Posts by Stephen Judd
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
to sail around the whole world you need maps
But you don't need literacy.
In fact stick charts are mnemonic aids for an oral culture that work very well for navigating long distances.
How ironic to hear someone presumaly educated in NZ, at one of the vertices of the Polynesian triangle, bang on about the inadequacy of oral culture mnemonic techniques for navigation.
-
bonking people that you mostly romanced over a computer network
Back when there was a bit more stigma attached, I learned to say happily "We met the old-fashioned way - on the Internet!" Somehow that dispersed the opprobrium.
-
It's totally plausible to me that in 100 years or so we could have a fairly standard written English, and an artifical spoken English for entertainment, but a lot of local varieties that are mutually incomprehensible. That's pretty much the situation for Arabic, and it's what happened to Latin too. The original language doesn't fall out of use or change much, but in different domains dialects or whole new languages take over.
(I am re-reading Nicholas Ostler's "Biography of Latin" again so this stuff is fresh in my mind).
-
For some franchisees that are close to the wall now, it could be the thing that tips them over.
And who hasn't noticed how cheap pizza is compared to days of yore? How many extra $$$ does this represent to a pizza joint wage bill? Wouldn't an extra 50c per pizza more than cover it?
-
"Has the difference between it's and its been abolished somehow?"
No. I was more thinking of the fact that we haven't had much of a genitive case in English since mediaeval times, and that it must be about 500 years since anyone noticed a missing vowel in the possessives that currently require an apostrophe.
I'm sure there are sentences with its/it's where the apostrophe disambiguates them, but I'm buggered if I can think of one right now.
-
Id be happy to see apostrophes die. Theyre a relic of grammatical forms that dont exist any more and in English at least, their raison d'etre is long gone.
I do write well-formed SMS messages where possible. Having a Treo with an alpha keyboard makes this much easier :)
-
Paul: the original context, I think, was B Jones' innocent enquiry as to why so many government and educational web pages have either umlauts or some sort of encoding problem. Possibly owing to the lateness of the hour when I first saw Ben's take on demands for typgraphical/orthographical/linguistic/stylistic/syntactic/malolactic* correctness, I thought that was the context he had in mind too.
Ben: it is at last clear to me what you're talking about, but I've been confused, because I got the impression you were arguing with a position espoused by someone in this thread, rather than introducing a new observation. I agree with you too.
* sentences are better when infused a note of butterscotch.
/trots off to make coffee and think about SMS gateways.
-
(Thanks for reminding me about that, by the way. I'm just printing it out so I can have it displayed in a prominent place.)
-
-
I'll never forget a teacher at intermediate school wasting about 3 hours of my life teaching me about apostrophes, by tearing up the work and making me write it again.
That sounds like a formative experience, Ben.
but the Académie française employs a cadre of burly, heavy-knuckled linguists named Vito And Yuri
Do you know what they call a cedilla in France?
...
FRENCH, MOTHERFUCKER! CAN YOU SPELL IT!