Upper/lower case words in titles
Markus Kuhn
use of uppercase and lowercase letters in titles and section
headings of English language publications?
English is the only language that I know, where some authors use
different rules for uppercase/lowercase spelling in titles
and in normal sentences.
I have noted that ISO standards do not follow this rule. In titles
and headings, they capitalise only the first letter of a phrase
as well as words that are part of a name. I can see numerous
advantages for this approach, especially for the software management
of bibliographic references. In the scientific literature,
habits seem to be rather mixed today, with some journals requiring
uppercase titles, while others require lowercase titles, i.e.
On the Diffusion of Pollutants in the Mediterranean Sea
versus
On the diffusion of pollutants in the Mediterranean Sea
It would IMHO simplify the management of bibliographic databases
significantly, if this practice could be formally standardized,
in my opinion preferably towards using the conventions used
in normal sentences.
I suspect that the frequently found capitalisation of most words
or of at least all nouns in English titles is some form of ancient
emphasis that was invented before we had bold fonts. If that is
the only original reason, then no doubt the practice is obsolete
today, and we can return to normal sencence casing and abandon
the horrid complications of case management of bibtex and similar
systems.
Any related references or opinions?
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
Henry Churchyard
> Markus Kuhn <mg...@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Are there any good standards or rational preferences for the use of
> uppercase and lowercase letters in titles and section headings of
> English language publications? English is the only language that I
> know, where some authors use different rules for uppercase/lowercase
> spelling in titles and in normal sentences. I suspect that the
> frequently found capitalisation of most words or of at least all
> nouns in English titles is some form of ancient emphasis that was
> invented before we had bold fonts. If that is the only original
> reason, then no doubt the practice is obsolete today, and we can
> return to normal sencence casing and abandon the horrid
> complications of case management of bibtex and similar systems.
Is a native German speaker complaining about the irrationality of
_English_ capitalization practices??? That's a reversal! If you can
persuade continental Europeans to standardize on running titles down
the spines of books (instead of perversely running up the spines), and
placing tables of contents at the beginning of books (instead of
peculiarly placing them at the very end), then maybe after all that
has been accomplished would be the right time to start discussing
English title capitalization! I will grant you that the American
English convention of arbitrarily placing punctuation before closing
quote marks is rather ugly and illogical, though...
--%!PS
10 10 scale/M{rmoveto}def/R{rlineto}def 12 45 moveto 0 5 R 4 -1 M 5.5 0 R
currentpoint 3 sub 3 90 0 arcn 0 -6 R 7.54 10.28 M 2.7067 -9.28 R -5.6333
2 setlinewidth 0 R 9.8867 8 M 7 0 R 0 -9 R -6 4 M 0 -4 R stroke showpage
% Henry Churchyard chu...@crossmyt.com http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/
Markus Kuhn
>If you canpersuade continental Europeans to standardize on running titles down
>the spines of books (instead of perversely running up the spines)
I have been working on that for years! Titles must run downwards
according to ISO 6357. Unfortunately, a German DIN standard said in
1957 that they should run upwards. This DIN standard was fixed to
comply with the English and ISO convention in 1975, but unfortunately
most German publishers seem to stil employ typographers who were
trained before 1975 and the news hasn't spread yet. As a result,
you can quickly get a neck injury today in German libraries as you
wobble your head along the shelves to read titles that go half the time
upwards and half the time downwards (with a few horizontal ones
on wide spines).
So at least in Germany, the standard is clear, it is just that
quite some publishers still ignore them, very much to the pain
of anyone standing in front of a book shelf.
>and placing tables of contents at the beginning of books (instead of
>peculiarly placing them at the very end)
Sorry, I have never seen that. Who is doing this?
>then maybe after all that
>has been accomplished would be the right time to start discussing
>English title capitalization!
Markus
Brian Inglis
wrote:
>Are there any good standards or rational preferences for the
>use of uppercase and lowercase letters in titles and section
>headings of English language publications?
I think it's probably a house style preference whether title case
or sentence case is used for various heading levels.
>English is the only language that I know, where some authors use
>different rules for uppercase/lowercase spelling in titles
>and in normal sentences.
I think the title case rules use initial caps for the first word
and any subsequent word not in the ~100 most common words list.
>I have noted that ISO standards do not follow this rule. In titles
>and headings, they capitalise only the first letter of a phrase
>as well as words that are part of a name. I can see numerous
>advantages for this approach, especially for the software management
>of bibliographic references. In the scientific literature,
>habits seem to be rather mixed today, with some journals requiring
>uppercase titles, while others require lowercase titles, i.e.
>
> On the Diffusion of Pollutants in the Mediterranean Sea
>
>versus
>
> On the diffusion of pollutants in the Mediterranean Sea
>
>It would IMHO simplify the management of bibliographic databases
>significantly, if this practice could be formally standardized,
>in my opinion preferably towards using the conventions used
>in normal sentences.
>
>I suspect that the frequently found capitalisation of most words
>or of at least all nouns in English titles is some form of ancient
>emphasis that was invented before we had bold fonts. If that is
>the only original reason, then no doubt the practice is obsolete
>today, and we can return to normal sencence casing and abandon
>the horrid complications of case management of bibtex and similar
>systems.
>
>Any related references or opinions?
>
>Markus
--
Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Brian....@CSi.com (Brian dot Inglis at SystematicSw dot ab dot ca)
fake address use address above to reply
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spam traps
David Kastrup
> "Henry Churchyard" <chu...@crossmyt.com> writes:
> >If you canpersuade continental Europeans to [...]
> >and placing tables of contents at the beginning of books (instead of
> >peculiarly placing them at the very end)
>
> Sorry, I have never seen that. Who is doing this?
Pretty common in the last century, for example. Probably was before
the trick of roman page numbers for table of contents was invented:
that way you could typeset the table of contents after the layout of
the other pages had been finished.
Plain TeX documents creating a table of contents usually spew it at
the end of the document, too.
--
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
Email: David....@t-online.de
Mike Oliver
> Pretty common in the last century, for example. Probably was before
> the trick of roman page numbers for table of contents was invented:
Just which century do you mean by "the last century"?
A Sunday installment of "Frazz", one of the more intelligent new comic
strips, referred to _Atlas_Shrugged_ as a work of "this century" --
well into 2001. It seems to be an easy mistake to make. Or maybe not
a mistake, if you interpret "this century" as "the most recent 100
years", which is at least borderline defensible.
Markus Kuhn
>Pretty common in the last century, for example. Probably was before
>the trick of roman page numbers for table of contents was invented:
>that way you could typeset the table of contents after the layout of
>the other pages had been finished.
Roman numerals for front matters is frowned upon by ISO as well.
At least the ISO standards for technical reports and theses say
that documents should be numbered continuously in arabic numerals
throughout the document starting from page 1. Makes a lot of
sense today, as PDF viewers show the same numbering, and any
separate roman numbers for front matter just render the table
of contents and index less useable. So better use in LeTeX the
report style instead of the book style (which differ mostly in he
numbering of front matter).
Steve MacGregor
> Are there any good standards or rational preferences for the
> use of uppercase and lowercase letters in titles and section
> headings of English language publications?
What I was taught in school is to capitalize the first word, the last
word, and all other words except articles, prepositions, and
conjunctions.
Some modify this rule by capitalizing prepositions and conjunctions
that have more than one syllable, or have more than a certain number
of letters.
My personal rule is to capitalize the first word, the last word, and
all other words except clitics[1].
--
Whom are you going to call? GRAMMAR BUSTERS!
<http://www.geocities.com/esperantujo>
[1] A clitic is a word with no accented syllables.
David Kastrup
> David Kastrup wrote:
>
> > Pretty common in the last century, for example. Probably was before
> > the trick of roman page numbers for table of contents was invented:
>
> Just which century do you mean by "the last century"?
The 19th.
> A Sunday installment of "Frazz", one of the more intelligent new
> comic strips, referred to _Atlas_Shrugged_ as a work of "this
> century" -- well into 2001. It seems to be an easy mistake to make.
> Or maybe not a mistake, if you interpret "this century" as "the most
> recent 100 years", which is at least borderline defensible.
Well, no use weaseling around, my words were clearly in error. Still
have to get used to being in 21st.
Maurizio Loreti
> Mike Oliver <oli...@math.ucla.edu> writes:
>
> > David Kastrup wrote:
> > ...
> > Just which century do you mean by "the last century"?
>
> The 19th.
> ...
> Well, no use weaseling around, my words were clearly in error. Still
> have to get used to being in 21st.
You have lost one century (the 20th) between the last one and the
current one --- sorry, couldn't resist... 8^)
--
Maurizio Loreti - Linux Is Not UniX - http://www.pd.infn.it/~loreti/mlo.html
Univ. of Padova, Dept. of Physics - Padova, Italy lor...@pd.infn.it
Douwe Egbert
"Markus Kuhn" <mg...@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:a2f2el$hch$1...@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk...
> Are there any good standards or rational preferences for the
> use of uppercase and lowercase letters in titles and section
> headings of English language publications?
>
> English is the only language that I know, where some authors use
> different rules for uppercase/lowercase spelling in titles
> and in normal sentences.
Actually it tends to be an editorial rather than
an authorial preference.
"House style" rules.
--
D E
Markus Kuhn
the book "The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax" by Geoffrey K. Pullum
(University of Chicago Press, 1991, ISBN 0-226-68534-9, p. 73),
which presents in the essay "Punctuation and human freedom" a good
case *against* the capitalization of title words, naming primarily
the loss of information that this brings (e.g., "The Case for
Case", "xerox" versus "Xerox", "the ford" versus "the Ford",
etc.).
http://dannyreviews.com/h/The_Great_Eskimo_Vocabulary_Hoax.html
Jules Bean
> the book "The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax" by Geoffrey K. Pullum
(note the capitalisation)
> http://dannyreviews.com/h/The_Great_Eskimo_Vocabulary_Hoax.html
(irony ;-)
J
Joe Fineman
> Are there any good standards or rational preferences for the use of
> uppercase and lowercase letters in titles and section headings of
> English language publications?
IMO it is reasonable to capitalize the titles of literary works,
because they often serve as the names of those works, and thus as
proper nouns. _War and Peace_, the Washington Monument, the Diet of
Worms,....
I agree that it is foolish to extend the practice to, say, titles of
articles in scientific journals, which are never used that way.
--
--- Joe Fineman j...@TheWorld.com
||: Before you do anything, you have to do something else, :||
||: usually piss. :||
Markus Kuhn
>PDF allows logical page numbering to be different from the physical
>page numbering, and with hyperlinks you really don't use page numbers
>to navigate. So the issue is rather in convincing PDF-producing
>programs to correctly "name" the logical numbers.
