“Once upon a time there was a printer who lived in the woods. He was a lonely printer, because nobody knew how to configure him. He hoped and hoped for someone to play with.” That is an excerpt from the Readme file for gnome-cups-manager. There are more snippets from different programs that might pique your interest.
I rather like this, Geoffrey Chaucer’s take on a README. I don’t think he wrote “Ye Nerde’s Tale”, so this couldn’t really be a README.Debian. But it’s as true today as it was then and would make a good intro to Scribus, LaTex, etc.
Go, little book, go, little myn tragedye,
Ther God thy makere yet, er that he dye,
So sende might to make in some comedye!
But little book, no making thou n’envie,
But subgit be to alle poesye;
And kiss the steppes, whereas thou seest pace
Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, Stace.
FWIW, it could also be used to make a compelling case against people who consider good spelling a luxury. :p
As Middle-English goes, that was actually pretty readable.
Three cheers for Heroic Couplets and Iambic Pentameter.
Edited 2008-08-02 17:35 UTC
Yes, I’m aware of that quotation’s age.
I wasn’t poking fun at Middle English; I was poking fun at modern people who do not care about proper spelling with all the references we have.
I’m a big believer in a shift towards phonetic spelling. While I am still pedantic enough to type the word “losing”, “loosing” actually makes more sense as a correct spelling. As English becomes even more international, I suspect that we are going to see some normalization and sensibility slapped into it, as people from disparate backgrounds make perfectly reasonable assumptions about how to say or spell this or that. The intuitive way should (normally) be the correct way.
Follow that through and spell the opposite of “win” as “loos”. Or “looz” perhaps since “loos” would end with an s sound. Or maybe I am biased about that last point since I am aware of the existence of the word “loose” (opposite of tight).
Anyway, if we let the internet guide spelling reform, we can expect rapid introduction of “turrent” (turret), “retarted”, “genious”, “hampster” and so forth. Somehow that seems a more terrifying possibility than that presented in “Meihem in ce Klasrum”* or it’s more recent relative “Ze drem vil finali kum tru”**
* http://members.aol.com/VoxVideus/meihem.html
** http://ashvital.freeservers.com/ze_dream.htm
Too much ambiguity throughout our language. From the character set, through the spelling, through the pronunciation.
Some sort of standardizing body is certainly necessary. I believe that we need to be more concerned about consistency. We need to stop correcting people when they say “radiuses” when we, too pedantically, think they should say radii. Some people will actually try to correct one for saying “octopuses” saying that the correct form is octopi. And, of course they (as smart as they think they are) are “wrong” too. The standard form is “octopods”. Go figure. As far as I am concerned, we should settle upon “octopuses”. Out with the old and in with the new. Consistency would benefit our de facto world language greatly. Let us not pedantically cling to the past in some vain effort to demonstrate how well educated we are.
Pluralization in English is a true art. Sometimes it matters; say Gooses all you like when you mean Geese, who will fail to understand? But if you try Persons when you mean People you may introduce some confusion.
Unfortunately standardizing languages is impossible. Languages, living languages anyway, are always what the speakers say they are–literally–and more specifically what the speakers agree on. You’d be hard pressed to force standard usage on enough people to make a difference.
Dictionaries have helped a lot by constraining the variations in spelling. This is both good and bad: Good because the problem didn’t get worse, bad because it didn’t get much better. Some words which might have evolved into spellings much more phonetic and logical now don’t because it would be ‘incorrect’–people have this idea that the dictionary describes the truth, not realizing that it merely documents what the rest of us are doing.
It might be possible to convene some kind of international standards organization to codify some kind of “standard English” and it might be possible to see it *formally* adopted in some places. I am extremely dubious about the probability that it would actually be *used*–think about Esperanto here. Even if officially required in some places I dare say few average people would use the standard form for at least a generation unless forced to do so.
>I am extremely dubious about the probability that it would actually be *used*–think about Esperanto here.
You mean like the daily events around the world which use Esperanto?:
http://www.esperanto.hu/eventoj/2008.htm
Or the daily Esperanto programs from i.a. Radio Polonia?:
http://www.polskieradio.pl/eo/
and Radio China International?:
http://esperanto.cri.cn/
Or the almost 100 regularly appearing Esperanto magazines?:
http://www.gazetejo.org/
Or the 150+ blogs in Esperanto
http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogo
Or the 1070 Yahoo discussion groups in or on Esperanto?:
http://ca.groups.yahoo.com/search?query=esperanto
Or regular papal use of Esperanto in the twice yearly ‘urbi et orbi’ blessings, and by Vatican Radio?:
http://www.ikue.org/pasko2008/pasko2008.htm
http://www.radiovaticana.org/esp/on_demand.asp
And so on, and so on! Surely ‘universal bilingualism’ [YOUR ethnic language + non-ethnic Esperanto for everyone] and the seven points of the Prague Manifesto:
http://lingvo.org
are things worth informing oneself on, given the present disastrous effects on minor languages and cultures of the world hegemony of one ethnic language?
