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.
As we already established in the purism editorial, the fact that English is now thelanguage of commerce, science, and international relations has had a profound impact on Dutch – and I’m sure, on other minor languages too. It’s easy to point towards specific words such as “computer” or even a golden oldie like “okay“, of which there are quite a few.
However, those have more to do with the global importance of English in and of itself, but not about the influence the computer might have had on the Dutch language. I want to take a look at two distinct cases where the increasing reliance on computers has forced a change in how the Dutch language operates. One has to do with punctuation, the other with the shortened form of the genitive inflection of the Dutch definite article (breath, pause, continue).
Quotation marks
Let’s start with the case where the usage of computers has changed (or better put, is changing) Dutch punctuation. In Dutch, the correct, old-fashioned way to denote a direct quote is to open the quotation with a left low double curved quote, and close it with a right [high] double curved quote. Like this:
Jan zei: „Hallo.â€
I’m assuming you can translate that on your own. Anyway, this is how I’ve been taught how to properly open and close direct quotes when I was in primary school. All my friends were taught the same rules, just like my parents and grandparents. Officially, the same notation is used for cases of irony or the use-mention distinction.
Fast forward to the age of ubiquitous personal computing, and everybody and their dog has a computer running Microsoft Word, or, if they’re cheeky, OpenOffice or WordPefect. Now, these programs come from the United States, and in the English language, quoting is done using different quotation marks. In English, the above would looks like this:
Jan said: “Hello.â€
The difference is clear: English opens with a (here we go) left [high] double curved quote and closes with a right [high] double curved quote. This is the common English use of quotation marks to denote direct speech.
Now, because word processors like Word were designed and coded by and for English language users, Word isn’t particularly open to using the proper, Dutch form of quotation. If you open the character map in Windows, for instance, you’ll find the left low double curved quote somewhere at the bottom (treasure troves, those character maps).
It’s not all Word’s fault, though. The left low double curved quote cannot be found on keyboards either. For some reason, manufacturers have forced the US keyboard layouts upon the Dutch market, and our own Dutch keymap can no longer be found (at least, not easily). Then again, if my memory serves me right, not even the Dutch keymap had a key for the left low double curved quote.
Now that word processors are pretty much the norm all over the country – from homes to the office to schools – the proper Dutch quoting rules are slowly but surely being forgotten, pushed out of the collective consciousness. The English quoting rules are taking over.
This is a process that is currently under way. Maybe I’m too much of a language geek, but I get really excited about things like this – a clear-cut change in language use happening right in front of my eyes, in my lifetime. „How jolly exciting,†said Alice.
To me, the English way of quoting looks all wrong and ridiculously out of place in Dutch text, but in all honesty, I’m too lazy to do proper keymapping in Word to “fix” the situation. And if I, as a nerd, am already too lazy – I can’t really blame others for not doing so either. What you do sometimes see, however, is Dutch people constructing the left low double curved quote using two commas – like so:
Jan zei: ,,Hallo.â€
Word will turn the closing marks into curly ones, but the commas will remain as they are. This looks hideous.
I’m not sure if the proper way of quoting is still being taught in primary schools, but seeing how computers have infested enriched that environment too, I’m pretty sure our children’s textbooks are being updated too. That’s what you get in a ridiculously rich welfare state – school materials get updated quickly.
Apostrophe
A long, long time ago, when computers did not exist and man still got around on horseback, the Dutch language was much more closely related to German than it is now. Back then, declension was a core part of Dutch, much like it still is in German today. The definite and indefinite article were two of those things that once inflected according to the grammatical cases (nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative).
Today, this is no longer the case. However, whereas in English this transition is complete, and you’ll barely find any remnants of case declension, the transition is not entirely complete in Dutch. You’ll find remnants of case declension all over the place – especially in fixed expressions and in more formal discourse. In general, however, case declension is gone, and you’ll mostly only deal with the nominative.
Mostly.
Whereas the dative and accusative have been relegated entirely to the realm of fixed expressions, the genitive still lingers around, and gets used even beyond mere fixed expressions – especially the genitive of the definite article. One of my mannerisms is to say “dat is niet des ” (“that is not of “), which is something I say whenever someone does something which he normally wouldn’t do.
In order to gain a better understanding of what’s going on here, let’s look at the case declension of the Dutch definite article (I’ll omit the plural, and focus on the singular):
Now, look at the two marked inflections – the genetive masculine and genetive neuter des. In Dutch discourse, the genetive inflection des often gets shortened to just s. Now, in order to indicate that it has been shortened, and that it is not just a random ‘s’ who got lost on his way to Mi_sissippi, we use an apostrophe, much like English does when you write down contractions like “can’t”.
Now, we’re going to get extremely pedantic. This is probably as pedantic as I’ll ever be, so let me apologise, and assure you that it won’t happen again. With that out of the way, let the pedanticness commence.
A proper apostrophe in Dutch (and I’m sure, in English too) looks like a comma floating in the air – a small dot with a tail curling to the left. However, many computer programs and websites can’t handle the apostrophe in the correct way, and end up using a straight single quote. Like this:
Under the influence of computing, the second type has become much more prevalent in Dutch, even though it’s technically incorrect. At school, we were taught the proper, fancy apostrophe, but computer programs tend to prefer the straight one. Luckily, though, Word has gotten smarter over the years, and in Word 2007, it properly recognises the Dutch apostrophe, and uses the fancy one. So, with a but of luck, we’ll see the proper method push back the incorrect one in the coming years.
As a side note, did you know that the straight single quote is not only forced to perform the job of the apostrophe, but also of the prime? Yes, the prime, used to denote all sorts of units of measurement, is actually a typography in its own right. The differences:
The prime: yet another innocent victim of the computer. Sad.
This is not purism
Now, as you may have noticed, I have made no qualitative statements about these developments. That’s because in all honesty – this is just the way language works. Language evolves under the pressure of all sorts of external (and internal) influences, and the computer is just one of them.
Still, the reason I wrote this article is to show you how the advent and popularisation of the computer is changing language right before our very eyes. If you look hard enough, you’ll find all sorts of changes going on right now that are caused – or at least sped up – by our reliance on computers.
In any case, please – every now and then, take a few moments to think about the poor straight single quote on your keyboard, who carries the burden of not just being the straight single quote – since the advent of the computer, the poor little guy has to perform the role of his relatives the apostrophe and the prime as well.
Poor little guy.
My native language is Serbian, and we use the same kind of „quotes†as the Dutch. The truth is most people don’t really care about the matter so the English style quotes go unnoticed in most cases.
Still, most formal documents use traditional quotes. I have written a number of such documents in Word myself and I must say, I had no trouble at all. Word automatically replaced the left high quote with the low one every time. The trick was to set the document language to Serbian.
