Posts by Mark Harris
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This is clearly false; if there are two possibilities as to what a word could be, depending on vowel doubling, and in one version there is no attempt to signal, and in the other there is, then one version will be ambiguous, and the other will not, even if the attempt is not strictly ideal.
And still it's not semantic. Try arguing with the point I made instead of inventing one.
(So, f'rinstance, if you can't use any non-ASCII characters, signifying doubling by replacing ā with a' would yield a more legible text than just giving up.)
And yet, if you know what the correct usage is, and you don't do it, it's just lazy, and saying to the reader that you don't really care whether you get it right or not and the onus is on them to understand you.
The point was that I used backticks instead of proper opening and closing quote marks; yet you still understood, indicating that they had meaning despite not being proper typography.
Good trick. I just put it down to your lack of computer skills. ;-)
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Well, ok, strictly, but a text with umlauts is more usable than one with no marking of vowels.
No, it is not. It is incorrect and has no semantic meaning.
(Likewise, but to a lesser degree, strictly speaking `quotation` like that is wrong; however it is better than quotation.
Say what? If you are quoting, it is equally permissable to use single or double quotes as long as the opening marks are the same as the closing marks. When quoting speech inside a quoted paragraphs, use the opposite type to avoid confusion.
"What do they teach them at school these days?"
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I think you better ask yourself that one, since it's not a belief I've ever expressed or held.
Really? So:
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
wasn't you?
Quickly, someone tell Russ! PA has been hacked!
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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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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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As usual, the Onion cuts to the chase (NSFW - language)
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/sony_releases_new_stupid_piece_of -
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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For what value of "right"?
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Everything was curvy
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So, Steve, you'd consider a film set to be a "normal" workplace?