Learn to pluralize
Learn to pluralize
Posted Jun 3, 2008 22:19 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769)Parent article: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 - 1-Year End Of Life Notice
One erratum, two errata.
Posted Jun 3, 2008 22:37 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (13 responses)
Posted Jun 3, 2008 23:16 UTC (Tue)
by pr1268 (guest, #24648)
[Link] (12 responses)
This one bothers me the most: one agendum, two agenda. Even as I type this, Firefox's (2.0.0.14) "spell checker" thinks agendum is misspelled (and recommends corrigendum as a replacement!). Then again, I'm usually more irritated at others' misuse of its/it's and there/their/they're, so oh well...
Posted Jun 3, 2008 23:46 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Posted Jun 3, 2008 23:52 UTC (Tue)
by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)
[Link] (10 responses)
Posted Jun 3, 2008 23:58 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Jun 4, 2008 2:52 UTC (Wed)
by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
[Link] (2 responses)
AFAIU, in China there are lots of different languages (not dialects!) spoken. This is not a case of "dialects drifted apart", the (official) language is... just the official one.
Posted Jun 4, 2008 7:37 UTC (Wed)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Posted Jun 4, 2008 15:53 UTC (Wed)
by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
[Link]
Posted Jun 4, 2008 6:47 UTC (Wed)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link]
'Phonetic spelling' just means there is a univocal correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, but this correspondence doesn't have to be immutable: it can change throughout the globe. In Spanish we have more-or-less phonetic spelling, even though there are some 400 million native speakers in tens of countries, and it works. Actually, given that modern Spanish has mostly lost a few phonemes ('v' and 'b' are now the same, 'h' is silent, and 'll' is only pronounced in small areas of Castilla), I wish we went a little bit further along this way. Schoolboys and schoolmasters would be so grateful.
A bigger problem IMHO is that Latin was not a particularly rich language, what with 26 phonemes; some languages have 80+. Correspondingly, the Latin alphabet is quite poor. Trying to represent 9+ vowels with 5 signs is going to be difficult: witness the crazy patterns of accents and circumflexes in modern French. And consonants are even worse. But I agree with Steve, a bit of adaptation might go a long way.
Posted Jun 4, 2008 2:23 UTC (Wed)
by pr1268 (guest, #24648)
[Link] (1 responses)
If it were code, we'd be demanding a cleanup. Such a "code cleanup" has occurred before in history; consider the work done by Noah Webster. Interestingly, his work was aimed at standardizing spelling and pronunciation of American English--both which varied substantially amongst the different geographic regions of the United States in the early 1800s (and still do to a lesser extent nowadays). Ironic that I use the word standardizing; changing the 's' to a 'z' was one of Webster's "fixes".
Posted Jun 4, 2008 7:35 UTC (Wed)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Posted Jun 4, 2008 3:48 UTC (Wed)
by jabby (guest, #2648)
[Link]
Posted Jun 5, 2008 8:50 UTC (Thu)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link]
Posted Jun 5, 2008 19:18 UTC (Thu)
by clugstj (subscriber, #4020)
[Link]
Learn to pluralize
"We have now been told correct datas and rethought our criterias," said a
spokesman. "There will be no more such erratas."
-- from _Heliograph_, 1993, reported in Langford, _You Do It With
Mirrors_
Learn to pluralize
I suspect that (rather ugly and non-English) singular/plural form is even
deader than hacker. Burchfield says (in Fowler) (citations elided)
Learn to pluralize
agenda. 1 The essential plurality of this word (= things to be
done) has become virtually extinct. Its dominant sense now is 'a list of
items to be considered at a meeting, etc.' [...] and it has produced a
plural in -s [...]. The former singular form agendum (i.e.
just one item to be discussed) is used principally in the out-of-term
meetings of Oxbridge governing bodies and other such admirable
institutions
[...].
For what it's worth, in thirty-plus years in the Home Counties I have
encountered not a single use of 'agendum', but then I didn't go to
Oxbridge...
Learn to pluralize
It's really time for all that crap to be dumped from the language in favor of consistency.
Ditto for non-phonetic spelling. Only arrogance has caused us to retain all these weird
plurals, unfathomable irregular verbs, and other inconsistent crap. Yes, I'm also in favor we
in the US biting the bullet and actually moving to SI measurements instead of just kinda sorta
pretending to a little. It's funny how shunning a bizarre and inconsistent system of
measurement and feeling comfortable with SI units is considered 'leet'... and using bizarre
and inconsistent pluralization is also considered 'leet'.
I'm a native English speaker. And even I see what a mess our language is. If it were code,
we'd be demanding a cleanup.
Learn to pluralize
Phonetic spelling is a catastrophically bad idea for any language spoken
outside a very restricted set of speakers, especially for a language as
popular as English. Why? Because what's phonetic spelling for you is not
phonetic spelling for a speaker who learned in Bangalore, or Perth, or,
gods forbid, Glasgow. Go phonetic and suddenly nobody outside your local
area spells the same way you do, and *still* virtually nothing you read
makes phonetic sense (to you).
In the end I'd almost expect English to do what Chinese has done (although
this might take a prolonged period of restricted global travel, so the
post-petroleum era). Already we've got nearly-mutually-incomprehensible
accents: given enough time and enough purely-written communication and you
end up with multiple mutually incomprehensible languages sharing only a
grammar and a writing system.
Chinese?
Chinese?
Yes, but they share a written form. They're mutually unintelligible, but
only when *spoken*.
Chinese?
The difference between a dialect and a language is like the difference between a sub-species
and a full-blown species, it's a matter of degree and always arguable.
"A language is a dialect with an Army and a Navy" is such a famous comment on this that it's
got a whole Wikipedia page devoted to it.
(All the below is based on book learning, I can't speak Chinese, and I don't know any actual
native Chinese speaking people well enough to interrogate them as to its accuracy, so caveat
emptor...)
The various Chinese "languages" today are closely related, and are all descended from Old
Chinese, just as today's English dialects are all descended from Old English, a language we
cannot understand today.
Indeed, although the written Chinese of a Wu speaker (from say, Shanghai) is not mutually
unintelligible with that of a Mandarin speaker (from say Beijing) as their speech would be,
they are certainly different and a native Chinese scholar would probably be able to tell you
whether an informal written note was written by a Wu speaker, it should be a much bigger
difference than you'd notice by the excess Zs in an American's writing, or the various
superfluous vowels in writing by an Englishman.
That is a bit of an exaggeration. Sure, the use of certain vowels (and even diphtongs) is not consistent across the whole English world, and there are some consonants which tend to vary a lot (the glottal stop is just a particularly surprising example, changing the 't' for a pause). But in no country is the 'k' in 'know' pronounced (and if so, it's time to drop it :). Likewise with most phonemes. IIRC Bryson says in "Mother tongue" that there are some 60-odd words pronounced the same as 'air', and that is not pretty.
Phonetic spelling
Learn to pluralize
Learn to pluralize
No it wasn't: z predates s, and Webster had nothing to do with it :) he
*did* zap the u in words like `colour', though.
For anyone interested in languages and words, I highly recommend "The Power of Babel" by John McWhorter.
language evolution
Learn to pluralize
It's really time for all that crap to be dumped from the language in favor of consistency.
Good idea - then you have one erratum, two erratums. Like one museum, two museums. I have no problem with that. But if you're going to try to be clever and use the plural in -a, at least get it right.
Language Purists
We entered the software field because we can create our own nice, neat, consistent reality
there. The real world isn't like that, get used to it. The English language is a hack of the
worst kind, but it works!