If it does not work for Dutch, it’s probably some kind of misunderstanding of the Dutch orthography on Microsoft’s part…
Same here — I am Hungarian, and we also place our left double quotes at the bottom. And lo! so does Word and OpenOffice, if you set the language to Hungarian. Which, according to my experience, is how computers of non-geeks are set up most of the time. So I wouldn’t blame word processors for that.
I think it’s a more recent development, but definitely computer-related. Chat applications, text editors, etc. use only “”. That and with all this English text around us, it’s no wonder people are more accustomed to the English style double quotes. Too bad.
That’s the price you pay for globalization. It’s actually a cheap one, compared to some other cultural aspects. One that really blows my mind is when international chains advertize their Christmas sales/menus/etc. with Santa Claus. Who is this Santa Claus guy anyway? And what does he have to do with Christmas? Go back to the US, we don’t need you! Dammit!
First of all, greets to the neighbor.
About the Santa, in Serbia the same looking guy brings presents on New Year’s Eve. He has nothing to do with Christmas and we call him Grandpa-Frost (Deda-Mraz in Serbian).
Despite the globalization, Grandpa-Frost prevails and I like it. Christmas should really be about Christ. Besides, members of every religion can appreciate Grandpa-Frost.
The problem with Christmas is it’s actually a Pagan end of year festival that Christians hijacked in order to convert more to their religion.
Christ was actually born some time mid year.
So in a way, globalization has already corrupted Christmas – though obviously it was called something different by the Pagans.
Laurence
PS I post this as a Christian myself. I just wanted to state that as I didn’t want my post to sound like I was trying to stir up an anti-religion flame-war
Yup, and no encyclopaedia, no historian, and neither the church themselves deny this fact. It’s basically a commercial holiday that even the church acknowledges since it will at least get them some attention. Nobody even cared what Jesus’ birthday was up until the second century when paganism spread into Christianity. (The idea of a birthday being significant is a Roman idea, based on their gods and beliefs)
Title says it all
chris
It’s not specifically computers affecting the language, as keyboards, since I assume the same factors would apply just as much to an old 1930’s typewriter as to a modern laptop.
It comes down to practicality – you can only have so many keys on a keyboard, and so you have to simplify. Separate keys for open and close quotes, single and double? Nice, but not strictly necessary – little readability is lost by merging the two symbols. And the same argument elsewhere. Another example for you is a tendency to drop accents from characters, as they’re hard to enter on a standard US keyboard…
Interestingly, computers actually improve the matter a little, as they can be a bit smarter about things – automatically turning straight quotes into their curly counterparts, allowing combination keystrokes to enter accented characters, etc.
Computers also changed the Korean language a lot. Now we have a new verbal ending that is ONLY spoken among young people. For some Koreans, this is quite creepy.
Edited 2009-10-27 01:53 UTC
Oh, really? I took a Korean class one and can read Hangul. What is this new ending?
It’s a nominalized ending of ‘-se’; hence ‘-sem’.
Origin: It was popular among “casual” elementary school students (AKA ‘choding’) to use this unorthodox verbal ending in internet forums. Now this unique ending is used in real life occasionally among youths.
I personally think it is great from the point of view of getting rid of cruft in the language – does it matter that a table is male/female? It reminds me when I was learning French, pointless parts of the language that added nothing in terms of content to the discussion – it was only there because, well, it is just there. I kept asking questions to my teacher (French himself) as to the purpose of it – why? what does it serve? the absence of that results in something lack in the content being transmitted?
On the good side, this year the Macquarie Australian English dictionary has added 5,000 new words to the official lexicon of Australian English. Language being created by the unwashed masses and making its way into the official language. As more words are added, the more exact one can express one self – rather than having a single word with multiple meanings (in the case if the doctrine of Ismah (based on the verse of purification) in Islam where the one word has 16 equivalent English words with no one I know being able to know whether the verse refers to sins, transgressions, faults, mistakes – it could mean anything you want it to mean). So the language becomes more rich, colourful and expressive which is a good thing ™
Edited 2009-10-27 03:05 UTC
French is awesome. It probably has the weirdest way to say eighty and ninety I’ve ever seen:
[70]
English: Seventy.
Spanish: Setenta.
French: Soixante-dix (sixty [and] ten)
[80]
English: Eighty.
Spanish: Ochenta.
French: Cuatre-vingt (“four [times] twenty”)
[99]
English: Ninety-nine.
Spanish: Noventainueve. (“ninety [and] nine”)
French: Cuatre-vingt dix-neuf (“four [times] twenty [and] nineteen”)
I only took a few classes, but this really looked weird to me
In Belgian French you have ‘septante’ for seventy and ‘nonante’ for ninety. These are used in Swiss French as well and they might even use ‘huitante’ for eighty, and i use it too since it makes more sense. Once upon a time there was an ‘octante’ for eighty too.
I was just about to point that out 🙂 Although I thought eighty was octante in Belgium. Wikipedia says otherwise though.
That kind of stuff tends to vary by region. I know that in Switzerland, some places use the “normal” French numbers while others use one or more of septante, huitante, and nonante. It’s quite probable that it’s the same in Belgium. So, you could easily have quatre-vingt, huitante, and octante all being used depending on where you are and who you talk to.
We have that in English too, though not often used, as in:
80 = Four score
90 = Four score and ten
That shows, it’s “quatre”, not “cuatre”
.
JAL
I can never get used to the Danish way of counting. It’s almost as bad as the French.
[50]
Swedish: femtio (five [times] ten)
Danish: halvtreds (half third [times twenty], where half third = 2.5)
[60]
Swedish: sextio (six [times] ten)
Danish: tres (three [times twenty])
[99]
Swedish: nittionio (nine [times] ten [and] nine)
Danish: ni og halvfems (nine and half fifth [times twenty])
I like the finnish way of counting. It’s quite simple, but numbers transcribed to words get scarily long. Some examples:
[1] yksi
[8] kahdeksan
[10] kymmenen
[11] yksitoista
[18] kahdeksantoista
So allright, that looks simple enough, but wait until we get to higher numbers:
[20] kaksokymmentä (not that bad)
[21] kaksokymmentäyksi
[39] neljakymmentäyhdeksan (could be worse)
[1337] yksituhatkolmesatakolmekymmentäseitseman (uuh…)
[31337] kolmekymmentäyksituhattakolmesatakolmekymmentäseitseman (argh)
No wonder the Finns don’t talk that much.
😯 … no way! … man, that’s wicked….
Wouldn’t that be noventa y nueve? As far as I know the i is only used for numbers in the teens and twenties (and even then, it is not used in some places at all). However, I am not a native Spanish speaker, so you could be correct.
