[BRLTTY] Contraction error and patch: Rheingold

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Lee Maschmeyer on 2010/12/05 at 10:44 -0500]

>> I'm no authority, of course, but I completely disagree with using the "in" 
>> contraction here. The reason is that the "ei" combination makes a very specific 
>> sound in German, and, as I see it, that should take precedence.
>
>Could it be that you have ae and ei mixed up? ae is a diphthong, so in
>the name Furtwaengler we don't use the en sign. But I don't think
>there's any stricture on the ei sound. 

"ei" is most definitely a two-vowel single sound in German. It makes the 
English "long i" sound, as in "I" or "eye". It's not divisible.

Just to double-check my own thinking on this matter, I looked at our very own 
German contracition tabls. The one called de-kurzschrift, which essentially 
maps to what we call grade 2, has contractions for "ei", "in", and "ein", so 
that doesn't help us too much. However, the one called de-vollschrift, which 
essentially maps to what we call grade 1.5, does. It has contractions for 
sounds, and there most definitely is one for "ei".

>I don't know about German, but in English we do use the in sign after the e.

But that's because English doesn't have a contraction for "ei". When we write 
words from other languages, I think it best that we contract them in ways which 
respect the structures of those other languages.

>First I scanned my books for rhein spelled out and got zero hits. Then
>I scanned for it with the in sign. I got one line from a German song
>written in grade 2 English, which is an error I think. The rest are
>from only two different books and all but the first are for the name
>Rheinhart. But it does show that we can indeed use the in sign in this
>context:

It shows that braille transcribers have used it, but it doesn't, at least to 
me, make them right. They just might all be building on each others' errors.

Maybe German contracted braille readers could comment here. I rather suspect, 
though, that using the "in" contraction in the word or syllable "rhein" would 
look awful to them, unless, of course, they've become conditioned to how others 
commonly misunderstand their language's properties.

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