Hard News: A Full Sense of Nationhood
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Stop it, Russell. I'm trying to beta test the kinder, gentler 50% less bitchy me, and you're making it difficult. :)
Oh you wascally wascal you
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Stop it, Russell. I'm trying to beta test the kinder, gentler 50% less bitchy me, and you're making it difficult. :)
I hear you can now purchase bitchiness offsets by being kind to children and animals, although the final shape of the Bitch Trading Scheme is yet to be determined.
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although the final shape of the Bitch Trading Scheme is yet to be determined.
There's a Cactus Kate joke in there somewhere....
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I hear you can now purchase bitchiness offsets by being kind to children and animals . . .
So that's why Farrar appears to cut 'baiter et al so much slack.
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For a more accessible treatment of what might have happened if the Nazarene cult had been squashed try Robert Silverberg's Roma Eterna.
Not exactly vintage Silverberg -- and 'fix-up' books of loosely linked short stories marketed as novels aren't exactly my cup of tea to start with --, but has it's point of interests. However, I was mildly surprised that the second story didn't attract more controversy. In A Hero of the Empire, it is the year 1370 (after the foundation of Rome, not the birth of Christ), and a minor nobleman is exiled to the arse end of the Eastern Empire where he has a most disquieting encounter with a charismatic young trader who has had a vision from the one true God -- a vision that, in time could constitue a threat to Rome itself.
I think you can guess where the story is set, who the antagonist is, and what his ultimate fate is?
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I think you can guess where the story is set, who the antagonist is, and what his ultimate fate is?
I'm going to say Tawa, Bruce Springsteen and becomes a realtor, settles down in a nice suburb with lots of upward potential.
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I was back stage watching Key with Buffy and Bimbo, both taller than he, and both with very big hair. Key was stiff, apprehensive at first, 'chatting' with them. Then went really apprehensive when Buffy&Bimbo exhorted him into a very simple dance routine to the tune of a remixed "Over the Rainbow".
For the first half of the song he was stiff and tried to look 'Prime Minister'-ly. As anyone would in that situation - you could read it on his face "Fuck - I'm the PM - gotta look prim, proper and respectful'.
Then amazingly, you could see him think - ahh fuck it. Let's get into it. Which he did. At that point, people really cheered - it became not a situation of it's the PM on stage with Buffy&Bimbo, but it's a straight white male who's game enough to give it a go.
And good on him for doing so.
Thanks for the behind-the-scenes insight. I can understand how he'd feel. I been to dozens and dozens of drag shows and would be apprehensive about being on stage with a couple of Divas, they've got the upper hand. But I'm really pleased to hear that he relaxed and enjoyed it as I'm sure were the crowd who have just as stronger claim on the PMs time as does any other group.
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At Foo Camp this Friday, I'm to perform the whaikorero on behalf of the manuhiri, in the whare at the college where it happens.
I don't intend to be one of those people who staggers through five minutes of bog Maori, so I'll express my respect in English. But I would like to greet in te reo, and know what I'm saying.
Anyone got a few good lines for a geek retreat? Mikaere?
Sure thing, glad to help. Where is Foo being held this year ?
It might be easier to take this offline. My email is mikaere[dot]curtis[at]gmail[dot]com.
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Sure thing, glad to help. Where is Foo being held this year ?
It might be easier to take this offline. My email is mikaere[dot]curtis[at]gmail[dot]comTa. Will do soon.
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TracyMac, those HTML macron codes are wonderful - thank you for making my life considerably easier.
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TracyMac, those HTML macron codes are wonderful - thank you for making my life considerably easier.
So. Geeky.
And yet, so good.
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don't know why so many university and govt web pages still seem to be incapable of getting it right
Just to descend into font geekery for a moment, there are a few reasons:
- web servers set up to serve iso-8859-1 by default (often a legacy of ancient times)
- templates for web pages that declare themselves as iso-8859-1 (often a legacy of ancient times)
- conversions from old documents that were written before fonts with support for macrons were in wide use
- document authors who are unaware of how to put a literal macron character into their document (most content authors in govt and uni, to their credit, are actual subject matter experts who don't have the training/assistance/other support to get typography right).
- old computers with old software being used to author content (more of them in govt and 3ary education than anywhere else)
- and the big one, lazy conversions from Microsoft Word. I am afraid the belief that Word is a suitable original format for a structured document is the taproot of a mighty tree of frustration. Word is a tarpit for documents; once they get into Word, they can never come out without needing a great deal of painstaking cleanup.
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I spent Waitaki Day with my mother - really good food
Oh come on, I thought we were over that stereotype.
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Just to descend into font geekery for a moment, there are a few reasons:
I could add another good one: Does it really matter? So long as the meaning is adequately conveyed, or can be easily found out, there's a lot to be said for just getting a document out, however many technical typos there are in it. I'd rather the functioning of government and academia wasn't held up by such concerns, considering how slow moving they already are.
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Does it really matter?
Well, BanWolson, I think it does for one.
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Mark, the BanWolson is a good example of an irrelevant typo since everyone will know what you meant. The rest of your sentence is ambiguous, despite being grammatically perfectly formed. So you've given the perfect example of exactly where pedantry can go wrong. I presume that was your intention?
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Pretty much.
However, I know a few people who will get pretty shirty if you consistently get their name wrong but tell them it doesn't matter because everyone knew what you meant.
With Te Reo, the macron indicates pronunciation (in non-macron capable systems, you might see a double vowel used instead) and the presence or absence of a macron may change the meaning of a word or proper name.
It's not pedantry to respect how a language is transcribed. The path you describe leads to ignorance and disrespect of any culture or language.