No no, you’re right. I shouldn’t stay up so late 😛
I’ve also learnt French a bit, and thus I will let myself point out, that 99 is even slightly more awesome than what you wrote: because 19 = “dix-neuf” means literally “ten [plus] nine”, so finally it goes as:
99 = “four twenty ten nine”
when I think about that from time to time I still get a feeling that someone who created this world must have been joking
The funny thing is when you talk to French people and they think that how they deal with 70+ is normal, and you have trouble explaining to them why it’s odd. Many are just so used to it that they don’t think about how 70+ follow a different pattern from the rest.
Why ? Is there anything weird ? When you are native (I’m French), you do not ask yourself whether your language is strange or not
And by the way I also speak Japanese which has a lot of funny “features” too. One of my favorite is the fact you have to use different words to count things: depending on what you are counting, the word for the number changes. For instance:
– two people: “two” is “futari” (hito futari) – for people
– two dogs: “two” is “nihiki” (inu nihiki) – for pets
– two letters: “two” is “nimai” (tegami nimai) – for flat things
– two bottles: “two” is “nihon” (botoru nihon) – for small cylindric objects
And there are a lot of them ! It appears it enables to give a lot more information than just a number, especially in the context of a shop (on word for oranges, one for rice, one for tofu …)
Gender on inanimate objects can be useful: it lets you talk about more than one object with only pronouns like in English you can easily talk about a male and a female using only pronouns without being confusing, but talking clearly about two distinct objects using only pronouns is usually impossible in English. On the other hand, in French, they might have different genders, and therefore get different pronouns. Gender is one of the ways languages get more than one third person / a fourth person (not really sure on the terminology here) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_person ).
But you haven’t explained *WHY* it is important – what extra information does it provide to me in my understanding of the information you’re transmitting to me. If you say that the table is blue with tongue and grove top and french style table legs – telling me that it is female or male is going to add what benefit to me? If you want to talk about more than one object then say, “I have 4 objects, the first object is…. the second object is …. and the third object is …..”
As for an addition person – I’d love to know where I’d need to use it. I’m not attacking you but every argument I have seen as been the defence of the fluff of old than a robust defence to an otherwise useless piece of syntax sugar.
Edited 2009-10-27 04:43 UTC
It doesn’t. But that’s not his point. The reason French still has genders is because Latin had them (and way back when, there was a time when they actually meant something) and the morphological syncretism of Romance and Old French was not enough to erase the distinction between masculine and feminine, so they are still around. But they are also still around because they aid in referring to multiple things in one sentence without having to use extra clarification.
As an undergrad in linguistics, maybe I can help.
People have the notion of gender in language backwards. It isn’t that there are languages that actually consider a table to be a female and spoons a male, it’s that there are two different noun classes in which Indo-European languages (ie, likely most, if not all, of the languages you have heard of) places biological sex. However, noun classes don’t always correlate to biological gender. Some languages have noun classes for animate and inanimate objects – in these, men and women would both be treated similarly. Other languages make distinctions based not only on animacy, but shape or even function. Luganda of Uganda is a language that has not just two or three noun classes, but 17!
As to why some languages have gender and others, like English or American Sign Language don’t, that’s a much more complicated question. It may be an issue of history, where the language used to say something like “two head of cattle” instead of “two cows”, and over time that first form shortened into a single lexical item with a morphological identity referring to animate objects. It may also be an issue of how the human mind works. Chomsky had proposed a system in the mind that is composed switches. When one feature of a language is turned on, like gender or zero anaphora, other features are then turned on or off.
I could go on, but the point is that it’s not a matter of a good idea or a bad idea. Languages don’t have feature sets like an operating system does, they have much more subtle features of expression that convey more information per sentence than we give ourselves credit for. Grammar is never invented, it just happens.
If you go to http://www.hotforwords.com and type REPAIR into the search box, it’s interesting how REpare and PREpare actually DO derive from the same root, just a case of “Linguistic Entropy” hmm ( I like that book “Genetic Entropy”, wonder about the details on these “mutations” ).
Also on the same site, OXYMORON has an interesting derivation – according to Marina, ( OXYMORON = oxys + moros ) is ITSELF an oxymoron, to computer people this is the kind of recursive-tail-chasing which blows up computers on Star Trek.
So you see I actually remember these interesting facts, although peripherally I was mainly watching the babe, in this case the medium managed to get a message across, too.
Edited 2009-10-27 08:12 UTC
Well, unless you’re talking about languages specifically created like Esperanto, Elvish, or Klingon. But even then, given enough real usage, they’ll start to drift. If a language is static, it’s dead. And once it starts drifting, it definitely starts to fall into the “just happens” category.
You should try learning a language other than American and then maybe you would understand. English doesn’t really have a case system any more, if it did you see why it is useful.
And if you used your brain and visited my profile, I am from New Zealand.
For the Americans out there, New Zealand isn’t located in Europe. I wish it were, but it isn’t.
I also know another language than English; I took Maori when I was at college.
“For the Americans out there, New Zealand isn’t located in Europe. I wish it were, but it isn’t.”
Is there really a need to be pointlessly offensive? Being impolite in public discourse only demeans your own intelligence.
He was kinda provoked; Coxy was a little caustic. At least, he seemed to be to me.
Try using yours, stop associating Noun gender with biological gender, learn about languages, and then you’ll see why noun genders are useful.
Yes, as an American, I take offense! I, for one, know that New Zealand is in Middle Earth.
Really?
Me Og. Me speak good.
Sorry, I just saw
and had to point out how bad your “American” is.
😛
There is no language called American, Americans speak a slightly modified version of English, and they call it…wait for it…English
Na klar… nur weil du an Amerikana bist. Schau mal hier:
http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&p=8x2Ml3&search=amerikanisch
In manche Sprachen gibts “American” ;-). In England sagte man auch ‘American’.
First you need to learn language before you know something like that… and I don’t mean c# 🙂
Was that supposed to be witty? It wasn’t. Sorry.
Please, translate that into “Amerikana” for the rest of us.
Jerk.
Thanks for replying Jerk,
is that really your name? How unfortunate, must have been awful for you at school.
I knew someone at school. Wayne, Wayne Kerr. Maybe he is a cousin of yours, no?
You’re quite welcome. But your grammar needs some work. What you think you’ve read would have been written:
Sincerely, Jerk.
…but alas, we seem to have long departed from intelligent decorum some time ago. So in the words of Barney Frank:
“Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table… I have no interest in doing it.”
Enjoy your Internet, it’s a lovely gift from Amerika!