How do I get these logical page numbers with distill or gs?
Will they be used by the acroread slidebar?
Joe Fineman
> If you can persuade continental Europeans to standardize on running
> titles down the spines of books (instead of perversely running up
> the spines),
That's not perversity; there is a genuine conflict. The U.S. way of
doing it has the advantage that when a book is lying flat on a table
in the usual way, with its front cover up, the title on the spine will
be right side up. The European way has the advantage that when a book
is on a shelf in some usual order (alphabetical by author, or volume
number in an encyclopedia) from left to right, you can scan for it
from left to right by tilting your head to the left, and the titles on
the spines will be right side "up".
--
--- Joe Fineman j...@TheWorld.com
||: The human species is gregarious but not social. :||
Peter Flynn
> Are there any good standards or rational preferences for the
> use of uppercase and lowercase letters in titles and section
> headings of English language publications?
I don't know if rationality enters into it. Some editors and
publishers (and authors) are slaves to the style they are most
familiar with or most in favour of.
Having said that, most American publications seem to prefer to
capitalise nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs, but not conjunctions
or prepositions; and the prevaling modern tendency in these islands
is to capitalise only the first word and proper nouns (which I prefer).
> English is the only language that I know, where some authors use
> different rules for uppercase/lowercase spelling in titles
> and in normal sentences.
Authors don't usually have a choice: it's dictated by the publisher's
house style.
> I have noted that ISO standards do not follow this rule. In titles
> and headings, they capitalise only the first letter of a phrase
> as well as words that are part of a name. I can see numerous
That pretty much follows the rule I prefer [above].
> advantages for this approach, especially for the software management
> of bibliographic references. In the scientific literature,
> habits seem to be rather mixed today, with some journals requiring
> uppercase titles, while others require lowercase titles, i.e.
>
> On the Diffusion of Pollutants in the Mediterranean Sea
>
> versus
>
> On the diffusion of pollutants in the Mediterranean Sea
Worse are those who uppercase the whole title *and store it as
uppercase*, thereby denying the ability to others to choose an
alternative capitalisation. This is a mild form of data-wrecking.
> It would IMHO simplify the management of bibliographic databases
> significantly, if this practice could be formally standardized,
> in my opinion preferably towards using the conventions used
> in normal sentences.
Yes. Ideal.
> I suspect that the frequently found capitalisation of most words
> or of at least all nouns in English titles is some form of ancient
> emphasis that was invented before we had bold fonts. If that is
Interesting idea. Both arbitrary and selective capitalisation were
certainly prevalent by the 18th century in England and America,
and I was always led to believe this originated in partial literacy
but was formalised in the reign of George I as a courtly way of
pandering to his dislike of English (he was a German who capitalised
his Nouns). I'm sure a historian can correct this view. I doubt if
it has much to do with emphasis, although I can See the Attraction
of the Idea.
> the only original reason, then no doubt the practice is obsolete
> today, and we can return to normal sencence casing and abandon
> the horrid complications of case management of bibtex and similar
> systems.
You won't persuade N American publishers -- especially newspapers --
to abandon this. It has become a fetish and a shibboleth by which
editorial competency is judged, like the insistence on including
terminal punctuation within the quotes, or the insistence that
acronyms must be pronounceable, regardless of the context. These
are social and cultural differences which you disturb at your peril:
adherents believe anything else is inherently "not right", in the
same way as other social standards like the "right" way to serve
toast and the "right" way to hand the toilet roll.
///Peter
Peter Flynn
> mg...@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn) wrote in message news:<a2f2el$hch$1...@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk>...
>
>
>>Are there any good standards or rational preferences for the
>>use of uppercase and lowercase letters in titles and section
>>headings of English language publications?
>>
>
> What I was taught in school is to capitalize the first word, the last
> word,
Fascinating. Why the last word? Symmetry?
///Peter
Dick Margulis
automatically. I know this does not apply in your situation, but it
gives you a clue that perhaps a similar macro could be constructed in
the TeX environment (or maybe one already has). In any case, you can fix
the thumbnail labels manually in Acrobat. Document > Number Pages (IIRC).
Simon Josefsson
> Giuseppe Bilotta <obl...@freemail.it> writes:
>>PDF allows logical page numbering to be different from the physical
>>page numbering, and with hyperlinks you really don't use page numbers
>>to navigate. So the issue is rather in convincing PDF-producing
>>programs to correctly "name" the logical numbers.
>
> How do I get these logical page numbers with distill or gs?
> Will they be used by the acroread slidebar?
Using 'pdflatex' I get logical page numbers automatically, or maybe it
is the hyperref package with the [pdftex] option that does it. The
hyperref package lets you configure several PDF specific things (such
as the PDF title, whether bookmarks should be generated, which page
should be displayed first, etc).
Steve Hayes
>Are there any good standards or rational preferences for the
>use of uppercase and lowercase letters in titles and section
>headings of English language publications?
>
>English is the only language that I know, where some authors use
>different rules for uppercase/lowercase spelling in titles
>and in normal sentences.
>
>I have noted that ISO standards do not follow this rule. In titles
>and headings, they capitalise only the first letter of a phrase
>as well as words that are part of a name. I can see numerous
>advantages for this approach, especially for the software management
>of bibliographic references.
That was our house style.
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/steve.htm
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk
Axel Reichert
> "Henry Churchyard" <chu...@crossmyt.com> writes:
> >and placing tables of contents at the beginning of books (instead of
> >peculiarly placing them at the very end)
>
> Sorry, I have never seen that. Who is doing this?
Everybody should who writes a document that is read from start to end,
e.g. a novel. Think of a chapter title "Peter's Death". If the table
of contents is at the beginning of the book, the reader will know that
Peter dies during the story.
The table of content should be at the beginning if it is more like a
menu: You want to read this, but not that, e.g. an anthology.
So once again there is no canonical solution, the typography depends
on the content.
Happy TeXing!
--
Axel Reichert -- http://www.axel-reichert.de
Apurbva Chandra Senray
> I can see numerous
> advantages for this approach, especially for the software management
> of bibliographic references.
As someone else said here recently, I'm certainly not going to
let the limitations of some computer program dictate my use of
language.
> In the scientific literature,
> habits seem to be rather mixed today, with some journals requiring
> uppercase titles, while others require lowercase titles, i.e.
Screw uniformity.
Joe Manfre
>
> Screw uniformity.
Phillips or flathead?
JM
fups
--
807
Michael J Downes
> Are there any good standards or rational preferences for the
> use of uppercase and lowercase letters in titles and section
> headings of English language publications?
>
> English is the only language that I know, where some authors use
> different rules for uppercase/lowercase spelling in titles
> and in normal sentences.
>
> I have noted that ISO standards do not follow this rule. In titles
> and headings, they capitalise only the first letter of a phrase
> as well as words that are part of a name. I can see numerous
> advantages for this approach, especially for the software management
> of bibliographic references.
"Sentence case" is the preferred form for titles in the amsrefs package,
for such reasons. One of the components in the amsrefs package is
an \inicap command that applies initial caps to a title written in
sentence case. Take a look at section 1 of inicap.dtx in the
distribution at
ftp://ftp.ams.org/pub/tex/amsrefs.tgz
(For the sake of other readers: The availability of a new release of
amsrefs [version 1.12] is something I was preparing to announce shortly,
but I noticed that I managed at the last minute to introduce some kind
of bug in the author-year option, so that needs fixing first ...)
> I suspect that the frequently found capitalisation of most words
> or of at least all nouns in English titles is some form of ancient
> emphasis that was invented before we had bold fonts. If that is
> the only original reason, then no doubt the practice is obsolete
> today, and we can return to normal sencence casing and abandon
> the horrid complications of case management of bibtex and similar
> systems.
>
> Any related references or opinions?
The invention of new forms of emphasis does not in itself necessitate
discarding the old form. But I agree that the details of the emphasis
should be separated from the intrinsic information of the title, as we
already do for fonts. And it would be good to do this separation not
just in bibliographies, but in document titles, section titles, and so
on. The motive for developing the \inicap function was to make it
possible to do this in LaTeX.
Regards, Michael Downes
Una Smith
according to culture. The British tend to use sentence case, but
Americans more often use title case. The American custom may have
to do with the idea that titles are in a sense proper names, so
should be capitalized throughout (except for common words). The
reasons are irrelevant, though. What matters is that, as ever,
journal editors *insist* on their own particular house style, but
now authors are required to submit their work in the house style.
If you publish internationally in journals, you'll have to deal
with this problem. What I do is preserve the exact capitalization
of the original publication (not what the bibliography databases
use). I then wrap all names and all German nouns in {} to protect
them from being made lowercase by BibTeX styles that use sentence
case. It is a tedious chore, but thanks to BibTeX you only have
to do it once.
eg: title={A New Species of {Quercus} from {California}},
Una Smith
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Mailstop K-710, Los Alamos, NM 87545
Dik T. Winter
> mg...@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn) wrote in message news:<a2f2el$hch$1...@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk>...
> > I can see numerous
> > advantages for this approach, especially for the software management
> > of bibliographic references.
>
> As someone else said here recently, I'm certainly not going to
> let the limitations of some computer program dictate my use of
> language.
Indeed. Consider sorting...
--
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj amsterdam, nederland, +31205924131
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn amsterdam, nederland; http://www.cwi.nl/~dik/
Steve MacGregor
> ...adherents believe anything else is inherently "not right", in
> the same way as other social standards like the "right" way to
> serve toast and the "right" way to hand the toilet roll.
I'm familiar with the right ways to open an egg, from having read
_Gulliver's Travels_, but what are the right ways to serve toast and
hand toilet rolls?
--
____ "Go: It's all fun and games,
(_) /: ,/ till someone loses an eye!"
/___/ (_) Steve MacGregor, Phoenix, AZ
<http://www.steve-and-pattie.com>
Peter Hullah
"Dik T. Winter" wrote:
>
> In article <c7482783.02012...@posting.google.com> acse...@yahoo.com (Apurbva Chandra Senray) writes:
> > mg...@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn) wrote in message news:<a2f2el$hch$1...@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk>...
> > > I can see numerous
> > > advantages for this approach, especially for the software management
> > > of bibliographic references.
> >
> > As someone else said here recently, I'm certainly not going to
> > let the limitations of some computer program dictate my use of
> > language.
>
> Indeed. Consider sorting...
Exactly. Like putting surname in front of forename (sic!) in mail systems because
M$ Outlook is incapable of allowing a sort on the second field.