What holds up papers in government and academia is less a matter of typography as it is a function of "consultation" and peer review of content.
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"technical typos"
It's not technical typos - it's correct spelling. A reasonable standard of spelling is usually considered a minimum requirement in an official publication, not a nice to have. You could argue that spelling doesn't really matter either, but most people feel that when authority and credibility are at stake, spelling is important.
English is actually pretty unusual in not having any diacritic marks, but in most other languages with a Latin alphabet they really make a difference, and misusing them makes you look illiterate.
If it comes to that, those diacritics are somewhat (though not wholly) consistent. An umlaut definitely suggests a rounded vowel if you know any European language that uses them. Totally wrong for Maori.
There are also considerations of search and discovery - if people follow correct orthography, then their words are easy to find.
Also, what Mark said.
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I am afraid the belief that Word is a suitable original format for a structured document is the taproot of a mighty tree of frustration. Word is a tarpit for documents; once they get into Word, they can never come out without needing a great deal of painstaking cleanup.
Amen. Create a document in Word for Mac. After saving, run Word's own arcane 'compatibility check'. Mail document to a Windows user. Something's sure to be screwy about at least the formatting when - or if - they can open it.
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It's not pedantry to respect how a language is transcribed. The path you describe leads to ignorance and disrespect of any culture or language.
Except, of course, the increasingly large culture and language of all the people who couldn't give a shit about typos, and just want the content.
As I thought I pointed out above, if the meaning is clear, then the macron can't matter. If it does matter, the meaning is not clear, and it moves to being an important typo. "Maori" is a good example. You can put all the macrons and extra a's you like in there, but it won't add or subtract from the meaning which everyone already knows.
I speak German, and frequently carry on work discussions with German clients in German, often on Skype. I've never once been pulled up on leaving out an umlaut (despite knowing that the word actually has an umlaut) because from the context it's clear what I meant. No customer or colleague has ever wasted their own time or mine picking me up on something so damned unimportant. And picking them up if they have made some pissly mistake in English is a surefire way to piss them off and discourage their use of my language.
I'm not suggesting that no proofreading is ever needed. I proofread almost everything I write. What I am saying is that I have little time for anyone who insists on not being able to use a document because of pedantic details, or insists on being insulted by them, or even uses them as a reason to dispute something in the document.
I frequently do minor edits in Wikipedia, to clarify things that are written without proofreading, or by people who don't speak good English. But what I'm doing is mere housework. They are the people who made Wikipedia. It would never have got anywhere near its current size if every edit had to have a subeditor proofreading it. Proofreading is a good thing to do, but it should not be a show-stopper. That is a path to full scale time wasting.
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An umlaut definitely suggests a rounded vowel if you know any European language that uses them. Totally wrong for Maori.
Really? I should have thought a diaeresis would suggest the non-dipthong nature of a vowel following another, as it does in English and French generally.
More to the point, an umlaut/diaeresis is better than nothing, and probably an improvement on doubled vowels. Macrons would be best, but the rule is arbitrary, so as long as consistency is maintained it is unlikely to harm legibility. (Which is to say, where it differs from `BanWilson', unless you propose the universal substitution of `a' for `e'.)
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More to the point, an umlaut/diaeresis is better than nothing, and probably an improvement on doubled vowels.
No. This is not correct. An umlaut has no value in Māori. The only reason you see umlauts used in Māori text is because Reddfish cobbled up some fonts back in the 90's by taking ISO 8859 versions of Arial et al , determined that nobody much used the diaeresis in English (which was pretty naïve of them really), and so replaced the glyphs for the umlauted vowels (but not the encoding, because you can't just make up your own ISO standards, unless you're Microsoft) with vowels with macrons on them, and then sold them holus bolus into Government agencies.
This was okay for printed documents, but as you start exchanging documents electronically with people who don't have the particular font you used, what they see is the ISO 8859 character rendered by their system as the character with the umlaut.
Theoretically, Unicode solves this issue but, in practice, most people don't know how to set their systems up for Unicode, even now.
(Note for the pedantic - I've used "umlaut" and "diaeresis" interchangeably in this post because we are talking about the cosmetic effect and because fonts display them the same way. I am well aware they are not the same thing)
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No. This is not correct. An umlaut has no value in Māori.
Depends on the purpose. If anyone reading it interprets it as whatever that line over the a is called, then they read it right, by the almost 99% certain intention of the author. They will both understand it, and be able to say it correctly if they are trained in the subtle differences in Maori vowel pronunciations. Well, to be honest, they will say it in a way that will make some tribal elders happy and other ones furious, since the whole insistence on 'correct' spellings and pronunciations of a language that was never written, and was spoken in many different ways, is a form of language-fascism that tries to kill off other modes of communication. And it fails for any living language. Only on dead languages can such pointless stickling make sense, because it is talking about what may have been correct at some other time than now. What is correct now is whatever people who are using the language continually are doing, and if that rides roughshod over every convention ever invented by earnest teams of scholars, that's too bad for them. I have no qualms about using American spelling all the time, despite it being 'technically' incorrect anywhere but America, simply because I actually like the way they have simplified things. Does anyone notice? Only pedants. Everyone else reads the words for their meaning, and passes over the missing letters without noticing.
Is Maori a dead language? Or do people actually want it to be used? Any time you have a language which is not allowed to be used without someone correcting you on irrelevant details, you have a language that no one will want to use.
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Funnily enough, Ben, it's the people using the language who insist on it being used properly. But you go ahead and do what you want.
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But, please, explain to me why, anytime someone asks you to do something you think is pointless, it's fascism.
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