Yeah, enjoy your american internet, the actual technologies used to show this page were created by CERN in Europe…
That’s another part of the world that your not familiar with as most americans don’t have passports. You’ll find it west of Georgia. That’s the country not the the state 😉
How come you are generalizing North Americans in such a passive aggressive manner? North America has 3 countries:
Canada
USA
Mexico.
Canada and USA have English as the official languages, while French is also spoken in Quebec, and New Brunswick. A lot of the states have large Hispanic populations. The official language of Mexico is of course Spanish.
The WWW was invented at CERN, the internet itself was invented in the states, by DARPA. Email for example, was invented in the states. FTP, same deal. the WWW is not the entire internet, and you would know all this if you put down the beer and the bratwurst, and did some traveling yourself.
Perhaps the reason most Europeans have passports is because there is 30 (a very quick count on my globe, I know there are more) countries within driving distance of Germany. I have to drive for almost 20 hours to get to the US from where I live, and 5-6 days to get to Mexico.
But that’s ok, keep the generalizations and stereotypes coming.
Most North Americans, as I assume most Europeans, cannot not afford to take frequent trips across the Atlantic to become as familiar with the different European cultures and countries, as you seem to be inferring that they should be.
I don’t know what you mean, but I do know that Google tells me that you said:
I’m Canadian, and I speak English. English comes from well, England. The US dialect is a bit farther from the original British English, with greater modifications on spelling, eg. color instead of colour.
Edited 2009-10-27 20:15 UTC
I’m not entirely sure that’s correct. I’ve been told that US English — especially the more rustic varieties, amusingly — is actually closer to the English that was spoken at the time the colonies where founded than what’s spoken in England today; it’s actually British English that’s changed more dramatically. Whether that’s correct or not, I don’t know.
Which sentence do you like to hear ?
Hey, you have a really pretty girlfriend!
or
Hey, you have a really handsome girlfriend!
Pretty and handsome have the same meaning and still the sentences above have a complete different meaning.
When I tell you the second sentence in your face, I’m sure I’m ending up with a black eye.
Well, for one thing, it enriches the expressiveness of the language. It’s also a very natural, human thing. My native language Urdu, also has male and female genders for all nouns and verbs are modified according to the gender of their subjects and objects. In fact, in Urdu, and many other languages, its not possible to say something without a gender involved.
To remove gender from say, French, would be as wrong as saying “Me hot” instead of “I am hot” in English.
Why is it there? Because that’s how the French language developed: it was there in Latin, and it was there in Proto-Indo-European, and beyond that, we don’t know.
What purpose does it serve? It conveys information, just like any other part of speech.
Does its absence result in something lacking in content? Yes, indeed.
It was also there in old English as well… but we got rid of the crap only keeping it for some things such as referring to ships as “she” instead of “it” which is just anthropomorphizing rather than really keeping the old rules around.
Not saying English doesn’t have its own issues, after all, it is also an evolved language, not a perfect language.
When people ask me about the history of the English language i usually say something like:
“Well, first we were invaded by the Romans while we were speaking early Gaelic/Germanic type languages around the regions, then we got invaded by the vikings, then the church influenced the language, France invaded us and we had a French Royal family but we got our own back and invaded France and gave them a British Royal Family for a while….. basically English has been modified over the years by everyone who invaded us or who we invaded to the point that Old English is barely recognizable to a current inhabitant of the British Isles.”
And this I think, is a good thing. Because of all this English is a very flexible language and many students find words from their native languages in English due to cross-pollination.
Cant remember the words now, but over the last couple of years was even amazed to discover some words of Russian origin in English. Also, if you learn a but of Russian then some of the words in Stanley Kubrick’s – A Clockwork Orange, are instantly recognizable.
The fact that so many languages make it so hard to write anything in a gender-neutral way is often a big problem. My 11-year-old daughter is very sensitive to sexist language and assumptions lately; if her native language were not English, things would be much worse.
Douglas Hofstadter of Gödel, Escher, Bach fame wrote an interesting essay about what life would be like if we used a different human attribute than gender to make language distinctions:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
Well, I would have to disagree. Having genders, plurality, politeness, tenses, etc in language enriches it and lets us communicate in a richer way. Language represents human communication, so it’s no surprise that it contains very human concepts in its grammar, such as gender.
A language containing grammatical gender has nothing to do with a piece of literature in that language being demeaning to either men or to women. Such a piece of literature can also be written in a language in which gender is less ingrained into the grammar. In other words, sexism != grammatical gender.
I would add that while grammatical sugar is nice, it doesn’t necessarily always take the form of endings, punctuation, case, etc. English is renowned for it’s abusability.
See?
… abusability…
Almost makes me feel guilty of something. Linguicide?
Mailperson? isn’t that specieist and offensive to carrier pigeons and other non-persons that deliver the mail?
I agree. Hallowed are the computers!
The reason we all use n+1 stupid conventions is that French and Americans exist. If they didn’t, everyone else would just standardize on one option and forget about obsolete local alternatives.
The Universal Coordinated Time is called UTC which doesn’t stand for anything because the French were all like “uh non non sacre bleu”.
And then the Americans are all like “it was all like 100 degrees outside”.
Maybe on Venus.
yyyy-mm-dd is a standard now, I am taking bets on what century they will accept it.
No, it is not. Where I come from, our grammar quite clearly states that the accepted format is DD.MM.YYYY.
Technically, it is – ISO 8601 – I cannot see countries moving to it for every day use soon, but I could easily see official documents, legal papers, etc, adopting it.
If the French gender system provokes this much hostility from you, then I suggest you never try to learn Polish. Our gender system is much more complex and in addition to three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), every noun is also identified by its personhood (person vs non-person) and animacy (animate vs non-animate). This is all in addition to the seven noun cases that a noun could fall into (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative).
>I kept asking questions to my teacher (French himself) as to the purpose of it – why? what does it serve? the absence of that results in something lack in the content being transmitted?
As a French myself, I can tell you, it has absolutely no purpose, which isn’t surprising language evolved more or less randomly so it’s not very surprising that the result isn’t ‘rational’.
Note that even minor proposal to simplify French such as replacing ê by é which sounds the same failed, so radical improvement such as adding a neutral gender are quite hopeless..
Although I really like the content of this site, I feel it isn’t always very aligned with the name OSnews as this article really has nothing to do with Operating System’s. Don’t get me wrong, I love this article. I just don’t think the site’s content fits it’s name anymore. Just a thought…
Yup. It’s turning more into Thom’s personal blog…
I wouldn’t really say that. It’s just that a lot of content of this site is more generalized now. Take for example the articles on the Wall Warts and alarm systems written by David. Then you have reviews of geeks.com products and graphics software from Eugenia. When you add that to articles like this, I feel this site is going into a different direction. It’s giving news that geeks like 🙂 (To Eugenia, David and Thom, please do not take this as an insult as that’s not what I wish to do. I actually like your articles)
We’re not experts in real time operating systems or the inner workings of the Linux kernel, nor the finer details of a UNIX mainframe. We need you peeps to contribute news, articles and opinion to make the spread more diverse than just 90% Thom and 10% the rest of the staff.