Or how about online forms that oblige you to give a state/province when you don't come
from a country that has states or provinces; and that force you to give a 'zip code'
at the end of your address when your local style has it in front of the town name - as in
most of Europe.
But don't blame computer programs - blame the blinkered programmers and marketing
departments who wrote them.
Dik T. Winter
> Or how about online forms that oblige you to give a state/province when
> you don't come from a country that has states or provinces; and that
> force you to give a 'zip code' at the end of your address when your
> local style has it in front of the town name - as in most of Europe.
One of the best examples of how not to do it is in the online reservation
system of British Airways when you come from the Netherlands. You
have to fill in many particulars and they give an example. If you follow
the example the system comes back with the message that you did not fill
it in the correct way. Moreover, filling in your phonenumber in the
international accepted manner also gives you an error message.
Peter Hullah
>
> In article <3C4FE079...@eurocontrol.fr> Peter Hullah <Peter....@eurocontrol.fr> writes:
> > Or how about online forms that oblige you to give a state/province when
> > you don't come from a country that has states or provinces; and that
> > force you to give a 'zip code' at the end of your address when your
> > local style has it in front of the town name - as in most of Europe.
>
> One of the best examples of how not to do it is in the online reservation
> system of British Airways when you come from the Netherlands. You
> have to fill in many particulars and they give an example. If you follow
> the example the system comes back with the message that you did not fill
> it in the correct way. Moreover, filling in your phonenumber in the
> international accepted manner also gives you an error message.
Ah - phone numbers. How can one express the delights of being obliged to give
an area code in a country that doesn't have area codes (an even when it did,
it din't use them like everyone else!) How many times have you been obliged
to completely screw up your phone number to fit it into a (xxx) xxx-xxxx format?
And how often do you have to remove spaces because you've reached the limit
for the number of digits you can enter?
Why can't programmers and marketing departments allow people to know how their
name (I have two middle initials, for example), address and phone number should
be written.
And what about time zones? According to M$, I'm in 'Romance Standard Time'. Bollocks.
It took me a while to persuade those on the timezone mailing list that I lived
in Central European Time and Central European Summer Time rather than the MET and METDST
that Hewlett-Packard, Sun and the others give us. It was only when Marcus Kuhn (the
very same) assured them that the German Standards Institute (that supreme authority
on the English language) agreed that they were CET and CEST in English that they accepted
- which is why his name is given in the files, not mine!
Markus Kuhn
>Ah - phone numbers. How can one express the delights of being obliged to give
>an area code in a country that doesn't have area codes (an even when it did,
>it din't use them like everyone else!) How many times have you been obliged
>to completely screw up your phone number to fit it into a (xxx) xxx-xxxx format?
>And how often do you have to remove spaces because you've reached the limit
>for the number of digits you can enter?
Which reminds me to mention that the following standard was
published last week on http://www.itu.int/
ITU-T Recommendation E.123 (02/01),
Notation for national and international telephone numbers,
e-mail addresses and Web addresses,
International Telecommunication Union, Geneva.
Summary
This Recommendation applies specifically to the printing of national
and international telephone numbers, electronic mail addresses and
Web addresses on letterheads, business cards, bills, etc. Regard
has been given to the printing of existing telephone directories.
The standard notation for printing telephone numbers, E-mail addresses
and Web addresses helps to reduce difficulties and errors, since
this address information must be entered exactly to be effective.
Anyone had a look?
Mark Brader
> Which reminds me to mention that the following standard was
> published last week on http://www.itu.int/
>
> ITU-T Recommendation E.123 (02/01),
> Notation for national and international telephone numbers,
I see no standards or recommendations *published on the web site*
as Markus says. I only see ways to buy them on various media.
If I missed something, what link should I have followed to find it?
Followups directed to comp.std.internat only.
--
Mark Brader | "Have you got anything without Spam in it?"
Toronto | "Well, there's Spam, egg, sausage, and Spam.
m...@vex.net | That's not got *much* Spam in it." --Monty Python
My text in this article is in the public domain.
Aaron Davies
> Peter Hullah <Peter....@eurocontrol.fr> writes:
> >Ah - phone numbers. How can one express the delights of being obliged to
> >give an area code in a country that doesn't have area codes (an even when
> >it did, it din't use them like everyone else!) How many times have you
> >been obliged to completely screw up your phone number to fit it into a
> >(xxx) xxx-xxxx format? And how often do you have to remove spaces because
> >you've reached the limit for the number of digits you can enter?
>
> Which reminds me to mention that the following standard was
> published last week on http://www.itu.int/
>
> ITU-T Recommendation E.123 (02/01),
> Notation for national and international telephone numbers,
> e-mail addresses and Web addresses,
> International Telecommunication Union, Geneva.
>
> Summary
> This Recommendation applies specifically to the printing of national
> and international telephone numbers, electronic mail addresses and
> Web addresses on letterheads, business cards, bills, etc. Regard
> has been given to the printing of existing telephone directories.
> The standard notation for printing telephone numbers, E-mail addresses
> and Web addresses helps to reduce difficulties and errors, since
> this address information must be entered exactly to be effective.
>
> Anyone had a look?
Apparently one must pay to see these things. Anyone here already a
member?
--
Aaron Davies
aa...@avalon.pascal-central.com
sig coming Soon(tm)
K. Edgcombe
Markus Kuhn <mg...@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>Which reminds me to mention that the following standard was
>published last week on http://www.itu.int/
>
> ITU-T Recommendation E.123 (02/01),
> Notation for national and international telephone numbers,
> e-mail addresses and Web addresses,
> International Telecommunication Union, Geneva.
>
> The standard notation for printing telephone numbers, E-mail addresses
They could perhaps start by deciding whether e-mail takes a capital E.
Katy
Markus Kuhn
>Apparently one must pay to see these things. Anyone here already a
>member?
https://ecs.itu.ch/cgi-bin/register-for-freedownload2
Henrik Holm
> > The standard notation for printing telephone numbers, E-mail addresses
>
> They could perhaps start by deciding whether e-mail takes a capital E.
or if email should contain a hyphen.
Henrik.
those who know me have no need of my name
>Which reminds me to mention that the following standard was
>published last week on http://www.itu.int/
>
> ITU-T Recommendation E.123 (02/01),
> Notation for national and international telephone numbers,
> e-mail addresses and Web addresses,
> International Telecommunication Union, Geneva.
>Anyone had a look?
not yet. <http://www.numberingplans.com/index.php3?goto=guide&topic=E123>
has a quick blurb about it ...
> E.123: Notation for national and international telephone numbers
Recommendation E.123 defines a standard way to write telephone numbers,
e-mail addresses, and web addresses. It recommends the following
formats (when dialing the area code is optional for local calling):
Telephone number:
National notation (042) 123 4567
International notation +31 (0)42 123 4567
E-mail address:
na...@provider.com
Internet address / URL:
www.company.com
It also recommends that a hypen (-), space ( ), or period (.) can be
used to visually separate groups of numbers. The parentheses are used
to indicate digits that are sometimes not dialed. a slash (/) is used
to indicate alternate numbers. This information is important if you
want to make sure people know how to dail a phone number in a specific
country.
--
okay, have a sig then
Henry Churchyard
It should -- unless you want to start writing about xrays, ibeams, and
tshirts.
--%!PS
10 10 scale/M{rmoveto}def/R{rlineto}def 12 45 moveto 0 5 R 4 -1 M 5.5 0 R
currentpoint 3 sub 3 90 0 arcn 0 -6 R 7.54 10.28 M 2.7067 -9.28 R -5.6333
2 setlinewidth 0 R 9.8867 8 M 7 0 R 0 -9 R -6 4 M 0 -4 R stroke showpage
% Henry Churchyard chu...@crossmyt.com http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/
Charles Riggs
after determining if anyone gives a rat's ass.
Charles Riggs
mplsray
"Henry Churchyard" <chu...@crossmyt.com> wrote in message
news:a2f75k$i...@moe.cc.utexas.edu...
> In article <a2f2el$hch$1...@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk>,
> > Markus Kuhn <mg...@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > Are there any good standards or rational preferences for the use of
> > uppercase and lowercase letters in titles and section headings of
> > English language publications? English is the only language that I
> > know, where some authors use different rules for uppercase/lowercase
> > frequently found capitalisation of most words or of at least all
> > nouns in English titles is some form of ancient emphasis that was
> > invented before we had bold fonts. If that is the only original
> > reason, then no doubt the practice is obsolete today, and we can
> > return to normal sencence casing and abandon the horrid
> > complications of case management of bibtex and similar systems.
>
> _English_ capitalization practices??? That's a reversal! If you can
> persuade continental Europeans to standardize on running titles down
> placing tables of contents at the beginning of books (instead of
> has been accomplished would be the right time to start discussing
> English title capitalization! I will grant you that the American
> English convention of arbitrarily placing punctuation before closing
> quote marks is rather ugly and illogical, though...
>
The author H. Allen Smith once said that Europeans were convinced that it
was easier to crook one's neck to the left, while Americans were convinced
it was easier to crook one's neck to the right.
The subject has been run into the ground in aue, but I have to say that I
can't agree with either of the adjectives you use to describe American
punctuation practices regarding quote marks.
--
Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com
K. Edgcombe
Yes, of course; but my point was that the two occurrences of the word in the
document itself were inconsistent about the capital; they were at least
consistent about the hyphen, so that decision appeared to have been made.
I didn't think I'd have to explain it.......
Katy
Giuseppe Bilotta
According to DEK (just to bring this back on topic), not (i.e. we
should start dropping the hyphen).
--
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta
Axiom I of the Giuseppe Bilotta
theory of IT:
Anything is better than MS
Michael J Downes
> > English convention of arbitrarily placing punctuation before closing
> > quote marks is rather ugly and illogical, though...
> The subject has been run into the ground in aue, but I have to say that I
> can't agree with either of the adjectives you use to describe American
> punctuation practices regarding quote marks.
For some reason I have seldom if ever seen anyone else point out the
obvious: that when we write by hand, we write a comma or period directly
under the quote mark, rather than before or after ... Why? Because it
looks good! Therefore I say that the "American" practice of putting the
punctuation inside the quotes, and the "un-American" practice of putting
it outside, when setting type, are both wrong.
Off-hand I would think the proper handling could be done rather easily
in TeX by putting the punctuation in the logical order and using
suitable kerns in the font metric file. (Hmm ... another interesting
little project to add to the bottom of my ever-expanding list: make some
tfm files and try it out. I guess when the double-quote character is
wider than the comma, for example, there is a potential problem of
getting too little after-space.)
