Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 27th Oct 2009 00:37 UTC
In the comments on our editorial about language purism and the Psystar case, it became quite clear that language is a subject almost everyone has an opinion on - not odd if you consider that language is at the very centre of what makes us "human". Since this appears to be a popular subject, let's talk about the influence computing has had on two very minor aspects of the Dutch language.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-11-10
Member since:2008-05-06
Russians still use them in written form and email.
EDIT: And on the subject of numbers, and to bitch about Russian again, you really want to see the wierdness going on with counting years.
Normally to pluralize in Russian there is an 'e' or 'i' type letter added to the end with 'и' (ee) perhaps the most common.
But with years they go strange. First off when counting you use different forms between 1, 2-4, and 5+, so the forms change, but to top it off, with years the word changes!!!
1 год (god)
2 года (goda)
5 лет (lyet)
Now if that isnt a case of convention making a language more difficult i dont know what is!
Edited 2009-10-27 11:06 UTC
Member since:2007-09-22
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Member since:
2005-07-06
I just remembered reading this article that the proper french quotation marks have been kind of rendered obsolete by computers too.
It normally looks like double chevrons, called "guillemets", like this:
<< bonjour >> (I can't be arsed finding the right unicode character for those) but they're not on the french keyboard and we use the double quote instead (that we also call guillemets nowadays).