Look, I don’t mean to be rude about this, but how can you complain about the content of the site when, if you scroll down the homepage, 90% of it is Thom’s, volunteered free. He’s really not being helped here, and if he stopped, OSnews would come to a grinding halt.
The reality is simple, if you don’t like the homepage lineup, start writing, you can change it into something you’d prefer
If the homepage were 90% contributed articles from across the spectrum of users, and 10% the staff, wouldn’t that be better? We need the help; it is for all intents and purposes Thom’s blog, but that’s hardly his fault since he’s the one keeping the ship afloat by filling in all the blanks.
You know what, you’re right Kroc. I was not complaining and I tried to make sure it didn’t seem like it. It’s my fault for not trying to submit anything to the site and for not making any suggestions. I will keep my mouth shut from now on.
I was adding to the thread, coming from the OP, not you specifically. No need to overreact.
The thing that keeps me from trying to submit something is that I’m not sure I have any real chance of being given the time of day (well, that and that I have nothing of value to say…). Basically, extracting from the conduct of the staff so far, I would expect that, if I submitted anything that wasn’t in-line with you guy’s opinions and views, it would never get published. If the site’s staff are in general unashamed to push their own personal views on thing when they create content, why would I expect them to suddenly become neutral facilitators when I offer a submission?
I don’t mean to be rude or ungrateful. I do realize that you guys, and Thom in particular, do a lot of work for free here, and I do appreciate it. It’s just that, if you ask, that’s why I, for one, don’t take your submission request too seriously. If you really want to see more submissions, maybe you should first convince us that you’re really, honest-to-God serious and ready to accept them?
It’s been turning into my personal blog for 6 years now, according to some. Is this process ever going to be finished? It kind of feels like dividing a number in half for all eternity – you never quite reach zero.
What would we ever do without good ol’ Zeno and his paradox…
I, OTOH, do like the diversity of the topics covered by the site. It feels so Renaissance. Just my $.02, and I know that article’s comments are not the best place to talk about such things
but if others do already talk, why wouldn’t I join for a moment :]
Cheers to all and every contributor!
I like how English is pretty restricted in the characters it uses. Some weird exceptions are naïve and vis-à -vis.
I wish there was some book somewhere that discussed many different languages and the unique characteristics of them. It wouldn’t have to work on vocabulary at all, just grammar and typography. For example, it could teach how to write in Arabic, which I think is right to left and possibly some letters affect how the next is drawn. Such a book would help in developing a text editor that could be designed to support many languages. Maybe such a book exists. Any recommendations?
Don’t forget façade and crème brûlée.
How come only French words are spelt properly? Loan words from any other language usually have the diacritics removed. For example the Swedish word smörgåsbord.
Personally I think English would benefit from having a few more letters since the language contains almost twice as many phonemes as it does letters. Sure, it’s convenient when you need to cram the letters into a limited amount of code points but spelling gets so much easier when you employ the principle “one sound – one letter”. Take a look at some of the slavic languages like Czech. I think it’s time to reintroduce some of the older English letters: þ, ð, æ, Å“, È, Æ¿.
In Dutch, diacritic marks cannot be omitted. They change the pronunciation of words, so if you remove them, pronunciation changes (and maybe meaning, too – I can’t think of an example, though).
We use all of them – accent grave, acute, cedilla, circumflex, and even the tilde.
I read that the idiotic commas-inside-quotes rule of the US was introduced by bad typewriters not positioning commas well after a quotation mark. Although completely adapting to that is more because of a low IQ than “computers”.
http://grammartips.homestead.com/inside.html
Not few people in Spain have cell phones that do not allow for opening question and exclamation marks. ¿What is an opening question mark, you say? ¡Well, I just wrote it for you a sentence ago!
As a result (added to other causes, such as the ridiculous character limit on SMS or because sometime people are just lazy) many people are omitting them in Spanish far too often. A pity, because they are indeed handy, specially on long or multiline sentences. In fact, how come not every other language uses them?
That depends on the language. Some could certainly use opening question marks. In Spanish, if I recall correctly, declarative and interrogative sentences can sometimes only be told apart from their intonation. Others, like my mother tongue Swedish, uses another word order for questions and thus you know pretty much from the start that it is a question even in a written text.
I see what you mean. Japanese too, for example, uses a syllable (㋠ka) at the end of a question. And yet, the same as in Spanish —sometimes—, like you correctly pointed out, you can then add or not a question mark and still have it understood. In fact, I bet Japanese did not use the question mark before the Meiji Restoration (≈1860). No real idea about that, though.
In Spanish interrogative pronouns have tildes on them, so you can tell their nature also by that (while a redundant feature, not all questions start with an interrogative pronoun anyway, so the opening question mark is still useful). But yet, some of those same cell phones do not allow for some of those tildes either!
What purpose does it serve? “I AM GOING TO ASK A QUESTION AND THIS MARK IS TO INFORM YOU THAT I AM” and then closing it being little more than “I AM CLOSING THIS QUESTION MARK BECAUSE YOU MIGHT GET CONFUSED” – now imagine a slightly over weight man screaming that at the beginning and end of that sentence to give you what a visualisation of what it appears on the page to the reader. Envisage the tango man doing it – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1jywlZG74o . To me it is an attempt to label the reader an idiot who can’t seem to understand when a question is asked either that or I am just mad trying to bring about a metaphysical representation of my reaction when I see such oddities on a page
Maybe I just have a hatred against needless syntax that ad no literary value beyond “it looks nice” but serving no functionary purpose. Boomer addresses why it is there based on historical reasoning but fails to address why it still exists today. Why not purge it out? it doesn’t serve any real purpose, its a needless complication for people to learn the language and it simply adds fluff to an otherwise simple sentence.
Why? why not use the wonderful comma? why not a series of questions one after another? if it is necessary, then how come other language can get away not using it? I hear examples but their reason for trying to work around crappy sentence structure rather than addressing why the sentence structure is crappy. Adding to the fact that there is a growing trend of people not reading the full sentence, paragraph or set of writing on its entirety and trying to pull out pieces in isolation rather than seeing the writing that should be viewed holistically. So if anything – maybe the solution is to get people to read and write properly than dropping in symbols to make up for craptastic comprehension and grammar.
