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“I just chose words carefully”

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Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#351

Post by toast0 »

Xirdus wrote: post #341
toast0 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dictionaries in columns statistically reduce white space and thus reduce the page count. Especially for the definitions that are very short, for example when they only reference a more preferred spelling or a more prominent word that has the exact meaning.

So multicolumn layout increases whitespace in newspapers but decreases it in dictionaries? Funny how it always does the exact thing needed to disprove whatever I say in this exact moment.

Well ok ... If a full width newspaper needs the whole sheet and you put columns to reduce the necessary whitespace, you would end with blank space that you can fill with more articles or ads.

You don't really want to reduce the number of sheets for your newspaper because size of the newspaper is an indicator of quality. But trimming off maybe 10% of a dictionary is worthwhile. Size of a dictionary is a quality indicator too, but the absolute production cost is more for a book so saving production costs is more pressing.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#352

Post by ahazred8ta »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #177
seszett wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They pronounce these words as if the e and the l were reversed, if "truffle" was written in a phonetic manner it would be written "truffel". Since the "l" sound is last and preceded by a schwa, "truffle" (or "missle") obviously cannot be considered phonetic.

> They pronounce these words as if the e and the l were reversed, if "truffle" was written in a phonetic manner it would be written "truffel". You can just look this up. The usual way to write "truffle" in a phonetic manner is of course /tɹʌfl̩/. You'll note that there is no vowel in the second syllable at all; it consists of just the L. (And that's what the small mark below the L means - "syllabic".) This is the sta…

Many dialects of English pronounce 'tr' as 'tr' and not tshr or chr. Likewise 'dr' is 'dr', although there are some that pronounce drink like "jrink".

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#353

Post by everdrive »

Xirdus wrote: post #333
everdrive wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's for psychological, ergonomic, and privacy reasons.

Depends what you mean by privacy. Most computers are a lot less private than most phones, in terms of how many people can access your data.

I think that characterization is too broad to be considered accurate.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#354

Post by brap »

easydidit wrote: post #208

In a similar vein, Taylor Otwell from Laravel writes his comment blocks exactly three lines long and each line is three characters shorter than the line above, e.g. /* |-------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Application Name |-------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | This value is the name of your application, which will be used when the | fra…

Incredible. This is the kind of weaponized OCD I want in my team

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#356

Post by gffrd »

Xirdus wrote: post #335
gffrd wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scanability and limitations of layout technology from 100 years ago.

I wonder what you'll come up with for 21st century reprints of the Bible. Please don't say tradition.

That's easy. The columns have to be narrow enough that you can still read a full column of scripture while your éclair rests on the other half of the page. That's why a full-spread layout is referred to a "qautréclair."

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#357

Post by cyphar »

SyneRyder wrote: post #153
cyphar wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And are British, at least in Australia (and the US, I guess?) we pronounce the second "i". It is always fun when you notice where someone is from based on secondary clues like that -- my favourite is the choice of "a" or "an" where it is ambiguous (for instance, I recently ran across "an HTTP request" where I would've said "a HTTP request").

The term for this is a "shibboleth", if it's of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth

My understanding of shibboleth is that it refers to the primary pronunciation identifying the speaker (which is how it was used biblically).

Those are also interesting but it feels a bit more special to me when it's a secondary speech characteristic because it feels a bit more like a clue in a detective novel -- it almost feels like you can hear inside the author's head and how they vocalise while they write.

In this case, "missle" is a malapropism that is only possible if you don't pronounce the second "i", and so is a secondary "speech" characteristic.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#358

Post by cyphar »

likis wrote: post #157
cyphar wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And are British, at least in Australia (and the US, I guess?) we pronounce the second "i". It is always fun when you notice where someone is from based on secondary clues like that -- my favourite is the choice of "a" or "an" where it is ambiguous (for instance, I recently ran across "an HTTP request" where I would've said "a HTTP request").

I thought the rules were clear and it depends on how the word is pronounced, with a vowel or consonant sound. I have only heard people say H T T P, as specific letters when pronouncing HTTP, and thus the a or an should be based on how one would pronounce the letter "H". And H would be pronounced as "aitch". Starts with an a -> vowel sound -> should be "an". But I'm a non native english speaker, so I'm happy to be pro…

You're quite right that the rules are clear and native speakers get them correct almost all of the time (I've not seen one get it wrong while speaking but some people were taught it as a spelling rule at school and so tend to write it incorrectly), but the difference is that different speakers pronounce the leading "H" differently.

In Australia we pronounce the H more like "heitch" while in the US people tend to pronounce it as "eytch" (IPA would probably more descriptive here, sorry!). In the UK it's a bit more of a mixed bag, as others have already elucidated.

"Ambiguous" was probably a poor word choice, I meant to say that because both ways of writing are technically valid based on the accent of the author there is an element of freedom in the choice that tells you something about them.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#359

Post by thaumasiotes »

saghm wrote: post #314
boomlinde wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversations like this are a dead end. You can't devise a phonetic spelling convention without using a phonetic alphabet. The reason you think that "le" makes sense and the person you are responding to thinks otherwise is that in English, the pronunciation of "le" isn't phonetically consistent. I imagine that GP's reasoning is that in writing "missile", the consonant is followed by a vowel, while phonetically the vo…

> Conversations like this are a dead end. You can't devise a phonetic spelling convention without using a phonetic alphabet. I don't disagree with the latter point, but the former doesn't make sense to me; unless you're saying that there wouldn't be enough phonemes representable by the letters to define spellings for all English words? In my mind, the entire point of a conversation like this is hypothetical changes t…

> and I think it's fairly straightforward changing the spelling of words ending in "le" to "el" would be more consistent to how "le" is used in other places in words where changing their spelling would be more difficult (e.g. there's not really any clear way to spell "less" without preserving "le" at the beginning).

I don't see why that argument is supposed to make sense on its own terms. The system we have now is that -le and le- are different. You want to reform -le to be spelled -el because its pronunciation is closer to that of (-)el- than to le-.

But making that spelling change will reduce the "inconsistency" you don't like that exists between -le and le- precisely by introducing a new inconsistency between -el and el-. Why is that supposed to be an improvement of any kind?

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#360

Post by throaway25498 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #174
likis wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the rules were clear and it depends on how the word is pronounced, with a vowel or consonant sound. I have only heard people say H T T P, as specific letters when pronouncing HTTP, and thus the a or an should be based on how one would pronounce the letter "H". And H would be pronounced as "aitch". Starts with an a -> vowel sound -> should be "an". But I'm a non native english speaker, so I'm happy to be pro…

Some UK speakers pronounce "H" as "haitch" (with a non-silent leading 'h'), not "aitch". Which leads to "a haitch tee ...". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H#Name

Not uncommon in Australia too. As a very ordinary General Australian speaker I use haitch (and therefore a, not an). I'm probably not 100% consistent in this. It's one of many words where Australian English permits two equally valid pronunciations (e.g. 'dance').

I do cringe when people insist on "an + h" where the h is in fact invariably pronounced, as in "an historic occasion". You only ever seem to hear this from Americans trying to sound educated, which makes me suspect it's affected, not organic. I doubt the person giving a speech on 'an historic occasion' would then go home and give his kid 'an history book'.

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