Posts by linger
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to HORansome,
in my role as a teacher of critical thinking,
If we're trading roles, I'm a corpus linguist with published papers describing observed spelling variation in New Zealand English. As I've stated from the beginning, the macron (or some close functional equivalent where the macron is not easily used) is vital within te reo Māori (which is the limit of the Māori Language Commission's purview). Within English, I would go so far personally as to agree that diacritic markers are "nice to have"; but as a linguist, I have to say my own research findings show that they are actually used only occasionally, and therefore cannot be said to be generally enforced -- so any pronouncement about "spelling errors" under such conditions is, at best, unsupported by data.
It astounds me that you seem to think data about actual edited published writing is irrelevant to this question. -
Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Tom Beard,
Yes; that's what I meant by "official support" above.
I don't think we actually disagree here; if you're in a computer environment that allows it, and if you need to distinguish different words in te reo Māori, then the macron is the recommended solution. In other computer environments, then, as you've stated, other workarounds may be necessary (given that if you're using te reo Māori, you still really do need to mark length somehow). -
a café is different from a cafe
, through meaning evolution and/or cultural appropriation.
But I’d also note that the meaning used in English of “person belonging to an ethnic group distinct from European settlers and indigenous to Aotearoa/New Zealand” was not the original meaning of the source word within te reo (= ’normal’). *shrug*(Though I take the point – there is an argument to make about whether the cultural appropriation [as signalled by the loss of diacritics] is appropriate.)
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to HORansome,
you keep misspelling “Māori.” The macron is not optional.
Nah. On two grounds.
(i) if you’ve borrowed the word into English, then you’re under no obligation to keep the macron; this is consistent with the disappearance of accent marks on French borrowings such as deja vu .
(ii) even within te reo, you are under no obligation to use a macron per se – though you should mark vowel length in some agreed way; and the macron has official support.
(The alternative Maaori is also available, though not as good a choice linguistically; or we could use other markers such as Ma:ori.) -
Whatever they're doing, they should be running it past ordinary punters for feedback before releasing it. That should at least remove the clunkers. The more worrying aspect is the complete lack of non-clunkers so far.
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A uniformed officer has been posted to the position of Deputy Director Corporate and Ministerial Services
I don't hold out much hope that that isn't simply a typo and they're continuing to delay by other means, i.e. appointing an uninformed officer.
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marketing of course is basically making stuff up for a living
...and so many of our MPs are basically making stuff-ups for a living.
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good grief, is Hone trying not to get elected?
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You know, that poster template is a seriously bad design FAIL.
It is not at all clear whether voting for Labour is supposed to correspond to ticking both boxes, or only the last one.
When a party’s PR machine can’t even get a two-option multiple choice question right, you gotta wonder what they’re being paid for.
We’d be better off hacking National's earlier red/blue contrast design again (and the greater clarity of that design itself speaks volumes). -
We haven’t even started talking about dicks yet!
[Except in the context of masturbation, as noted already...]
We can't have that kind of sloppiness here
But we can have many contributors describing in loving detail why they're sticking to their chosen seats.