Weekly Edition
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Quotes of the week
No mum just the creator of Linux making my life hard on a Friday.
I'm sure Dad can find articles about it.
-- Dave
Airlie
Damn, this is complicated crap. The analagous task in real life
would be keeping a band of howler monkeys, each in their own tree,
singing in unison while the lead vocalist jumps from tree to tree,
and meanwhile, an unseen conductor keeps changing the tempo the
piece is played at. Thankfully, there are no key changes, however,
occasionally new trees sprout up at random and live ones fall over.
-- Zachary Amsden (thanks to Markus
Armbruster)
Overdesigning is a SIN. It's the archetypal example of what I call
"bad taste". I get really upset when a subsystem maintainer starts
overdesigning things.
-- Linus Torvalds
Or maybe he's talking about ye olde readlocke, used widely for OS
research throughout the middle ages. You still find that spelling
in some really old CS literature.
-- Linus Torvalds(Log in to post comments)
Quotes of the week Posted Dec 21, 2009 15:21 UTC (Mon) by mattmelton (subscriber, #34842) [Link]
Having dated a postgrad Anglo-Saxon English researcher (yes yes - an actual girl, and apparently there are Anglo-Saxon research departments in some universities!) I acquired an interesting bit of useless trivia about "Ye Olde"...
'Ye' is actually 'The', with the Y forming a Th-sound.
I presume there's no mention the dreaded 'readlocke' in medieval literature, but wouldn't that be damn cool if there was?
Quotes of the week Posted Dec 21, 2009 17:26 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] I didn't ever date a postgrad Anglo-Saxon English researcher, but the »Y« in »Ye Olde ...« should actually be spelled »þ«. This is another character altogether called a »thorn«, which is no longer used in English but lives on in Icelandic. The thorn-to-Y substitution happened during the 15th/16th centuries, when movable type became popular, because English printers liked to buy their fonts from Continental foundries. These would include »Y« but not »þ«. By that time the hand-written thorn had morphed into something more or less like a »Y« that was closed at the top, so it wasn't really a very big change.
Quotes of the week Posted Dec 26, 2009 0:33 UTC (Sat) by firefly (guest, #17760) [Link] The same thing happened to another letter, the yogh (Ȝȝ):http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogh It looked a bit like 'z' so that's what the printers decided to use. For example, the Scottish name MacKenzie was originally spelled MacKenȝie (/məˈkɛnji/).
Quotes of the week Posted Dec 24, 2009 19:57 UTC (Thu) by efexis (guest, #26355) [Link] "'Ye' is actually 'The', with the Y forming a Th-sound."As mentioned in other reply, the Y was just the closest looking glyph on the printing press to the thorn character as it was written at the time, and had the unvoiced 'th' sound (like 'thistle', as opposed to voiced like 'this'). Interesting another word which underwent this transformation and it stuck (ie, people started pronouncing it as a 'y' instead of keeping the 'th' sound) is the word 'you'... which was pronounced 'thou'! So the word 'you' is basically a typo :-) And people think that kids abbreviated texting is going to change the language like never seen before :-p
Quotes of the week Posted Dec 30, 2009 19:43 UTC (Wed) by siride (guest, #62756) [Link]
That's actually incorrect. "You" was the plural form (the accusative case
form, as it were -- the nominative being "ye") and "thou" was the singular. They were used in a similar fashion to "vous" vs. "tu" in French, after which the English system was modeled, but eventually the polite/formal form "you" took over and "thou" was restricted to religious contexts and now is just a literary archaism.
Quotes of the week Posted Jan 11, 2010 23:58 UTC (Mon) by efexis (guest, #26355) [Link]
Time goes back further than that, English didn't just begin with both those sets of words already in common useage.
From what I can gather, evidence is not quite as plenty as to be conclusive on the matter, with different folk having different theories and different bits to support them, some even seeming contradictory, which leads me to believe that not all who spoke English spoke it the same as all else :-)
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