Since linguistic clarity is the purpose of interethnic communication, Esperanto-speakers strive to use an internationally accepted standard form rather than the trendy, with-it language favored by many (monolingual?) English-speakers.
Edited 2008-08-05 15:31 UTC
Forgive me if I seem dismissive, but the quantities you are citing are mere drops in the bucket, so to speak. Yes, there are some dedicated speakers, but its use is barely more wide spread than Klingon. The theory of esperanto as an international reserve language is beautiful, but in practice it is not in sufficiently wide use and appears to be more or less stagnate in growth.
I admit my knowledge of the current state of esperanto is somewhat limited. Sorry for that. I was merely mentioning it to show how even a good idea when it comes to language has to make an uphill struggle to be accepted. Even with an official mandate it would be a slow and possibly fruitless process.
Yes, you’re right about the drop in the bucket compared to eco-linguistically destructive World English, but you’ll please pardon me if I dispute your often-repeated statement about the number of Klingon speakers. One authority is quoted as saying that “all the fluent Klingon speakers can comfortably go out to dinner together.”
[Dr. Laurence Schoen of the Klingon Language Institute, quoted by Gavin Edwards in “Dejpu’bogh Hov rur Qabllj!”, Wired, Aug. 1996, pp. 84-93,] What is the source for your statement, please?
The 93rd annual week-long World Esperanto Congress, which finished a few days ago in Rotterdam/Netherlands, gathered together 1800+ fluent Esperanto-speakers from 73 different countries. How many fluent speakers do Klingon congresses attract? Are there in fact any annual Klingon congresses where all the proceedings are conducted solely in Klingon? Amusing pastime though it may be, how does Klingon seek to better the world for following generations on the basis of equal language rights for all?
Edited 2008-08-05 18:07 UTC
It has been my experience at the Worldcons (World Science Fiction Conventions) that I’ve attended, that it isn’t all that difficult to find fluent Esperantists. While I have encountered more people in truly excellent Klingon costumes at Worldcons than I have Esperantists, it seems that all of those Klingons were education somewhere other than the Klingon homeworld and didn’t speak their language fluently.
Actually, there are three possibilities with an official mandate for Esperanto. If it came from the UN, it would probably be almost universally ignored. If it came from a national government, it might actually be detrimental, as there would now be an international language being treated more or less as the property of a single country. Probably the only way it would work would be for the EU to fund teaching Esperanto as a second language.
Certainly Esperanto is not spoken nearly as widely as English. However, it is much more widespread than Klingon. As one Klingon enthusiast supposedly put it, you could probably get all of the fluent Klingon speakers around a single table. I’ve been to local gatherings of Esperantists where that many people attended.
Esperanto is remarkable among artificial languages for a number of reasons. First of all, it has outlived its creator by nearly a century now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._L._Zamenhof
Secondly, it has actually gathered as many speakers as some smaller ethnic languages. The most reliable estimate, and perhaps the only reliable estimate, is now a couple of decades old. Estimating the number of fluent speakers of a language that has no geographic home is quite difficult. The range was between 100K and 2M.
Third, although Esperanto was artificially created, it is undoubtedly a living language now. There are between several hundred and a couple of thousand native speakers (called “denaskuloj” in Esperanto). I’ve met a few. They are the children of Esperantists. Sometimes their parents teach them the language out of idealism, but often it is more practical than that. There are Esperantist couples whose most fluent shared language is Esperanto. Speaking it at home simply makes sense for them. Of course, native Esperantists are natively bilingual or multilingual.
I would love to see Esperanto more widely adopted. It has achieved its current level of success through grass roots efforts. An artificial language grew from being the creation of a single person to having roughly a million speakers. It did so without being the official language anywhere. It did so even though there was no existing body of cultural works in Esperanto prior to the 1880’s.
Esperanto would have two significant advantages over English as an international language. First, it is easier to learn and retain fluency in. Second, it is neutral. It doesn’t confer an advantage to the lucky people who happened to be born somewhere where it is the local language.