PS. And by the way, unsupported claims that a particular tradition is
"American", "British", "Swahili" or what have you should be taken with a
grain of salt. Leaping to generalizations---generalizing too widely from
a few examples---is a temptation that few people seem able to resist
(especially me).
If a Russian published a mathematics book in the U.S. following the
usual typographic conventions of his native land, I dare say a few years
down the road some people would be calling those conventions "American"
because they vaguely remembered seeing them in a U.S.-published book and
had no particularly strong recall of any counter-examples.
And I seem to recall noticing that someone who worked for an American
publisher assumed "non-french-spacing" was a foreign practice because
the house style for that publisher was to use what is called in TeX
"\frenchspacing".
For that matter, mathematicians in the U.S. (and no doubt those in many
other scientific disciplines, but I speak only whereof I have personal
knowledge), tend to see the division in the quotes question as between
sensible authors and irrational publishers, not between one country and
another. :-)
Michael Downes
Peter Wilson
"Michael J Downes" <eps...@ams.org> wrote in message
news:25180b3c.0201...@posting.google.com...
> > > English title capitalization! I will grant you that the American
> > > English convention of arbitrarily placing punctuation before closing
> > > quote marks is rather ugly and illogical, though...
> ...
> > The subject has been run into the ground in aue, but I have to say that
I
> > can't agree with either of the adjectives you use to describe American
> > punctuation practices regarding quote marks.
>
> For some reason I have seldom if ever seen anyone else point out the
> obvious: that when we write by hand, we write a comma or period directly
> under the quote mark, rather than before or after ... Why? Because it
> looks good! Therefore I say that the "American" practice of putting the
> punctuation inside the quotes, and the "un-American" practice of putting
> it outside, when setting type, are both wrong.
>
> Off-hand I would think the proper handling could be done rather easily
> in TeX by putting the punctuation in the logical order and using
> suitable kerns in the font metric file. (Hmm ... another interesting
> little project to add to the bottom of my ever-expanding list: make some
> tfm files and try it out. I guess when the double-quote character is
> wider than the comma, for example, there is a potential problem of
> getting too little after-space.)
>
The position of punctuation at the end of a quote is often an editorial
decision, not a typographical rule. Putting the punctuation under the quote
mark is chickening out. In any case, with some fonts it is possible to
mistake a quote mark above a period as an exclamation or question mark, or
at least make the reader subconsciously
pause.
Peter W.
Peter Flynn
> "Henry Churchyard" <chu...@crossmyt.com> wrote in message
> news:a2f75k$i...@moe.cc.utexas.edu...
[...]
>>English title capitalization! I will grant you that the American
>>English convention of arbitrarily placing punctuation before closing
>>quote marks is rather ugly and illogical, though...
> The subject has been run into the ground in aue, but I have to say that I
> can't agree with either of the adjectives you use to describe American
> punctuation practices regarding quote marks.
I'd agree with both adjectives, but there is little point in trying to
persuade either side they are wrong, as neither will listen to the other
point of view, any more than they will over the correct manner of
serving toast, or the right way to pronounce "tomato."
The fact remains that there is only one right way in all the above
cases. The correct pronounciation of the quoted word at the end of the
preceding paragraph is clearly "tomatostop".
///Peter, with malice aforethought :-)
Dik T. Winter
> mplsray wrote:
> > The subject has been run into the ground in aue, but I have to say that I
> > can't agree with either of the adjectives you use to describe American
> > punctuation practices regarding quote marks.
>
> I'd agree with both adjectives, but there is little point in trying to
> persuade either side they are wrong, as neither will listen to the other
> point of view, any more than they will over the correct manner of
> serving toast, or the right way to pronounce "tomato."
I still remember the time the author at Argonne of a report on Ada had
difficulty to let the text 'the operator "+".' stand as it was and not
to move the period between the quotes (which would make the text
completely nonsensical).
Timothy Murphy
>For some reason I have seldom if ever seen anyone else point out the
>obvious: that when we write by hand, we write a comma or period directly
>under the quote mark, rather than before or after ... Why? Because it
>looks good! Therefore I say that the "American" practice of putting the
>punctuation inside the quotes, and the "un-American" practice of putting
>it outside, when setting type, are both wrong.
>Off-hand I would think the proper handling could be done rather easily
>in TeX by putting the punctuation in the logical order and using
>suitable kerns in the font metric file. (Hmm ... another interesting
>little project to add to the bottom of my ever-expanding list: make some
>tfm files and try it out. I guess when the double-quote character is
>wider than the comma, for example, there is a potential problem of
>getting too little after-space.)
Dear Michael,
You've done great work with AmsLaTeX,
but this (printing punctuation underneath quotes)
is a terrible idea.
Please abandon it.
--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: t...@maths.tcd.ie
tel: 086-233 6090
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
Henry Churchyard
Peter Flynn <pe...@silmaril.ie> wrote:
>mplsray wrote:
>> "Henry Churchyard" <chu...@crossmyt.com> wrote in message
>> news:a2f75k$i...@moe.cc.utexas.edu...
>>> I will grant you that the American English convention of
>>> arbitrarily placing punctuation before closing quote marks is
>>> rather ugly and illogical, though...
>> The subject has been run into the ground in aue, but I have to say
>> that I can't agree with either of the adjectives you use to
>> describe American punctuation practices regarding quote marks.
> I'd agree with both adjectives, but there is little point in trying
> to persuade either side they are wrong, as neither will listen to
> the other point of view, any more than they will over the correct
> manner of serving toast, or the right way to pronounce "tomato."
> The fact remains that there is only one right way in all the above
> cases. The correct pronounciation of the quoted word at the end of
> the preceding paragraph is clearly "tomatostop". ///Peter, with
> malice aforethought :-)
Nonsense -- in the U.S. it would clearly be pronounced "tomatoperiod"! ;-)
Don't know why I've never really liked the predominant American
convention, but it didn't make much sense to me at a pretty early age
(even before I was subjected to any significant British influence).
The Jargon File ("New Hacker's Dictionary") has some reflections at
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/Hacker-Writing-Style.html
--
mplsray
If you are talking about a passage in ordinary English prose or poetry, the
quoted word would be pronounced /t@'meItoU/ in my dialect. If you are
talking about an entry in a computer program--and I *have* in the past
written computer programs as a hobby--I would most likely pronounce it
/t@'meItoU 'pIri@d/.
--
Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minneapolis USA
Rowland McDonnell
[snip]
> Screw uniformity.
Sew yewd rarthar gow bac to thee gwd olde daiz ov ahbitraeri speling?
Rowland.
(chucking a bit of Welsh orthography in for good measure)
--
Remove the animal for email address: rowland....@dog.physics.org
PGP pub key 0x62DCCA78 Sorry - the spam got to me
http://www.mag-uk.org
UK biker? Join MAG and help keep bureaucracy at bay
Peter Hullah
Rowland McDonnell wrote:
>
> Sew yewd rarthar gow bac to thee gwd olde daiz ov ahbitraeri speling?
Not to the extent of being non-rhotic in 'arbitrary' after being rhotic
in the middle of 'rather'!!
J. J. Lodder
> Apurbva Chandra Senray <acse...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > Screw uniformity.
>
> Sew yewd rarthar gow bac to thee gwd olde daiz ov ahbitraeri speling?
>
> Rowland.
> (chucking a bit of Welsh orthography in for good measure)
Or as on www.freespeling.com ?
^^
They advocate moderate freespeling, only a few words at a time,
but of course that will soon get out of hand.
The Netherlands has had a period (late sixties, early seventies)
when free spelling was fashionable in some cicles,
(calling themselves progressive)
but the results were not encouraging.
It has gone out of fashion again.
We meet in the unlikeliest places, don't we?
Jan
Donna Richoux
That's not the way we usually use the words "rhotic" and "nonrhotic" in
a.u.e. By my reckoning, Rowland is consistently nonrhotic, using "ah"
and "ar" to represent the same sound. To the nonrhotics, they are the
same.
What surprises me is calling this method "arbitrary spelling." I would
think that fixing a single approved spelling is what would be called
arbitrary, not being free to make it up as you go.
Is "arbitrary spelling" truly a common name for this phenomenon?
--
Best wishes -- Donna Richoux
Rowland McDonnell
> Peter Hullah <Peter....@eurocontrol.fr> wrote:
>
> > Rowland McDonnell wrote:
> > >
> > > Sew yewd rarthar gow bac to thee gwd olde daiz ov ahbitraeri speling?
> >
> > Not to the extent of being non-rhotic in 'arbitrary' after being rhotic
> > in the middle of 'rather'!!
>
> That's not the way we usually use the words "rhotic" and "nonrhotic" in
> a.u.e. By my reckoning, Rowland is consistently nonrhotic, using "ah"
> and "ar" to represent the same sound. To the nonrhotics, they are the
> same.
What does rhotic mean? The word is not in my dictionary.
> What surprises me is calling this method "arbitrary spelling." I would
> think that fixing a single approved spelling is what would be called
> arbitrary, not being free to make it up as you go.
Maybe you would, but that doesn't match the standard definition of
arbitrary as listed in my dictionary as I understand it.
> Is "arbitrary spelling" truly a common name for this phenomenon?
It's following the conventional definition of the word arbitrary from
the Concise Oxford Dictionary 8th edition 1990:
\textbf{arbitrary} {\emph adj.}
\begin{enumerate}
\item based on or derived from uninformed opinion or random choice;
capricious.
\item despotic
\end{enumerate}
I was careful to mix as many different ways of doing things together as
I could be bothered to think of, which makes that form of spelling
apparently based on uniformed opinion or maybe random choice, and very
definitely capricious: as arbitrary (1) as it gets.
If you're following a standard, you are acting on informed opinion: that
is therefore anti-arbitrary (1); although one might argue (if feeling
perverse) that it was arbitrary (2).
I haven't a clue what jargon terms linguists might use to describe this
way of doing things, and nor do I care: I'm interested in using plain
English which normal people can understand.
Rowland.
Rowland McDonnell
[snip]
> Or as on www.freespeling.com ?
> ^^
> They advocate moderate freespeling, only a few words at a time,
> but of course that will soon get out of hand.
Indeed. Bloody silly idea if you ask me. Standards are always Good
Things if they don't block useful innovation, and I don't see that
standard spelling blocks any useful innovation at all.
> The Netherlands has had a period (late sixties, early seventies)
> when free spelling was fashionable in some cicles,
> (calling themselves progressive)
Yeessss... I expect they did call themselves progressive. I think I'd
rather call them bloody silly myself. Anyway, isn't Dutch a pretty
regular language when it comes to the spelling? English spelling's
undoubtedly a mess, but I thought Dutch had been more or less sorted
out?
