce the word as "nive" (I assume you're referring to the PRICE vowel) -- the ordinary reading of the written vowel sequence "ai" would use the FACE vowel, as in plain, main, strain, vain, tail, wail, pail, sail, mail, plaice, taint, and waive.
Note that the Russian letter Ё does not feature a diacritic - the two dots are an integral part of the letter, and it is not related to the visually similar Russian letter E. As noted upthread, it is the iotified form of the letter O. (Russian has five or six non-reduced vowels, but for historical reasons the Russian alphabet has eleven vowels, including a / e / i / o / u plus ya / ye / y / yo / yu.)
I grew up on a street named after him, but I had no idea who he was until now. Fascinating.
I’m rather surprised he might not be not better known here. Kropotkin is a major figure of anarchism that you’ll found revered even in some Russel's books. Surely hackernews readership red all Russel works — both color, didn’t it? Don’t you search for a Wikipedia biography each time you cross an antonomastic street, creating it if needed?
I grew up on a street named after him, but I had no idea who he was until now. Fascinating.
I’m rather surprised he might not be not better known here. Kropotkin is a major figure of anarchism that you’ll found revered even in some Russel's books. Surely hackernews readership red all Russel works — both color, didn’t it? Don’t you search for a Wikipedia biography each time you cross an antonomastic street, creating it if needed?
We have a square named after indian city of Bangalore - the Bangalore square. I was sure for a long time that's just another (jewish?) surname. Even though I knew that city, in context of street names I simply assume surnames, it didn't occur to me to think anything else.
It's really weird seeing letter ё in English language title. I'd rather spell his name as "Pyotr Kropotkin" or even "Peter Kropotkin", following a commong convention to spell Russian tzar Pyotr Romanov's as Peter.
I actually like it, it's a great idea. You wouldn't be surprised if you saw words like Köln or Malmö (or even Malmø) in an English text, right, so how is this different?
If you’re going to use Ë just because it looks the same as the original Cyrillic, then logically you’d also use P instead of R, X instead of Kh, etc.
It's very readable and quite interesting. It aimed to have a veneer of science, when the science of animals and nature was still fairly undeveloped; and it succeeded in a sense, because its observations are still held in regard, but I think it succeeded much better as a work of philosophy.
In any case, it suffers a little for what I think is the naive thesis of "if only mankind could cooperate like the animals do, we would live in a utopia." Of course, mankind has demonstrated through thousands of years of history that tribes of men can't really cooperate in any grand sense, so the point seems rather moot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually like it, it's a great idea. You wouldn't be surprised if you saw words like Köln or Malmö (or even Malmø) in an English text, right, so how is this different?
Well it’s different as in this case it’s translated from a Cyrillic alphabet. Also, I would be surprised to read Köln in English as an English name exists for the city: Cologne.
This is wrong on so many levels...