On the other hand, English has the enormous advantage of the network effect. There are already more speakers, teachers, writers, books, etc. in English. English is the de facto lingua franca of our time. Of course other languages have occupied that position in the past. I have no doubt that some day another language will take the place of English. I would rather see an easily-learned, neutral language do that.
I agree that Esperanto is more neutral than English, and that it is easier to learn. I question its other advantages.
Primarily the advantage English has, apart from widespread use, is vocabulary. More is not necessarily better, but English is certainly an expressive language. This is something any new language would struggle with.
I admire the goals of Esperanto but I don’t think it is the language to achieve them. Already there is too much baggage associated with it for it to receive broad support, much less a mandate. If left alone the pool of Esperanto speakers will I do not doubt gradually increase, at least up to a point, but I do not know that the result will be a universal language that meets the original goals.
I view the success of Esperanto to be more of a novelty. The rise in the number of speakers is, I think, more a result of increased ease of dissemination of information (i.e., the Internet) and the increase in world population than a measure of real popular growth. Some people will always be interested in Esperanto and its goals and so some people will always speak it, but I don’t forsee it ever “crossing over” into a general spoken language.
Esperanto certainly lags behind English in technical vocabulary. In that, it is no different from most of the languages of the world which must adopt or coin words for technical terms after they are created in one of a handful of languages, English being the primary one at the moment.
However, Esperanto has very little problem with creating new vocabulary. One experience that is so commonplace among Esperantists that it often goes unnoticed until it is pointed out is that we create new words on the fly conversationally. One of the design features of the language is that any compound word or use of a word as a different part of speech is permitted so long as the resulting words actually has a sensible meaning.
One writer who dealt in some detail with the objections to Esperanto as an international language was Claude Piron. He brought to his discussion of the problem two things. First, he was a fluent Esperantist, quite familiar with the language and the developing culture surrounding it. Second, he was a translator. He was aware of the effort and expense that go into learning languages and translation. You can find a number of his articles here:
http://claudepiron.free.fr/articles.htm
Sorpigal wrote:
I’d like to concur with what Dejlo has said and to add something. I don’t know how many languages besides English Sorpigal has communicative competence in, but I suspect not many. From the point of view of the native-speaker a large vocabulary might seem an advantage, but from the point of view of the language-learner (or the person forced to use a language other than his/her mother-tongue to communicate) it is a decided disadvantage. Esperanto has sought to deal with this problem by its ingenious system of word-building, using suffixes (prefixes, affixes and infixes). And it now has a history of daily use about as long as that of ethnic languages like Afrikaans and Ivrit (Modern Hebrew).
And surely ‘expressiveness’ is not necessarily something inherent in the language per se, but more in the skill of the speaker to manipulate the possibilities of a particular language?
Nor has the cultural/linguistic colonialism that goes along with imposing an ethnic language on others been mentioned – or perhaps that is of little concern here? [Robert Phillipson has dealt with this is his books ‘Linguistic Imperialism” and “English-only Europe?”]
Mi parolas Esperante dum 10 jaroj.
I’ve been speaking Esperanto for 10 years and it’s almost like a secret club with a secret language. While people mention Klingon, Esperanto is more of a patois or a pidgin. It may not be perfect, but it has over 50,000 speakers, has loads of literature (including “adult” material if you’re into that sort of thing) and is very easy. It’s not meant to replace any national languages, but as a go between. Esperanto meetings are the only international meetings I go to where there are no interpreters! Also, you can practically read anything with nothing but a dictionary or reta-vortaro.de
Estas amaso da originala literaturo ankaA-.
We need to stop correcting people when they say “radiuses” when we, too pedantically, think they should say radii. Some people will actually try to correct one for saying “octopuses” saying that the correct form is octopi. And, of course they (as smart as they think they are) are “wrong” too. The standard form is “octopods”. Go figure
You are illustrating your point brilliantly. It would be “octopodes”
But I’m in partial agreement with your thoughts on pluralizing. I’m all for octopuses, viruses (in latin, there was no plural for “virus”) etc. If people don’t know Latin (I don’t) it should always be safe and acceptable to pluralize something the English way.
On the other hand I don’t mind people using radii, geese, moose, fish etc and see no reason nor possibility for things like that to be mandated away.
Also, English is hardly alone with confusing plurals (try figuring out plurals in German for instance http://german.about.com/library/blplural01.htm ), so it’s a little unreasonable to expect English to be perfectly sensible when it comes to plurals. Of course, if your point is that English, as a second language for so many people, should do better and be more accommodating, I can’t object too strongly.