> but the results were not encouraging.
> It has gone out of fashion again.
<whew>
> We meet in the unlikeliest places, don't we?
<grin> I dunno - I've been hanging around on comp.text.tex
intermittently for years. What's your excuse for being tangled up in
this cross-posting? ;-)
Rowland.
Donna Richoux
> Donna Richoux <tr...@euronet.nl> wrote:
>
> > Peter Hullah <Peter....@eurocontrol.fr> wrote:
> >
> > > Rowland McDonnell wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Sew yewd rarthar gow bac to thee gwd olde daiz ov ahbitraeri speling?
> > >
> > > Not to the extent of being non-rhotic in 'arbitrary' after being rhotic
> > > in the middle of 'rather'!!
> >
> > That's not the way we usually use the words "rhotic" and "nonrhotic" in
> > a.u.e. By my reckoning, Rowland is consistently nonrhotic, using "ah"
> > and "ar" to represent the same sound. To the nonrhotics, they are the
> > same.
>
> What does rhotic mean?
In non-technical terms, a person is rhotic who "pronounces the R" before
a consonant or at the end of a word. Some nonrhotic people object to
that definition, because they say, "We do pronounce those R's, in our
own way." But anyway, a person who pronounces "teacher" as "teachuh" is
nonrhotic, and a person who pronounces it as "teacherr" is rhotic.
> The word is not in my dictionary.
I'm not sure if it is rare or just new. It's useful in discussions of
English dialect.
>
> > What surprises me is calling this method "arbitrary spelling." I would
> > think that fixing a single approved spelling is what would be called
> > arbitrary, not being free to make it up as you go.
>
> Maybe you would, but that doesn't match the standard definition of
> arbitrary as listed in my dictionary as I understand it.
>
> > Is "arbitrary spelling" truly a common name for this phenomenon?
>
> It's following the conventional definition of the word arbitrary from
> the Concise Oxford Dictionary 8th edition 1990:
>
> \textbf{arbitrary} {\emph adj.}
> \begin{enumerate}
> \item based on or derived from uninformed opinion or random choice;
> capricious.
> \item despotic
> \end{enumerate}
Yes, exactly, I think that supports *my* point. A person is capricious
and despotic who claims "Everyone shall spell 'done' as d-o-n-e. Why
that way? Because. Because I say so. Because there is no other way."
They have arbitrarily chosen a single spelling. Whereas the person who
advocates free form spelling might spell it as "done" one time and "dun"
another time and "dunn" a third time. They would be open-minded,
accepting whatever spelling they read that was close. To me that's not
being arbitrary.
But that's all right, I'm not trying to persuade you to change your
word. It just surprised me, that's all, and I wasn't sure I understood
you right.
>
> I was careful to mix as many different ways of doing things together as
> I could be bothered to think of, which makes that form of spelling
> apparently based on uniformed opinion or maybe random choice, and very
> definitely capricious: as arbitrary (1) as it gets.
>
> If you're following a standard, you are acting on informed opinion: that
> is therefore anti-arbitrary (1); although one might argue (if feeling
> perverse) that it was arbitrary (2).
>
> I haven't a clue what jargon terms linguists might use to describe this
> way of doing things, and nor do I care: I'm interested in using plain
> English which normal people can understand.
--
Donna Richoux
> J. J. Lodder <nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
> > The Netherlands has had a period (late sixties, early seventies)
> > when free spelling was fashionable in some cicles,
> > (calling themselves progressive)
>
> Yeessss... I expect they did call themselves progressive. I think I'd
> rather call them bloody silly myself. Anyway, isn't Dutch a pretty
> regular language when it comes to the spelling? English spelling's
> undoubtedly a mess, but I thought Dutch had been more or less sorted
> out?
It doesn't stay sorted out. They issue new spelling reform changes every
twenty years or so. Sometimes they even undo changes they made in an
earlier reform. For one thing, the language changes, pronunciation
changes. For another thing, for political and social reasons, they can
never make as many changes, as sweeping and drastic of changes, as they
would like to; the officials just make as many changes as they can agree
on, and discuss the remaining proposals again during the next cycle.
The children learn the latest reform easily, being flexible and not
really habituated, but I remember talking to one woman in her 70s who
was in tears, afraid she was never going to master the latest batch of
changes. She was an intelligent, proud woman who didn't want to look
stupid and illiterate, but it's a lot to ask of people her age, who have
lived through several such reforms.
One issue the reformers faced was, when a word is borrowed from a
foreign language, should its spelling to revised to fit the "Dutch
rules" or should the original spelling be preserved? It was a difficult
decision; you could argue either way, if you stop and think about it.
It's not an empty question, either, as there as been an avalanche of
English words borrowed in the last twenty years.
They decided on preservation, and even ordered some words that had
previously been Dutch-icized, such as the French "cadeau" to "kado," be
returned to the original spelling. They must have had some sort of
historic cut-off point, though; they didn't order really old French
borrowings, like muziek, to be changed back.
--
Best wishes --- Donna Richoux
An American living in the Netherlands
Jeffrey Goldberg
in <1f6qigw.9eq9vi1sccnqwN%real-addr...@flur.bltigibbet>:
> Donna Richoux <tr...@euronet.nl> wrote:
> > That's not the way we usually use the words "rhotic" and "nonrhotic" in
> > a.u.e. By my reckoning, Rowland is consistently nonrhotic, using "ah"
> > and "ar" to represent the same sound. To the nonrhotics, they are the
> > same.
>
> What does rhotic mean? The word is not in my dictionary.
Very roughly it is an adjective characterizing "r" in a variety of its
forms.
-j
--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice
I rarely read top-posted, over-quoting or HTML postings.
mplsray
"Rowland McDonnell" <real-addr...@flur.bltigibbet> wrote in message
news:1f6qivw.1842xr2id2b9cN%real-addr...@flur.bltigibbet...
I do not agree with the plan proposed by the author of www.freespeling.com ,
but I would like to point out, as I have on at least one previous occasion,
that the author of that Web page intends his plan to lead eventually to a
new standard spelling.
--
Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
Rowland McDonnell
> Rowland McDonnell <real-addr...@flur.bltigibbet> wrote:
>
> > Donna Richoux <tr...@euronet.nl> wrote:
> >
> > > Peter Hullah <Peter....@eurocontrol.fr> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Rowland McDonnell wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > Sew yewd rarthar gow bac to thee gwd olde daiz ov ahbitraeri speling?
> > > >
> > > > Not to the extent of being non-rhotic in 'arbitrary' after being rhotic
> > > > in the middle of 'rather'!!
> > >
> > > That's not the way we usually use the words "rhotic" and "nonrhotic" in
> > > a.u.e. By my reckoning, Rowland is consistently nonrhotic, using "ah"
> > > and "ar" to represent the same sound. To the nonrhotics, they are the
> > > same.
> >
> > What does rhotic mean?
>
> In non-technical terms, a person is rhotic who "pronounces the R" before
> a consonant or at the end of a word. Some nonrhotic people object to
> that definition, because they say, "We do pronounce those R's, in our
> own way." But anyway, a person who pronounces "teacher" as "teachuh" is
> nonrhotic, and a person who pronounces it as "teacherr" is rhotic.
Righto - thanks.
> > The word is not in my dictionary.
>
> I'm not sure if it is rare or just new. It's useful in discussions of
> English dialect.
It smells like a jargon term to me - I'd say it therefore classes as
`rare'. I've never met it in nearly 35 years of using English every
day; and if the COD doesn't have it, it's almost certainly not in common
usage.
> > > What surprises me is calling this method "arbitrary spelling." I would
> > > think that fixing a single approved spelling is what would be called
> > > arbitrary, not being free to make it up as you go.
> >
> > Maybe you would, but that doesn't match the standard definition of
> > arbitrary as listed in my dictionary as I understand it.
> >
> > > Is "arbitrary spelling" truly a common name for this phenomenon?
> >
> > It's following the conventional definition of the word arbitrary from
> > the Concise Oxford Dictionary 8th edition 1990:
> >
> > \textbf{arbitrary} {\emph adj.}
> > \begin{enumerate}
> > \item based on or derived from uninformed opinion or random choice;
> > capricious.
> > \item despotic
> > \end{enumerate}
>
> Yes, exactly, I think that supports *my* point.
No, it directly contradicts it.
> A person is capricious
> and despotic who claims "Everyone shall spell 'done' as d-o-n-e. Why
> that way? Because. Because I say so. Because there is no other way."
> They have arbitrarily chosen a single spelling.
Yes, but that's irrelevant: that situation does not arise. Standard
spelling is not fixed by one person's caprice acting in a despotic
fashion - I note that you are mixing up the primary and secondary
definitions of the word.
The situation that exists here is that a set of fixed spellings exist:
not set by whim or a person acting arbitarily, but by a long process of
evolution and messing around. The spellings have been codified in
dictionaries which simply log commonly accepted usage - they do not
prescribe; the describe. Therefore, going against those spellings - in
a fashion you call open-minded and I call stupid and deliberately
obstructive - is arbitrary by the standard definition, because it's
either random choice or uninformed opinion.
> Whereas the person who
> advocates free form spelling might spell it as "done" one time and "dun"
> another time and "dunn" a third time. They would be open-minded,
> accepting whatever spelling they read that was close.
Thus making it very hard to tell the difference between the standard
English words `dun' and `done' - it's not open-minded, it's idiotic
because it makes comprehension harder. I have a *lot* of experience of
untangling this sort of arbitrary spelling - there's quite a lot of
slydexia in my family. It's nothing but a pain.
> To me that's not
> being arbitrary.
That is *exactly* what the primary definition of arbitrary is in my
dictionary. There are two meanings of arbitrary, and you seem to be
insisting that only the secondary one has any validity.
> But that's all right, I'm not trying to persuade you to change your
> word.
It's not my word. It's a standard English word with a well-defined
standard meaning logged in standard dictionaries. I cannot change
anything about it, and I don't own any words. I've no idea what kind of
warped mind could make anyone think that I own any words.
[snip]
Rowland.
[FU set]
Rowland McDonnell
> Rowland McDonnell <real-addr...@flur.bltigibbet> wrote:
>
> > J. J. Lodder <nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
>
> > > The Netherlands has had a period (late sixties, early seventies)
> > > when free spelling was fashionable in some cicles,
> > > (calling themselves progressive)
> >
> > Yeessss... I expect they did call themselves progressive. I think I'd
> > rather call them bloody silly myself. Anyway, isn't Dutch a pretty
> > regular language when it comes to the spelling? English spelling's
> > undoubtedly a mess, but I thought Dutch had been more or less sorted
> > out?
