Spoiler = ? ppl =?

Ppl is one of those "text-speak" abbrieviated words, and it stands for people. A spoiler is an account of a book, or a motion picture or a television program which tells the reader what will happen, what the denouement will be.

I don't read (or care to learn to read) the pronunciation symbols you've used. Denouement, according to Dictionary-dot-com, is pronounced ˌdeɪnuˈmɑ̃ in the international phonetic alphabet. French is pronounced so little like English, that i mistrust the attempt to use any English equivalent to show the pronunciation. For example, in languages such as English and German, "hard" consonants such as "d" are explosive. No consonant in French is explosive. So it is unlikely that you'll get the "d" right from a transcription of a phonetic alphabet.

Noeud is the French word for "knot." The word means the "un-tying" or the unravelling, and refers to the part of a literary work where all is revealed, where the truth comes out.

2) Knot means "un-tying"? I didn't get it (it seems the opposite is true).

oristarA wrote:

2) Knot means "un-tying"? I didn't get it (it seems the opposite is true).

Obviously you didn't get it. The word under discussion is denouement. It derives from the French word for knot. As it appears necessary . . .

noeud = knot
nouer = to tie
dénouer = to untie
dénouement = the untying, the unravelling

Technically, i suppose that in English, the word should be written dénouement, with the acute accent over the first "e."

French is pronounced so little like English, that i mistrust the attempt to use any English equivalent to show the pronunciation.

Quote:

French is pronounced so little like English, that i mistrust the attempt to use any English equivalent to show the pronunciation.

Ori didn't ask about the French pronunciation. He asked about the English pronunciation. They likely are different in some respect but that should come as any surprise because French has a different sound system than English.

Had he required the French pronunciation, looking to you would be a waste of his time.

Nothing is wrong with Setanta.

Quote:

Nothing is wrong with Setanta.

Many beg to differ.

But that's not as important as, Setanta often wrongly describes how English works. He's got some pretty nutty ideas about language.

There Are No Postmodernists In a Foxhole

Geoff Nunberg
Commentary broadcast on "Fresh Air," August 20, 2002

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/fish.html

Like a lot of my favorite stories, this one begins with a pronoun, this from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that quoted Harvard President Lawrence Summers in an interview saying, "I regret any faculty member leaving a conversation feeling they are not respected"

The sentence was tailor-made to bundle puristic panties, particularly given the context and speaker -- and in fact a few weeks later, the Chronicle ran an extensive diatribe from a professor of English who took exception to Summers' grammar. According to the writer, Summers should have said "I regret any faculty member's leaving," not "any faculty member leaving." And the antecedent "any faculty member" required the pronouns "he or she," not "they," (Modern academics are particularly attached to the "he or she" construction, which enables them to sound politically correct and pedantic in the same breath.)

The professor went on to chide President Summers for contributing to the general decline of precision in language -- all the more distressing in someone who has presented himself as a crusader for scholarly rigor. Indeed, he said, the woeful state of the language is evident to anyone who listens to National Public Radio for 15 minutes or reads a single section of The New York Times. That's what happens when students are taught that writing is a form of pure self-expression, so that students "need never accept correction; for if it is their precious little selves they are expressing, the language of expression is answerable only to the internal judgment of those same selves." We've come to the point, the writer said, where composition teachers have a horror of acting as language police and grammar itself is regarded as a form of reactionary tyranny.

The response went on in this vein for a full 1750 words, and concluded with an insistence that all college composition courses should henceforth teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. In short, it was an utterly routine grammatical harangue, distinguished only by the speciousness of the occasion for it. For example, that business about having to use the possessive "any member's leaving" instead of "any member leaving" is one of those mindless superstitions that have been passed on to generations of schoolchildren at the end of Sister Petra's ruler. As the linguist Geoff Pullum pointed out in a letter to the Chronicle, if you really believed the construction was incorrect, you'd have to take a red pencil to Shakespeare, Milton, Jane Austen, and most of the other great figures of English literature. And as for the plural pronoun they, bear in mind that Summers' words were quoted from a spoken interview, and that everybody uses the plural that way in their informal speech.

Had he required the French pronunciation, looking to you would be a waste of his time.

I believe the "once again" portion of my comment covers off my general view of your posts.

loathe to admit it.