On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 17:28:16 -0500, Peter T. Daniels
<grammatim@...> wrote:

> I am thinking of K. Paramasivan (he made us call him K.P., and even in
> his publications he never spelled out his first name), who called my
> language "Yinglish" and was a friend to "yeveryone." He was the first
> Tamil-speaker I knew (we started at Chicago at the same time), and I
> subsequently heard the same phenomenon in other Tamil-speakers.

My father's native language was Russian, and although as a scholar he had
a huge English vocabulary, he never learned a few details of English. My
sister, Elizabeth, was quite distressed when he called her "Yelizabeth".
(yElizabeth? :) ) In Russian, that name is "Yelizabeta", and many initial
e's seem to be "ye". Cyrillic Е seems to be much more common than Э,
although my knowledge of Russian is very scant.

(Btw, we adopted my mother's maiden name when the Cold war began; I never
changed back. When numerous Americans can't spell the names Murray and
Swain, because they are too difficult, and can't pronounce them correctly
when reading aloud, Bessaraboff (...ov, in modern translit.) is utterly
hopeless.)

Sorry to be so inactive; swamped with e-mail!

My regards to all,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath
Libranet GNU/Linux: No bit rot!
When will the first water skier cross the North Pole?