>
> It doesn't stay sorted out. They issue new spelling reform changes every
> twenty years or so. Sometimes they even undo changes they made in an
> earlier reform. For one thing, the language changes, pronunciation
> changes. For another thing, for political and social reasons, they can
> never make as many changes, as sweeping and drastic of changes, as they
> would like to; the officials just make as many changes as they can agree
> on, and discuss the remaining proposals again during the next cycle.
Uhuh.
> The children learn the latest reform easily, being flexible and not
> really habituated, but I remember talking to one woman in her 70s who
> was in tears, afraid she was never going to master the latest batch of
> changes. She was an intelligent, proud woman who didn't want to look
> stupid and illiterate, but it's a lot to ask of people her age, who have
> lived through several such reforms.
Why don't people just carry on using the older spellings? Faced with
spelling reforms, I know I would, as would many folk over here and
probably even more French people if someone tried to regularize the
French language (I heard that some people were still working as if old
francs were in use right up until the change to euros occurred - I'm not
*quite* that awkward myself). btw, attitudes like mine are one of the
reasons English is not going to have its spelling regularized in the
foreseeable future. There's a lot of bloody minded wossnames like me
around - *I* still say `fount' when I mean `set of type in one size and
style'.
> One issue the reformers faced was, when a word is borrowed from a
> foreign language, should its spelling to revised to fit the "Dutch
> rules" or should the original spelling be preserved? It was a difficult
> decision; you could argue either way, if you stop and think about it.
Of course; but to my mind, it's an irrelevant question because I don't
like the idea of a language being regularized like that - I *like* the
way English and French spellings in particular are frankly perverse.
> It's not an empty question, either, as there as been an avalanche of
> English words borrowed in the last twenty years.
>
> They decided on preservation, and even ordered some words that had
> previously been Dutch-icized, such as the French "cadeau" to "kado," be
> returned to the original spelling. They must have had some sort of
> historic cut-off point, though; they didn't order really old French
> borrowings, like muziek, to be changed back.
I suspect that the cut-off has to do with words which were Dutchified by
`natural' processes, rather than official diktat.
J. J. Lodder
> J. J. Lodder <nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > Or as on www.freespeling.com ?
> > ^^
> > They advocate moderate freespeling, only a few words at a time,
> > but of course that will soon get out of hand.
>
> Indeed. Bloody silly idea if you ask me. Standards are always Good
> Things if they don't block useful innovation, and I don't see that
> standard spelling blocks any useful innovation at all.
A standard that is too complicated is counterproductive.
Learning standard English seems to take up
so much of the poor kiddies time
that they don't have any time left
to learn a few bits of another language.
> > The Netherlands has had a period (late sixties, early seventies)
> > when free spelling was fashionable in some cicles,
> > (calling themselves progressive)
>
> Yeessss... I expect they did call themselves progressive. I think I'd
> rather call them bloody silly myself. Anyway, isn't Dutch a pretty
> regular language when it comes to the spelling? English spelling's
> undoubtedly a mess, but I thought Dutch had been more or less sorted
> out?
You are mistaken. While not as bad as English it is stil a mess,
despite several attempts at reform.
Those proposing to change English speling should have a look a the Dutch
experience.
Dutch seems to be the only modern language in which major spelling
reforms have been undertaken, with rather mixed results.
> > but the results were not encouraging.
> > It has gone out of fashion again.
>
> <whew>
>
> > We meet in the unlikeliest places, don't we?
>
> <grin> I dunno - I've been hanging around on comp.text.tex
> intermittently for years. What's your excuse for being tangled up in
> this cross-posting? ;-)
I have been following aue for some time,
Jan
J. J. Lodder
> Rowland McDonnell <real-addr...@flur.bltigibbet> wrote:
>
> > J. J. Lodder <nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
>
> > > The Netherlands has had a period (late sixties, early seventies)
> > > when free spelling was fashionable in some cicles,
> > > (calling themselves progressive)
> >
> > Yeessss... I expect they did call themselves progressive. I think I'd
> > rather call them bloody silly myself. Anyway, isn't Dutch a pretty
> > regular language when it comes to the spelling? English spelling's
> > undoubtedly a mess, but I thought Dutch had been more or less sorted
> > out?
>
> It doesn't stay sorted out. They issue new spelling reform changes every
> twenty years or so. Sometimes they even undo changes they made in an
> earlier reform. For one thing, the language changes, pronunciation
> changes. For another thing, for political and social reasons, they can
> never make as many changes, as sweeping and drastic of changes, as they
> would like to; the officials just make as many changes as they can agree
> on, and discuss the remaining proposals again during the next cycle.
You suggest a far more planned procedure than what actually takes place.
And unfortunately 'they' is certainly not 'the people' or it's chosen
representatives. Actually an obscure comittee decides on what the refor
is going to be, and parliament is not allowed to vote on the proposal.
> The children learn the latest reform easily, being flexible and not
> really habituated, but I remember talking to one woman in her 70s who
> was in tears, afraid she was never going to master the latest batch of
> changes. She was an intelligent, proud woman who didn't want to look
> stupid and illiterate, but it's a lot to ask of people her age, who have
> lived through several such reforms.
Why bother to attempt to follow the latest reform,
unless you have to professionally?
> One issue the reformers faced was, when a word is borrowed from a
> foreign language, should its spelling to revised to fit the "Dutch
> rules" or should the original spelling be preserved? It was a difficult
> decision; you could argue either way, if you stop and think about it.
> It's not an empty question, either, as there as been an avalanche of
> English words borrowed in the last twenty years.
This is made impossible to resolve because of an eternal difference of
opinion between north and south. The Flemish have their eternal language
battles ('taalstrijd') and they feel that as much as possible every word
that resembles a correponding French word should have its spelling
dutchified (c -> k/s, etc). The North on the other hand is more
conservative in this, since many French words have been absorbed in the
Dutch for centuries. Changing them all would change the language too
much.
So a comprimise is arrived at over each word seperately.
The results are of course impossible to memorize,
and often ignored.
> They decided on preservation, and even ordered some words that had
> previously been Dutch-icized, such as the French "cadeau" to "kado," be
> returned to the original spelling. They must have had some sort of
> historic cut-off point, though; they didn't order really old French
> borrowings, like muziek, to be changed back.
No cutoff at all, just random bickering between a few professors,
Jan
PS Light amusement:
The same works through in words borrowed from English.
If the word is clearly English the spelling is usually left untouched.
If it looks like it might have been a French word originally they want
to change it :-)
J. J. Lodder
> > The children learn the latest reform easily, being flexible and not
> > really habituated, but I remember talking to one woman in her 70s who
> > was in tears, afraid she was never going to master the latest batch of
> > changes. She was an intelligent, proud woman who didn't want to look
> > stupid and illiterate, but it's a lot to ask of people her age, who have
> > lived through several such reforms.
>
> Why don't people just carry on using the older spellings? Faced with
> spelling reforms, I know I would, as would many folk over here and
> probably even more French people if someone tried to regularize the
> French language (I heard that some people were still working as if old
> francs were in use right up until the change to euros occurred - I'm not
> *quite* that awkward myself). btw, attitudes like mine are one of the
> reasons English is not going to have its spelling regularized in the
> foreseeable future. There's a lot of bloody minded wossnames like me
> around - *I* still say `fount' when I mean `set of type in one size and
> style'.
Writing on usenet you can do that.
However, if you write professionally, you will have to conform.
Unless you are a major author with a settled reputation of course :-)
Jan
J. J. Lodder
> I do not agree with the plan proposed by the author of www.freespeling.com ,
> but I would like to point out, as I have on at least one previous occasion,
> that the author of that Web page intends his plan to lead eventually to a
> new standard spelling.
But the method proposed to achieve a new standard
seems -very- unlikely to work.
Sems a case of deliberate 'verelendung' to me:
thinking that things must get worse
before they can get better.
Jan
J. J. Lodder
> I suspect that the cut-off has to do with words which were Dutchified by
> `natural' processes, rather than official diktat.
Je bedoelt wllicht 'diktaat'?
Jan
Ben Zimmer
Donna Richoux wrote:
>
> Rowland McDonnell <real-addr...@flur.bltigibbet> wrote:
>
> > What does rhotic mean?
>
> In non-technical terms, a person is rhotic who "pronounces the R" before
> a consonant or at the end of a word. Some nonrhotic people object to
> that definition, because they say, "We do pronounce those R's, in our
> own way." But anyway, a person who pronounces "teacher" as "teachuh" is
> nonrhotic, and a person who pronounces it as "teacherr" is rhotic.
>
> > The word is not in my dictionary.
>
> I'm not sure if it is rare or just new. It's useful in discussions of
> English dialect.
"Rhotic" is a relatively new coinage (introduced in phonetics c. 1968),
but the term "rhotacism" to describe various kinds of "r-fulness" goes
back to 1834, according to the OED.
(If a non-rhotic told a rhotic with the Don/dawn merger that his speech
was "r-ful" ['A:f@l], wouldn't he be offended?)
--Ben
Raymond S. Wise
[...]
Out of curiosity, I checked a couple of dictionaries for the terms
"rhotic" and another technical term not widely used, "Received
Pronunciation." My edition of Merriam Webster's Collegiate, "Webster's
New Collegiate Dictionary," (C) 1981, does not have "rhotic." It does
have "Received Pronunciation," which it defines as "the pronunciation
of Received Standard." I had never heard of that last term, which the
dictionary defines as "the form of English spoken at the English
public schools, at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and by
many educated Englishmen elsewhere." I would refer to that as
"Standard British English," and would say of the Queen of England, for
example, that she speaks Standard British English with Received
Pronunciation.
My edition of the Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary has "rhotic,"
and has for its etymology "Mid-20C. < RHOTACISM." It defines
"rhotacism" as "unusual pronunciation of the letter 'r,' or too much
emphasis on this sound," which it derives ultimately from the Greek
*rhotakizein,* "make wrong use of the letter _r._" The Microsoft
Encarta has "Received Pronunciation" but not "Received Standard." It
has "Standard English," but not "Standard American English" or
"Standard British English." Those are, it appears, included in the
following:
[quote]
Stan.dard Eng.lish _n_the variety of the English language used by
educated speakers and regarded as representing correct usage in
grammar, spelling, vocabulary, and punctuation, while taking into
account some regional differences
[end quote]
I found that "while taking into account some regional differences" to
be interesting. The Webster's New Collegiate also has an entry for
"Standard English":
[quote]
Standard English _n_ : the English that with respect to spelling,
grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary is substantially uniform though
not devoid of regional differences, that is well established by usage
in the formal and informal speech and writing of the educated, and
that is widely recognized as acceptable wherever English is spoken and
understood.