Edited 2009-10-27 12:08 UTC
I have little to no knowledge about Spanish, but it could be that in Spanish, the sentence structure does not change based on whether the sentence is a question or not. If that’s indeed the case (a Spanish speaker will have to confirm) then I can certainly see a use in starting a question sentence with a toppled-over question mark, because else you wouldn’t know it was a question until you reached the end of the sentence – screwing up intonation, especially when reading aloud.
As a native Spanish speaker, I can tell that Thorn is right indeed. Even though some words can help you learn you are about to state a question or an exclamation (as elmimmo stated above), most of the time the only way to know it is through intonation. Without opening marks, when you get to the closing one it is way too late.
As a side note, I am pasting a rather amusing but totally true statement found in the “Spanish language” article in Wikipedia:
“An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ¿Cómo, como como? ¡Como como, como! (What do you mean, how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!).” I assure you each and every one of those “como” are pronounced the same, but intonated differently.
English frequently uses intonation alone to mark questions. Yet we get by without an opening question mark. You certainly don’t need an opening exclamation point because neither language has special syntax for that (it is, in fact, entirely based on intonation and doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence).
I will not talk about English intonation because it is still a mistery to me.
However, Spanish intonation for both questions and exclamations requires that you rise your pitch at the very beginning and ending of the sentence (well, more or less, but you get the general idea). As we usually do not change neither the words nor their order when using those constructions, you do need a clue while reading; that is what the opening mark is for. Even more so as we tend to use very long sentences, with the closing mark possibly out of immediate sight.
I do not wish imply that they are needed in every language out there, but in Spanish they certainly are.
I believe the reason is mostly caused by the word(s) “Por que”:
http://spanish.about.com/od/writtenspanish/a/porque.htm
It’s a horrible little pair of syllables that take the place of “why is/are”, “because”, “for what/which”, “that”, and sometimes “for the reason”. It can be one or two words, with or without accent.
English is less compact and tends to make a question’s syntax more obvious towards the end. I once had a Spanish teacher point out that English is also more suspenseful than most Latin-based languages and causes the reader to reach the end of the sentence before it can be fully digested by the brain. Alternatively, in Spanish you know the subject/noun first and adjectives come later, making the beginning of the sentence more significant – perhaps worthy of an upside-down question mark. But it’s still ugly if you ask me.
English: “red rubber ball”
Spanish: “pelota de goma roja”
Funny, for me as Spaniard it was the closing question mark always that looked upside down (I do know the opening one is called “inverted”, it just does not match my impression of it).
In Italian it’s like in Spanish, the structure does not change. But we don’t use a reverse question mark.
BTW, Thom: I moved to the Netherlands 2 months ago and I’m struggling with the Dutch language. I’m taking a course, but man it’s hard to learn!
Calling all Spanish speaking people subdued by the idiocy of their language was nice trolling. So, knowing that what follows is a sentence before actually starting to read it has no purpose? Then I bet, say, opening quotation marks do not have one either.
I can perfectly admit that other languages can perfectly pass without opening question or exclamation marks. It was just a rhetorical statement. There are no absolutes, man. Of course the content of the text helps you understand the nature of it. Sometimes, though, it is handy to get a hint or two. Or you’ll tell me you have never ever been in that situation when you realize your intonation was wrong all along until you got to the end, right?
And we are talking languages here. If you wanted math, it is the wrong thread. Why does the English 3rd person has a frigging s at the end in present tense? I see nobody claiming for getting rid of it.
Edited 2009-10-27 22:21 UTC
Thanks, i really enjoyed that. Also interesting that Dutch is slowly loosing its declenations (god… is that a word?).
For the last 5 years or so i’ve been trying to get some sort of grip on Russian and the thing that really drives me bonkers (being native English) is the way words change *all* the time. If i didnt need the language i would never have started.
Maybe time to move country… always wanted to live in the Netherlands.
Dutch lost its declensions a long, long time ago. In fact, they were already in decline in the Middle Ages. The reason for still having them around is that some pedantic Latinophiles thought Dutch would look better and more like latin with all those cases, and re-introduced them in written language and high vernacular. Really stupid.
JAL
Thom, you should know very well the origin is – again – Greek: Ολα Καλα
No.
Read the wikipedia article that he linked. The actual origin of the word okay is unknown, and there are several popular theories. The one you mentioned is just one of the popular theories, and it’s not even necessarily the most likely.
Although the article was entertaining, and as far as the discussion on quotes is concerned almost accurate, there are some factual errors on the Dutch language:
Dutch and German form a language continuum, back then and now still. Dutch once did have declensions, but started to lose them in medieval times (they were re-introduced later for the written language).
“des X zijn”, is a fixed expression. Though the genetive may not be entirely dead, your example is exactly a fixed expression, and I bet you use it even when [name] is a female (and not “der X” in that case).
That’s not in discourse, that’s in fixed expressions. Noone says “de heer ‘s huizes”, or the like.
JAL
That’s “pedantry”. (We’re here to help.)
Not to be confused with Pederasty. (also here to help)
Interesting article, but unfortunately I think it misses the point badly, overemphasizing the role of computers in the evolution of languages. Things like slang etc. continue to have much more profound effect on languages.
You’re the one missing the point. Where did I say computers have a bigger impact than other influences? I just posited two minor cases (I even called them minor in the article) where the computer DID play an important role.
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).
U+00AB «
U+00BB »
🙂
These are incorrectly called ‘Guillemots’ in the Unicode table, a typo. A truly subtle, but ingenious way to wind up the French
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
Eleven is a convention too, it’s not like the other whatever-teen things, like: sixteen.
In Danish, the official way to quote is to use the “geese eyes” characters, such as: Henrik siger »Goddag«. Note that this is the inverse of the French quotation marks, such as in «Bonjour».
These are not available on a Danish keyboard either, so we also here see the use of English-style quotation.
Microsoft Word has also made another, more serious change to the Danish language: In Denmark, we often join words, such as »morgenbrød« meaning “morning bread”. The spell checker in Word can, however, not handle general word joining, so only the most common combinations have been added as explicit cases to the dictionary. The result is that, when someone writes a word correctly joined, Word complains about the spelling, but removes the complaint when you (incorrectly) separate the word. Hence, you everywhere now see words written separately that should rightly be joined.
Thankfully, our “special” letters Æ, Ø and Ã… are found on modern Danish keyboards, but before the ISO 8851-1 standard, there was no standard encoding of these letters in the ASCII character set, so you found nonstandard solutions such as replacing [\] by ÆØÅ (and {|} by æøå), which placed them right after Z/z (as they are in the Danish alphabet), so sorting would work. When the IBM PC came to Denmark, it used some of the characters in the 128-255 range for the Danish letters, but not the same that was later used in the ISO 8851-1 standard. So converting documents using the Danish letters between formats was always tricky (and still is, if one part uses ISO 8851-1 and the other UTF8).
