Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
NOTE: use Perl; is on undef hiatus. You can read content, but you can't post it. More info will be forthcoming forthcomingly.

All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Lingua::EN::VarCon - Starting a war against America(n) 11 Comments More | Login | Reply /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More | Login | Reply
Loading... please wait.
  • Ha ha ! great post, I like your sense of humour.

    As a side note, I'll add that this approach wouldn't be that useful for French : every French-speaking country (in Europe, America or Africa) uses the One True Spelling defined by the Académie. However, there are differences in vocabulary between fr_FR, fr_BE and fr_CA. But vocabulary is notoriously difficult to translate without context...

    • You'll have to forgive me some poetic licence :)

      You are correct of course. French, and also German, have active systems in place to protect and standardise the language, something that we unfortunately don't have.

      But much of this problem DOES stem from this problem of having English being American. 2/3rds of the programs on my desktop right now, including Thunderbird, have American dictionaries, and don't come out with British versions with anything like the rapidity of, say, the French version.

      And it reall
  • As I understand things, American wasn't originally a fork of English. The 'simpler' spellings (eg: harbor instead of harbour) you referred to were actually the common usage in England at the time.

    What happened was the English language continued to develop and more elegant spelling conventions were imported from other languages (esp. French). But the Americans no longer had real-time network access to the development branch. They were stuck on the last stable release which quickly became outdated.

    Ultimate
  • While you're about it, perhaps you could undertake overall spelling reform. English could do with some rationalization of the byzantine relationship between sound and script, as compared to German and French. http://pages.infinit.net/mtalbot/humour/4.html [infinit.net] http://www.rocksforkids.com/FabFours/spelling.htm [rocksforkids.com] I hope the Queen will see her way to appointing some computer chappies to undertake this important project. But perhaps the US is also willing to participate, seeing how the ISO 8601 Date Format is gaini
    • Well, that is a MUCH bigger problem, and one completely beyond my powers or responsibility.

      Someone else can deal with language unification, I'd just like WHATEVER the correct spelling is deemed to be to at least be available.

      Also, I believe someone has already done what you are talking about. That's partly how we got American in the first place.
  • "[R]ebel colonials in America have gotten a
    little out of control, and are creating spelling
    confusion and inconvenience "
    That 'gotten' is surely an Americanism, isn't it.

    In British English it would be 'got.' No?
    • While I may aim for British English, I write in Australian :)

      I suspect gotten has seeded a bit too hard here to be removed.

      Certainly in my town anyway.
      • Got, got, gotten are lazy words. They are used when the speaker/writer can't think of a better word. Or so said my grade two primary school teacher.

        She said that you can always find a better formulation that doesn't used them.

        "[R]ebel colonials in America are a
        little out of control"

        "[R]ebel colonials in America have gone a/become
        little out of control"

        Something like that.

  • As far as I am concerned, English is ultimately defined as the language spoken in England.

    You basically lost me here.. There are many languages spoken in England.... If you find that answer too smartallecky, then which dialect are you referring to specifically? Why do you or anybody get to choose which of those represent "real" English? Saying that BBC English is the real one is arbitrary, and most people don't use it. (I'd like to see a table of how many people speak various dialects of English.)

    I've

    • It's not smart-alecky, but it is pedantic, and reading more into what I'm saying than I am. You've also missed the main point in that I'm talking about written English, and not spoken English.

      As to your specific points, I get to choose because it's MY opinion, and nobody elses. As far as _I_ am concerned, and as I related it to my personal universe, that is the case.

      As to which is better, I really don't care and made no implications that either spelling was inherantly better. Dictating what the official spe
Stories, comments, journals, and other submissions on use Perl; are Copyright 1998-2006, their respective owners.