71–80 of 180 posts
He was so frustrated that shortly before his death in 1950 Shaw put the creation of a new alphabet in his will backed by grant in aid. And thus the Shavian alphabet was born. Enjoy:
Why does the author use `initialize` for a function name in the source code? I question their purity of intentions!
Filthy non-OED user. The author is probably a Cambridge dictionary person! Seriously, -ize endings in the Cambridge spelling tradition relies on you knowing the etymology of the word, and if it’s from the Ancient Greek, that’s the one you use. Otherwise -ise for French or Latin words.
If everyone was just aiming for consistency we would be better off than following developer whims. We should aim to get over our personal preferences and try to be consistent and that means not having an ego about American vs British English.
Absolutely terrible. You should spell everything in American English when programming as like it or not the standard in every codebase and programming language going to be this. I am British but coding is not language, and trying to be clever like this is incredibly counterproductive especially in a diverse team. If you want British English to be used why shouldn’t the German on your team be able to use their languag…
At this point it seems we have two separate languages American and English and I say it as a non native speaker. Wach an US movie, then watch a British movie. Compare TV shows, compare news articles.
Ironically, you'd use an American rubber with a British fanny.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Filthy non-OED user. The author is probably a Cambridge dictionary person! Seriously, -ize endings in the Cambridge spelling tradition relies on you knowing the etymology of the word, and if it’s from the Ancient Greek, that’s the one you use. Otherwise -ise for French or Latin words.
Isn't this the Oxford way? I'm not sure what Cambridge does.
Obliged to point out that "color" is how it's spelled in Latin, Old French, and therefore post-Norman English, that the superfluous "u" was added later by the English aristocracy because they were jealous of how fancy the newly-respelled French looked.
Obliged to point out that spelling is always an entirely cultural artefact, and that before colour was spelt color, it was spelt colos. There's nothing more correct about older forms, or newer forms, or any other forms. What matters is what is going to be clearest to your speech community and audience.
English is one of few languages where the relationship between the writing and the pronunciation of the vowels is mostly unpredictable, so knowing whether a word is spelled with "o" or with "ou" does not help you to know how to pronounce it.
So for the case of English, you are right that spelling is a cultural artefact, but not for the case of most languages, including Latin.
The oscillations in the spelling of Old French were caused by the fact that French had acquired some vowels that did not exist in Latin, e.g. front rounded vowels, so the French speakers did not know what Latin letters should be used to write them, and there existed no standardizing institution to choose some official spelling.
I believe that some people's actual full-time job is to translate software from US English to British English. I wonder what that job feels like after the thousandth time you've replaced color with colour and neighbor with neighbour
The AI revolution will take care of that job
Kind of funny the animus the author has against US spellings. It's nothing but shade to refer to US spellings as 'simplified' and UK spellings as 'traditional', regardless of the merit of the argument for doing so. I can't imagine anyone will really need to use this, but it seems to have let the author work out some issues.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obliged to point out that spelling is always an entirely cultural artefact, and that before colour was spelt color, it was spelt colos. There's nothing more correct about older forms, or newer forms, or any other forms. What matters is what is going to be clearest to your speech community and audience.
The transition in spelling from "colos" to "color" did not have anything with culture, but it has correctly reflected a change in the pronunciation of the word. English is one of few languages where the relationship between the writing and the pronunciation of the vowels is mostly unpredictable, so knowing whether a word is spelled with "o" or with "ou" does not help you to know how to pronounce it. So for the case o…
Colos to color was indeed part of a common sound change in early Latin (e.g. floses > flores), and led to new spelling, but many later substantive changes in Latin did not lead to any changes in spelling (e.g. the palatalisation of /k/ before front vowels). Similarly, English spelling used to change regularly to reflect changes in pronunciation, until Middle English, when it suddenly stopped and became largely fixed. And yet other languages continued to evolve orthographically after that point (e.g. major Czech spelling reforms in the 19th century). Why?
All of this is entirely cultural. In certain societies and at certain times, language users will prefer phonetic spellings, and in other societies and at other times they will prefer etymological ones. Sometimes spellings can evolve dramatically in a short span of time, at other times they seem eternal and utterly immovable. Language is deeply cultural.