On 20 Jan, 16:21, Sam Wilson wrote:
In article
,

*MIG wrote:
On 20 Jan, 10:35, Peter Beale wrote:
Peter Beale wrote:

* Êdimbourg or Pêkin

Sorry - Édimbourg or Pékin - I need to retype my list of ALT + numbers
in a larger font, the eyes aren't as good as they were! And yes, I do
know that accents are not essential on capitals.

Peter Beale

Why insert a letter m for the French? *That's more likely to appear in
English pronunciation. *In French, the sound before the b is a nasal
vowel, with the lips not closing till the b.

Because that's the way the French spell it. *They'd pronounce it pretty
much the same way whether there was an 'm' or an 'n'. *(One of) the
local phonetic spellings is Embra.

Well, I'd never seen it spelt that way. I'll take your word for it.
In such words, the presence of m or n is just a sign that it's a nasal
vowel, and it makes no difference to the pronunciation, eg "temps" is
pronounced the same as "tant".