[end quote]
The Webster's New Collegiate does not have "rhotacism."
What makes that last word of particular interest to me is that when I
was young I had to get speech therapy because I pronounced my r's like
w's: "My name is Waymond Wise." So now I can call it by a fancy name:
I suffered from rhotacism.
--
Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minneapolis USA
Richard Fontana
>
>My edition of the Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary has "rhotic,"
>and has for its etymology "Mid-20C. < RHOTACISM." It defines
>"rhotacism" as "unusual pronunciation of the letter 'r,' or too much
>emphasis on this sound," which it derives ultimately from the Greek
>*rhotakizein,* "make wrong use of the letter _r._"
>What makes that last word of particular interest to me is that when I
>was young I had to get speech therapy because I pronounced my r's like
>w's: "My name is Waymond Wise." So now I can call it by a fancy name:
>I suffered from rhotacism.
I think it should be called Dubyaism, or maybe Fuddism, or Barbara Walters
Syndrome.
Stephen Baynes
>
> Rowland McDonnell <real-addr...@flur.bltigibbet> wrote:
> > around - *I* still say `fount' when I mean `set of type in one size and
> > style'.
>
> Writing on usenet you can do that.
> However, if you write professionally, you will have to conform.
But you get editors with their own prefered anachronisms like "role" spelt
with a o-circumflex despite the fact no UK English dictionary has had
that spelling in it for many many years. So you get forced to non-conform.
--
Stephen Baynes CEng MBCS Stephen...@soton.sc.philips.com
Philips Semiconductors Ltd
Southampton SO15 0DJ +44 (0)23 80316431
United Kingdom My views are my own.
Bob Cunningham
[ . . . ]
>What makes that last word of particular interest to me is that when I
>was young I had to get speech therapy because I pronounced my r's like
>w's: "My name is Waymond Wise." So now I can call it by a fancy name:
>I suffered from rhotacism.
I think you mean you suffered from wotacism.
Donna Richoux
> Donna Richoux <tr...@euronet.nl> wrote:
> > The children learn the latest reform easily, being flexible and not
> > really habituated, but I remember talking to one woman in her 70s who
> > was in tears, afraid she was never going to master the latest batch of
> > changes. She was an intelligent, proud woman who didn't want to look
> > stupid and illiterate, but it's a lot to ask of people her age, who have
> > lived through several such reforms.
>
> Why bother to attempt to follow the latest reform,
> unless you have to professionally?
I guess if a person has spent a lifetime following high standards, and
really believes that making mistakes is a sign of ignorance and
laziness, they don't just drop that attitude when they get older. From
what I see, people here have internalized a lot of faith in the value of
education, hard work, etc. I got the feeling that this woman felt
ashamed and embarrassed about the chance that anyone else might spot
defects in her writing.
I expect to see her next week; if the chance arises I will remind her of
our old conversation and ask her how it has gone.
Peter Flynn
> Donna Richoux <tr...@euronet.nl> wrote:
>
>
>>Rowland McDonnell <real-addr...@flur.bltigibbet> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>J. J. Lodder <nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
>>>
>>>>The Netherlands has had a period (late sixties, early seventies)
>>>>when free spelling was fashionable in some cicles,
>>>>(calling themselves progressive)
English has had several periods of this, on both sides of the Atlantic,
starting with the one documented by Caxton ("what sholde a man in thyse
dayes now wryte, `egges' or `eyren'?"), and continued with the argument
of Andrew Jackson ("It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of
at least two ways to spell any word"). That doesn't make it any wiser
or foolisher, but what Caxton went on to call "dyversite and chaunge of
langage" is probably inevitable.
///Peter
Peter Flynn
> "J. J. Lodder" wrote:
>
>>Rowland McDonnell <real-addr...@flur.bltigibbet> wrote:
>>
>
>
>>>foreseeable future. There's a lot of bloody minded wossnames like me
>>>around - *I* still say `fount' when I mean `set of type in one size and
>>>style'.
>>>
>>Writing on usenet you can do that.
>>However, if you write professionally, you will have to conform.
>>
>
> But you get editors with their own prefered anachronisms like "role" spelt
> with a o-circumflex despite the fact no UK English dictionary has had
> that spelling in it for many many years. So you get forced to non-conform.
As equally (someone has pointed out, I forget who) the English spelling
"metre" reflects the unimportant fact that the word arrived in the
language from French. Regional and dialect forms may be edited out by
large-scale or international publishers, but persist (and are thereby
preserved) in local publications like newspapers, and in signs and
posters (Hiberno-English spells "rear" as "rere", as in `Entrance at
rere of office').
///Peter
Typographia ars artium omnium conservatrix
J. J. Lodder
> "J. J. Lodder" wrote:
> >
> > Rowland McDonnell <real-addr...@flur.bltigibbet> wrote:
>
> > > foreseeable future. There's a lot of bloody minded wossnames like me
> > > around - *I* still say `fount' when I mean `set of type in one size and
> > > style'.
> >
> > Writing on usenet you can do that.
> > However, if you write professionally, you will have to conform.
>
> But you get editors with their own prefered anachronisms like "role" spelt
> with a o-circumflex despite the fact no UK English dictionary has had
> that spelling in it for many many years. So you get forced to non-conform.
Does that affect the pronunciation?
What I mean is not officially, but would you have a tendency
to pronounce rôle slightly more French-like than role?
Jan
J. J. Lodder
> J. J. Lodder <nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
>
> > Donna Richoux <tr...@euronet.nl> wrote:
>
> > > The children learn the latest reform easily, being flexible and not
> > > really habituated, but I remember talking to one woman in her 70s who
> > > was in tears, afraid she was never going to master the latest batch of
> > > changes. She was an intelligent, proud woman who didn't want to look
> > > stupid and illiterate, but it's a lot to ask of people her age, who have
> > > lived through several such reforms.
> >
> > Why bother to attempt to follow the latest reform,
> > unless you have to professionally?
>
> I guess if a person has spent a lifetime following high standards, and
> really believes that making mistakes is a sign of ignorance and
> laziness, they don't just drop that attitude when they get older.
The attitude still exists among the older people, I believe.
However, the successive spelling changes have eroded it a lot.
> From
> what I see, people here have internalized a lot of faith in the value of
> education, hard work, etc. I got the feeling that this woman felt
> ashamed and embarrassed about the chance that anyone else might spot
> defects in her writing.
The opposite is also quite common: I know some old people who still
refuse to write anything newer than pre-1950 spelling.
> I expect to see her next week; if the chance arises I will remind her of
> our old conversation and ask her how it has gone.
Tell her she has no 'ruggengraat', if she writes it that way,
Jan
Henry Churchyard
"Egges" and "eyren" were actually different basic pronunciations,
rather than merely different spellings. (It's interesting that very
few alternative standard or quasi-standard modern English spellings
are based on different pronunciations; "aluminium" vs. "aluminum" is
one of the few).
--
Henry Churchyard chu...@crossmyt.com http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/
Rowland McDonnell
[snip]
> Out of curiosity, I checked a couple of dictionaries for the terms
> "rhotic" and another technical term not widely used, "Received
> Pronunciation." My edition of Merriam Webster's Collegiate, "Webster's
> New Collegiate Dictionary," (C) 1981, does not have "rhotic." It does
> have "Received Pronunciation," which it defines as "the pronunciation
> of Received Standard." I had never heard of that last term, which the
> dictionary defines as "the form of English spoken at the English
> public schools, at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and by
> many educated Englishmen elsewhere." I would refer to that as
> "Standard British English," and would say of the Queen of England, for
> example, that she speaks Standard British English with Received
> Pronunciation.
She doesn't in my book; and I'm pretty sure that's a mistaken definition
of `received pronunciation' - it sounds like they've mixed up `received
pronunciation' (which is, more or less, what quite a lot of BBC World
Service announcers use on the whole - I once met a German who spoke
English in near perfect received pronunciation. When I remarked that he
sounded like he'd learnt English from the BBC World Service, he told me
that he had...) with `U' pronunciation, which involves clenched teeth
and the ability to rhyme `house' with `mice'. Why `U'? No idea.
One of my grandfathers used to speak with traces of `U' pronunciation -
every bloody syllable of `vegetable', but always `ain't' for `isn't; and
`orf' for `off', for example.
[snip interesting stuff]
Rowland.
Rowland McDonnell
[snip]
> Writing on usenet you can do that.
> However, if you write professionally, you will have to conform.
I conform with the standard definition as listed in my dictionary and
the standard common spelling used for the word in the days before the PC
explosion. I'm damned if I'm changing just because computers have
`Font' menus rather than `Fount' menus - both spellings are acceptable
UK English spellings.
btw, I have been a professional writer and that is what I did then.
> Unless you are a major author with a settled reputation of course :-)
Phooey. I'll spell the way I want and damn the opinion of anyone else -
provided I'm backed up by a dictionary.
Rowland McDonnell
I'm afraid I don't speak Dutch; in any case, diktat in English derives
from the German word for `dictate' - quite similar to the Dutch
`dictaat' from what I can gather from my dictionaries here.
Rowland McDonnell
[snip]
> A standard that is too complicated is counterproductive.
> Learning standard English seems to take up
> so much of the poor kiddies time
I'll admit it's a bit awkward, but it's not *that* bad; it's usually
only people with learning disabilities who have serious trouble - that's
one of the reasons dyslexia was first spotted in England, for example.
I've been both a pupil and teacher in England.
> that they don't have any time left
> to learn a few bits of another language.
Nah - the problem there is that foreign language teaching in the UK is
largely just plain bloody awful compared to most of Western Europe.
[snip]
> > English spelling's
> > undoubtedly a mess, but I thought Dutch had been more or less sorted
> > out?
>
> You are mistaken. While not as bad as English it is stil a mess,
> despite several attempts at reform.
> Those proposing to change English speling should have a look a the Dutch
> experience.
> Dutch seems to be the only modern language in which major spelling
> reforms have been undertaken, with rather mixed results.
[snip]
Hmm. Interesting - thanks for that.
Rowland McDonnell
[snip]
> PS Light amusement:
> The same works through in words borrowed from English.
> If the word is clearly English the spelling is usually left untouched.