In Dutch we join words like Danish too. Though at least the spell checker of OpenOffice handles this correctly.
Atleast you get to type in your language, leaving the punctuation aside… Indians, on the other hand, almost never have the luxury of typing in their language. The indic fonts are hard to get, and the indian keyboards are very rare. Most of the time my friends try to type telugu or so in english and it’s awfully painful to read considering how I try to apply english pronuciations to those arbitrarily transliterated messages..
Seriously? I may not be able to type it, or understand it, but I searched (google) around for enough Indic fonts to be able to view the various blocks in Unicode.
What OS do you use?
You have to understand that majority of my friends (indians) are laymen using XP loaded PC’s. In other words majority if not all would get around searching for fonts or learning keyboard layouts they can’t feel on QWERTY. Getting the indic font rendering to work in XP means that you needed the original CD, which is a joke in third-world countries anyway.
As for myself, I use Linux, XP, Vista, Win7, Mac OS X and Haiku. But the deal is that when I’m chatting with my friends the fonts are either absent or they’re transformed into weird letters.
Do note that the indic keyboards is also an important issue here. Most of the software that render indic scripts can’t be integrated and thus are rarely used. I tried using a AHK script to use IAST (which means that I’d just have to rely on good ol’ QWERTY) but it gets changed to an unreadable font.
I’ll admit that it’s been a while since I started doing it again, but I don’t recall Arial Unicode to be installed by default on XP systems (I believe it comes with Office?) and Yahoo Messenger turns the IAST into unreadable mess..
Thom,
please make it obvious that the English of which you are referring to in this article is American English, as Commonwealth English uses different quotations.
Of course, the situation in the articles repeats, British use has been affected as of late by the lack of any support from Microsoft.
I notice you missed commenting on decimal separator differences, I know a Slovenian who never knew that theirs was ‘,’, albeit she is a teen
Examples:
‘this is a quote’
‘“this is a quote†quoting the above’
‘grocers apostrophe’s suck’
Ah, keyboard layouts and character encodings, one of my favorite topics.
Here in Sweden we have it quite easy since straight quotes are perfectly fine. When we use curved quotes only the right high ones are used (â€like thisâ€). Of course, word processors would change straight quotes into curly automatically if you told it to. However in the past they were often hardcoded for english and would change the opening quotes into the left curled ones.
I’m a Mac user and I happen to know that on my Swedish keyboard I can type “, †or „ by holding shift+alt and then type n, m or comma. But to most people, if it’s not (visible) on the keyboard, it doesn’t exist. I had a Spanish teacher that would add all the ¡, ¿ and ~ by hand to her printed texts since she didn’t know and didn’t bother to find out how to type them on her computer. When I studied some Chinese a few years later I remember we were given a special pinyin font that replaced ä, â, ë, ê… with the proper Ä, ÇŽ, Ä“, ě… . *Brr*, such solutions make me shudder. A hint to those who deals a lot with foreign languages: check out the extended keyboards which contain most of the diacritics you’ll ever need plus a ton of other symbols.
Another thing that’s been influenced by enlgish and computers is the use of the decimal point versus the decimal comma (and subsequently whether to use commas or spaces as thousands separators). The decimal comma is used in all of Europe (except the UK). However many computer programs expect the input to be using a point. This has led to some younger people (at least that’s what I’ve seen here in Sweden) having started to use the decimal point in other contexts as well and even stating that they prefer it.
Are there any standards, or barring that, reliable guides (preferably in English) as to what the various sets of rules are regarding the separation of digits? I inherited some software that has both “.” for fractional separation and “,” for digit grouping hard coded, and I would like to ensure that the correct form can be used globally. Our case is complicated because we have cases where we need to parse the local form to convert back to an internally numeric form as well.
That won’t be exactly a response to your question, but I’ve once had issues with that – and then I stumbled into an article, which surprised me even more. It mentions that there are some countries where digit grouping is not done in groups of three at all!…
see: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/04/17/577483.aspx
Another difference computers made to Dutch has to do with our ,lange IJ†(teasing Thom). In Dutch the ‘ij’ is one character. This character doesn’t appear our US Keyboards though (it does on the Dutch layout and old typewriters I belief) so we write it as two characters i and j.
One small consequence is in counting; the word “zijn†has three characters, though computers think there are four. It’s clearly one character in written Dutch, we’re it is most times written as an y with dots on it. But because nowadays we type more then write most people think “zijn†has four letters.
Alphabetically sorting words containing a IJ is also difficult for computers, because the think the words start we an I. (Though the rules about sorting the IJ differed before computers.)
I heard that in Flemish the ij are two distinct characters, and are there for also capitalized as Ijswinkel (instead of our superior IJswinkel -:)
Edited 2009-10-27 12:55 UTC
The long and short “ij/ei” is still a mystery for me. I don’t hear a difference for starters. Secondly, it’s supposed to be a different character but have you ever chanted Dutch alphabet using that character? I haven’t
To me, it’s something indoctrinated at young age and not a real character. (I was raised bilingual Dutch/Serbo-Croatian btw)
One thing that I miss in this article is the change of spelling in (mostly) youngsters typing. I’ve seen a lot youngster use “egt”-> “echt” or “lag”-> “lach” (mostly being the lack of spelling functionality in for example MSN Messenger).
The ij and eij used to be pronounced differently, and because some Dutch dialects still pronounce them different they are not combined yet. The same is true for the g and ch. In most parts of the Netherlands these are indistinguishable, but for example here in Brabant we use our (in)famous ‘soft g’ for g, and use the ‘hard g’ for ch.
(The pronounciation of our soft g is actually one of the most rare sounds of the world
Officially the IJ is the 25th character of the Dutch alphabet, between X and Z. That’s why we say “iks, ij, zet’ instead of ‘iks, griekse ij, zet’
(http://leespret.web-log.nl/mijn_weblog/images/2009/05/24/alfabet.jp…)
I think that youngsters use ‘egt’ and ‘lag’ because they think it’s cool. I did not see it outside msn language much.
Edited 2009-10-28 08:03 UTC
I’ve looked at the previous subject and not that many comments were about language purity but apparently it’s a subject you like..
I live in France so I’ve heard too many times about language purity debates..
I find them quite annoying in fact: language evolves in time, not so long ago people didn’t go very much to school so it was really true evolution, why should we block language evolution now??
Because we have ‘language tzars’ who want to prove that they are important by managing language evolution and polititians who take an easy ride with nationalists by managing language ‘purity’??
In an historical context it doesn’t make sense.
I use LaTex partly for that reason: using babel packages we get all the quoting, apostrophes and even the -ij- right. Diacritics are no problem, etc. But not really a mass market solution, as most people are scared off by it… (also we can make a difference between -, — and — “hyphens”, etc. Knuth is a language nerd too!