For the most part I’m happy to let strange native English plurals fade slowly, but like you I’d much prefer non-English words be pluralized the English way (with an “s”) than be pluralized incorrectly in any language. And certainly there should be no stigma attached to pluralizing things with an “s”. If the language changes that way by itself, so be it. And in the end, that’s what will happen and it will take far better than it would if it was somehow legislated.
I’d go with lewzing if we’re going strictly on sound.
But yoo can’t make a fonettic spelling with inglish beec~Ayens evreebadee pronaunces wirds differntlee.
Bat yoo c~A¤n’t maka a fonettic spelling wit inglish bcoss evreebodee prenaunses whirds diffrntlee.
Edited 2008-08-03 11:31 UTC
lol. Nice.
“Hooked on Phonics” is what has destroyed English
My brother used it growing up and can’t spell for shit.
And, as you so elegantly demonstrated, a completely phonetic language doesn’t work when you have local variants in enunciations. Everyone pronounces words differently. If you started off phonetic, it’d eventually evolve into separate, but related, languages. It’s a circle. This is exactly what has happened time and time again… throughout history.
heck, I can barely make out what people are saying in the valley below me, as it is…
It’s tempting to say that loose will become more correct over time, as it is more intuitive, but the flaws in English are too extensive for simple corrections like that. A better alternative would be loos, to avoid hitting an existing word, or, better, luz, as this eliminates the double-letter problem (namely, sometimes–bot not always–we pronounce letters differently when they are next to other letters).
The major flaw in English is simple to describe and hard to fix: too many sounds and not enough letters!
At the moment to pronounce a word in English you must know (at a minimum) the general rules of pronunciation, the variations on those rules and the language of origin for the word or word root. Additionally you need to simply memorize several insane letter formations which are exceptions to any rule or rule variations. It’s enough to drive even a native speaker mad.
Resolving this problem deliberately breaks the language and makes it virtually unrecognizable without retraining. Fixing it evolutionarily by slow mutations like lose->loose (as in your example) will never completely solve the problem and will mostly just serve to increase overall confusion, especially when speakers of the new English try to read old documents.
The problem really cannot be solved without giving up something somewhere. It’s just a question of what we loos and where we luz it.
U r sux!
are there not a haiku hiding in the linux source comments?
are there not a haiku hiding in the Haiku source comments?
that i would not know. but if so, and if its about haiku, would that make it a recursive haiku?
the mind boggles…
Edited 2008-08-03 00:47 UTC
The WindowMaker readme has a little Dave Berry bit at the top.
http://fts.ifac.cnr.it/cgi-bin/dwww?type=file&location=/usr/share/d…
NetBSD manuals sometimes are funny. For example:
“crime does not pay”
from sgimips/crime(4)
“You can tune a file system, but you can’t tune a fish.” from tunefs(8)
“Data loss is possible on busy systems with baud rates greater than 300.” from amiga/ser(4)
“Bugs? You crazy, man?!?” from robots(6), BUGS section
“Currently it does not support running X. It can however coexist well enough with grf0 to make possible running X the old way, but be warned, you cannot switch screens while in X and when quitting it, it seems to hang. Switching a screen then will bring up the text console. As always, we apologise for the inconvenience.” from amiga/amidisplaycc(4)
There is certainly more, but I don’t remember them now…
heh, stuff like this always makes me think of that classical unix printer error: “printer on fire”.
its a very old error message in computing terms, from when printers used ink ribbons and write heads.
basically the heads where sometimes cleaned in alcohol or something similar.
so, if you take a newly cleaned write head, stick it next to a ream of paper, and then have the printer jam.
this would then all heat up, and one could very well guess what would happen next.
so the programmers put in code that would put those very words on screen if the printer port sent a signal that would indicate a jammed paper.
then it was up to the sysadmin if he would grab the fire extinguisher, or some frozen hot dogs for the bonfire
that, and order up a new printer…
Edited 2008-08-03 00:46 UTC
This reminds me of the best acknowledgements section in a manual I’ve ever read:
http://www.scsh.net/docu/html/man.html
Oh man. Thank you for that link. I laughed out loud through that whole thing. Priceless.
….”Have you mooed today?”…
I once bought a battery charger that said, in it’s little fold-out manual, something along the lines of “do not insert batteries upside down, as this will create a reverse polarity field which will rip a hole in the space-time continuum and destroy the universe”. A funny bit of unscientific crap, but it did make me think twice about which way I’d put the batteries