Posts by Stephen Judd
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Break OUT, damnit. My fingers have their own ideas about what to do.
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Also, I think it's time to break at this cartoon.
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Ben: are we perhaps getting hung up on "you" meaning people in general, versus criticism directed at you personally? I mean, if you want people to like you, you should wash every day too...
Imagine talking to someone who says in a perfect BBC English accent "I'm sorry, my good man, but I can't understand a word you are saying", when you are talking in perfectly normal (for your town) and clear English. You tend to think they are being a wanker.
Yeah, but who's advocating that? Or anything like that? That's just a straw man.
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Keir: damn, you are so right, and I am wrong.
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Oh Mark, don't you know? Insisting on non-hyperbolic use of "fascism" is... fascism.
Ben, we're probably only a hair's breadth away from agreement in our actual practice. I am absolutely mellow about informality in quickly-composed text - you might have noticed there wasn't any macron in my previous comment (although there's an argument that naturalised loanwords don't need diacritics anyway, eg naive ).
My concern is with what we might call publication. If you're aiming for polish, for professionalism, for just getting things right, then macrons aren't too much to ask for; they're bugger-all work really. Even in the relaxed environment of PA System, I notice nearly everyone tries to spell correctly even if they don't always succeed, and writes in a way that doesn't necessarily accord that well with their speech, in the interests of communication.
Your comments about Maori are just as true for every other language, including (in fact especially) English. All standard languages are artificial and inaccurate compromises to some extent. As a German speaker you ought to know that no one grows up speaking Duden-style Hochdeutsch, and you must have noticed the huge range in spoken English in the UK. Yet most languages have at least one standard grammar, pronunciation and spelling, and people turn their noses up at failure to observe those conventions in a formal setting. (If you're Norwegian, you have two, Nynorsk and Bokmal, US vs Commenwealth English are arguably two standards, and for all I know there are languages with even more competing standards...)
Keir: umlauts and diareses aren't the same, they just look the same. Certainly two dots over a vowel that is not succeeded or preceded by another vowel are unambiguously umlauts.
Should we update the Wikipedia page to reflect informal NZ usage, do you think?
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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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Look, if you're not going to store contraband visibly on a high shelf, how will the offspring discover the illicit thrill of snagging forbidden literature?Surely once they have the height/engineering skills/curiosity to winkle the naughty stuff down, they're probably old enough.
/not entirely tongue in cheek
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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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Is Kiwiblog broken for everyone else, or just me?
MUST! RESIST! OBVIOUS! SNARK!
Yeah, I see a lot of binary crap too. I suspect evil hackers.