As an example: The german language has similar requirements as Thom mentioned, such as the correct use of single and double quotes, and very few uses of the apostrophe. LaTeX serves excellently here.
I’m using LaTeX only, because I consider a professional typesetting system to be a higher stage in evolution than a sloppy text processing program. 🙂
Of course it isn’t a “mass market solution”, because it requires the user to be familiar with very few LaTeX technques (macros, document structing etc.). If you take the time to learn LaTeX (which isn’t much different to learning HTML or C), you’ll find the correct differentiation of content and form (note my “evolution” comment above) to be one of the strengths of this typesetting system. You don’t have to care HOW things look, instead you tell LaTeX WHAT things are, e. g. a chapter caption, a footnote, or a quote. This makes it easy to design the process of creating the content as painless as possible. One of the means to do so is the absence of a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) style interface. Instead, a paradigm describable as YAFIYGI (you asked for it, you got it) is applied. So you don’t end up in microformatting your documents (e. g. raising the font size and activating “bold” if you want something to be a headline). I know that many text processors offer the opportinuty to use predefined templates and styles for different “functions” of text, but most users simply don’t use it; instead, they use microformatting as described.
Given those facts, LaTeX is not a “mass market solution” because it is a very professional tool. And as always, the worst solution prevails, so there’s jut a “niche market” for LaTeX, mainly education and professional documentation, as well as very few writers. And because LaTeX isn’t sold in shiny boxes on the shelf of computer shops, there is no “market” at all. At least “usage share” could count.
LaTeX is not as hard to use as its haters want everyone to believe. I started using it in school when I wanted my texts to be formatted accurately and searched for an easy means to import graphics and formulas. LaTeX can handle all this. And the learning curve is not that steep. When I was in school, there was no Internet that provided ready-made solutions, I had to learn it myself! 🙂
One of the most advanced concepts of LaTeX is that even with all the fine character manipulations, graphics, formulas, tables and formattings, it is based on text files. You don’t need LaTeX to create .tex files, and you don’t need LaTeX and other tools to read (or modify) a ,tex file. Allthough there are macros in the text, you can read the content easily, it’s much easier than reading XML stuff. Plain text is the most comfortable data format for interchange purposes between different operating systems.
Another fine thing is that you can easily turn your documents into PDF files that keep all your formatting intact.
Bottom line: Use LaTeX and get rid of all those silly problems. =^_^=
Nicely done, Thom!
I do believe this shift is also partly the influence of the English language on the Dutch language, so not limited to computers alone.
For example, many Dutch currently write:
WRONG: Dat is Peter’s huis.
Akin to the English: That is Peter’s house.
CORRECT: Dat is Peters huis.
(Note: I probably write the apostrophe in the correct form completely wrong… oh well 😛 )
The genitive-s…
MAY IT ROT IN HELL FOR AL ETERNITY.
There. I hate that thing in Dutch. Remarkably inconsistent.
It’s present in German, too, but much more interesting. The apostrophe is used to indicate one of the three things:
a) Attention! A “s” follows!
b) Attention! The last letter follows!
c) This is plural.
In most cases, the apostrophe is represented by a gravis or an acute.
Examples: Helga’s CD`s sind nich’t gut. (Helga’s CDs are not good.) Finger weg, das ist mein’s! (Fingers off, this is mine.) Ich habe nicht`s gesehen. (I have nothing seen.)
The only places where an apostrophe should be placed it is gently omitted.
Oh the joy of continuous newspeak spelling reforms! Imaginn iff I wott do thi`s to The englis languish wott you like, it? Surely not. 🙂
I know that a lot of French writers actually use Macs since it was nearly impossible to write correct French on a PC before the advent of Unicode.
The main reason was that PC “code pages” did not contain all the characters needed whereas Macs used the MacRoman charset.
http://geeks.free.fr/macroman/
In French we are supposed to use:
– left and right pointing double angle quotation marks: « »
– a couple ligatures: Å“ æ
– accented capitals: À É Ê…
– apostrophe: ’
And you will notice that I used the ellipsis char: … not dot-dot-dot …
Even nowadays you need cumbersome keystrokes to get access to those on a PC (it’s a bit easier on a Mac).
All those characters have been present in the 256 byte ASCII set. And I was always able to enter them in Solaris, mostly due to the means of the “Compose” key, so the absence of many non-US characters or at least the easyness to create them seems to be quite PC-specific.
By the way, I seem to recognize the double angle quotation marks from my russian lessons in school, but I think I remember to have learned the form of »pointing to the center« there (Alt-Gr Y X here).
It’s easy on a PC running UNIX and X, especially with a Sun USB keyboard, like ÉÀøæßöçéÃýôÚ and other typographical attributes. 🙂
May be Bahasa Indonesia is the simplest language I know. Persistent pronunciation like Germany, no gender, no plural form, no tenses conjugation. Simple?
Typographic issues are more implied by imported typewritters and printing cost in the XVIIIth century than computers limitations : those come from typewriter legacy.
Althought, computers impact the vocable. The verb ‘valider’ for ‘to validate’ was not widely in use previously. The verb ‘éditer’ changed its meaning from printing a book to modify a file. That’s due to the a simple fact : frenches have a bad foreign language skills.
As you can read
(But I do efforts, I swear)
Ive read a few comments now where people have said things like genders and cases enrich the language, but to my mind it still makes things more complicated than they need to be and also to my mind, don’t add anything.
To take a simple example with Russian.
She said – она Ñказала
he said – он Ñказал
I don’t get why i need the additional ‘a’ at the end of “she said”. It doesnt bring anything to the table. I know in Russian you can cheat a bit often and drop the pronoun, and thus loose the ability to determine gender… but anyway i’m using gender (language) = gender (sex) here, and for things like pen, pencil, paper then there is no sex gender.
Another example focusing on the word cat.
cat = кот
give me a cat = дайте мне кота
Again… why change the word? Why not?: дайте мне кот
(PS: Sorry to all native speakers of Russian… my Russian is pretty crap).
So… how do these things enrich the language?
Ive read a few comments now where people have said things like genders and cases enrich the language, but to my mind it still makes things more complicated than they need to be and also to my mind, don’t add anything.
Well, they DO enrich the language, but I do agree with you in that it doesn’t add anything meaningful to it. It only serves to add confusion to any non-native speakers, and it takes a while to learn and memorize all the correct places where to use genders.
In Finnish we have no such thing, we use “hän” (“he”/”she”, no gender associated) of people and “se” (“it”) for everything else, and I don’t feel like we’re losing out on anything of value.
Anyways, merely wanted to add something to the discussion even if it is off-topic. Apologizes to anyone it may offend