> If it looks like it might have been a French word originally they want
> to change it :-)
<chuckle> Is this because the Dutch seem to own half of England, but
haven't made many inroads into France? ;-)
David Squire
[snip]
> .... I'm pretty sure that's a mistaken definition
> of `received pronunciation' - it sounds like they've mixed up `received
> pronunciation' (which is, more or less, what quite a lot of BBC World
> Service announcers use on the whole - I once met a German who spoke
> English in near perfect received pronunciation. When I remarked that he
> sounded like he'd learnt English from the BBC World Service, he told me
> that he had...) with `U' pronunciation, which involves clenched teeth
> and the ability to rhyme `house' with `mice'. Why `U'? No idea.
>
> One of my grandfathers used to speak with traces of `U' pronunciation -
> every bloody syllable of `vegetable', but always `ain't' for `isn't; and
> `orf' for `off', for example.
That's "U" for "upperclass", as coined, I believe, in Nobless Oblige
(1956), edited by Nancy Mitford.
D.
Rowland McDonnell
[snip]
> That doesn't make it any wiser
> or foolisher, but what Caxton went on to call "dyversite and chaunge of
> langage" is probably inevitable.
Oh aye, but there's a big difference between *that* and deliberately
scuppering something for no good reason. Evolution is a Good Thing;
gratuitous and destructive revolution is very rarely anything but awful.
Rowland McDonnell
> Stephen Baynes <stephen...@soton.sc.philips.com> wrote:
[snip]
> > But you get editors with their own prefered anachronisms like "role" spelt
> > with a o-circumflex despite the fact no UK English dictionary has had
> > that spelling in it for many many years. So you get forced to non-conform.
>
> Does that affect the pronunciation?
Not that I've noticed.
> What I mean is not officially, but would you have a tendency
> to pronounce rôle slightly more French-like than role?
Might I direct the questioner to exhibit `A', the Rt Hon Edward Heath
MP? Ever heard *him* speaking `French' as he calls it? French accents
don't seem to come out of English mouths very well.
Rowland McDonnell
[snip]
> As equally (someone has pointed out, I forget who) the English spelling
> "metre" reflects the unimportant fact that the word arrived in the
> language from French.
It's quite a useful difference: it means English English makes it easy
to distinguish between the length measure `metre' and a gadget for
measuring `meter'.
> Regional and dialect forms may be edited out by
> large-scale or international publishers, but persist (and are thereby
> preserved) in local publications like newspapers, and in signs and
> posters (Hiberno-English spells "rear" as "rere", as in `Entrance at
> rere of office').
Coo - that, I didn't know. I like that. (then again, I have enough
trouble with those bloody silly Irish traffic lights to worry about
minor things like that ;-) )
Not only, but also: dialect variations in the language make for
curiosities such as `outwith' (common in Scotland) for `without'. The
more diversity, the better in my book.
mplsray
"Rowland McDonnell" <real-addr...@flur.bltigibbet> wrote in message
How would you characterize the speech of Queen Elizabeth, in terms of
dialect and accent? It is not clear from your post. As for "U," I take it
that that is from the "U/non-U" distinction. I was under the impression that
those terms were nearly obsolete. You rarely encounter them in the
newsgroups alt.english.usage and alt.usage.english , for example.
I was the one who said of the Queen that she "speaks Standard British
English with Received Pronunciation," not either of the dictionaries I cite.
Such a characterization is not original with me, however. The first time I
encountered it was when it was used by Anthony Burgess in his book *A
Mouthful of Air: Language, Languages--Especially English,* a book which is
basically an introduction to linguistics. Once upon a time, dialects and
accents were thought to go hand in glove, but that is no longer true with
the various Standard Englishes which exist in the world. It is possible, for
example, to speak Standard American English with Received Pronunciation, or
Standard British English with a Scots accent. Standard American English
cannot even be said to have any specific accent attached to it.
--
Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
J. J. Lodder
> J. J. Lodder <nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
>
> > Stephen Baynes <stephen...@soton.sc.philips.com> wrote:
> [snip]
>
> > > But you get editors with their own prefered anachronisms like "role" spelt
> > > with a o-circumflex despite the fact no UK English dictionary has had
> > > that spelling in it for many many years. So you get forced to non-conform.
> >
> > Does that affect the pronunciation?
>
> Not that I've noticed.
>
> > What I mean is not officially, but would you have a tendency
> > to pronounce rôle slightly more French-like than role?
>
> Might I direct the questioner to exhibit `A', the Rt Hon Edward Heath
> MP? Ever heard *him* speaking `French' as he calls it? French accents
> don't seem to come out of English mouths very well.
That maybe a trueism, but it is not what I asked.
Will there be subtle differences in pronunciation
(at least in some speakers)
depending on the absence or presence of accents like ô?
And no, no need to feed me counterexamples.
It is always amusing to see most of the English in France
pronounce both è and é as English ee.
In placenames for example,
even when asking real Frenchmen for the way to.
If they don't understand just shout louder :-(
Jan
J. J. Lodder
> J. J. Lodder <nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > Writing on usenet you can do that.
> > However, if you write professionally, you will have to conform.
>
> I conform with the standard definition as listed in my dictionary and
> the standard common spelling used for the word in the days before the PC
> explosion. I'm damned if I'm changing just because computers have
> `Font' menus rather than `Fount' menus - both spellings are acceptable
> UK English spellings.
>
> btw, I have been a professional writer and that is what I did then.
>
> > Unless you are a major author with a settled reputation of course :-)
>
> Phooey. I'll spell the way I want and damn the opinion of anyone else -
> provided I'm backed up by a dictionary.
If you write for a newspaper for example
your private spellings may be inacceptable to your editor,
or they may be corrected without you being asked about it.
Jan
J. J. Lodder
> J. J. Lodder <nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
>
> > Rowland McDonnell <real-addr...@flur.bltigibbet> wrote:
> >
> > > I suspect that the cut-off has to do with words which were Dutchified by
> > > `natural' processes, rather than official diktat.
> >
> > Je bedoelt wllicht 'diktaat'?
>
> I'm afraid I don't speak Dutch; in any case, diktat in English derives
> from the German word for `dictate' - quite similar to the Dutch
> `dictaat' from what I can gather from my dictionaries here.
Real Dutch don't know anymore whether it should be
'dictaat' or 'diktaat' in Dutch without consulting a dictionary.
That's what you get with spelling changes.
But never 'diktat', or 'dictat'.
And the Dutch of course also has 'Diktat',
in the same (very specific) meaning as in English. (Versailles)
Jan
And Dutch TV has copied Pivot with a yearly 'Nationaal dictee':
a TV program that demonstrates that the average Dutch
will make 50 errors or so in half a page of dictated text.
The Belgians almost always win:
they practice in teams all winter for the event.
The Dutch just don't care.
Maybe an idea for BBC :-)
J. J. Lodder
> J. J. Lodder <nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > PS Light amusement:
> > The same works through in words borrowed from English.
> > If the word is clearly English the spelling is usually left untouched.
> > If it looks like it might have been a French word originally they want
> > to change it :-)
>
> <chuckle> Is this because the Dutch seem to own half of England, but
> haven't made many inroads into France? ;-)
No, it is mostly a Flemish problem.
Following the Belgian revolution of 1830 the French speaking part of
Belgium grabbed the power, and attempted to suppress the Flemish
completely by outlawing it for official use and in schools.
They expected to be able to get rid of the Flemish,
in 30 years or so.
The result has been the 'taalstrijd' (lit. fight of/about languages),
which also was a fight for emancipation of the suppressed population.
The Flemish are back on top nowadays, in what remains of Belgium.
To the Flemish French influence is something to be fought;
the Dutch don't care too much.
Best,
Jan
PS And the Dutch do own half of France in some regions,
(Ardeche for example) with their second houses.
The English have followed in recent years;
with the overvalued pound buying French is cheap at the moment.
Ben Zimmer
OED2 gives a slightly earlier first cite:
----------
1954 A. S. C. ROSS in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen LV. 21
(title) U and non-U.
Ibid., In this article I use the terms upper class (abbreviated: U),
correct, proper,..to designate usages of the upper class; their antonyms
(non-U, incorrect, not proper,..) to designate usages which are not
upper class.
Ibid. 22 As a boy I heard not quite a gent..used by non-U speakers.
Ibid. 23 The non-U slang phrase He's left his visiting card.
Ibid. 27 The U-rules for ending letters are very strict; failure to
observe them usually implies non-U-ness.
Ibid. 45 Pardon! is used by the non-U in three main ways.
----------
--Ben
Matti Lamprhey
>
> That's "U" for "upperclass", as coined, I believe, in Nobless Oblige
> (1956), edited by Nancy Mitford.
She didn't coin it, but popularized it. Here's a typical reference for
U/Non-U:
Upper-class and other class. Designates linguistic usage posited as the
primary distinguishing characteristic of the upper classes of England.
Introduced by Professor Alan S.C. Ross, 1954. _Upper Class English Usage_,
in _Bulletin de la Société Néo-philologique de Helsinki_. Given currency by
Nancy Mitford in her celebrated September 1955 article for Encounter, _The
English Aristocracy_.
Matti
Giuseppe Bilotta
> and the ability to rhyme `house' with `mice'
Reminds me of the Irish saying moys instead of mouse and so on and so
forth.
--
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta
Axiom I of the Giuseppe Bilotta
theory of IT:
Anything is better than MS
Rowland McDonnell
> Rowland McDonnell <real-addr...@flur.bltigibbet> wrote:
>
> > J. J. Lodder <nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
> >
> > > Stephen Baynes <stephen...@soton.sc.philips.com> wrote:
> > [snip]
> >
> > > > But you get editors with their own prefered anachronisms like "role"
> > > > spelt with a o-circumflex despite the fact no UK English dictionary
> > > > has had that spelling in it for many many years. So you get forced
> > > > to non-conform.
> > >
> > > Does that affect the pronunciation?
> >
> > Not that I've noticed.
> >
> > > What I mean is not officially, but would you have a tendency
> > > to pronounce rôle slightly more French-like than role?
> >
> > Might I direct the questioner to exhibit `A', the Rt Hon Edward Heath
> > MP? Ever heard *him* speaking `French' as he calls it? French accents
> > don't seem to come out of English mouths very well.
>
> That maybe a trueism, but it is not what I asked.
I know; but I directly answered the question above.
[snip]
Rowland McDonnell
> Rowland McDonnell wrote:
> > and the ability to rhyme `house' with `mice'
>
> Reminds me of the Irish saying moys instead of mouse and so on and so
> forth.
Hmm... I'd say that's a different thing entirely - `U' pronunciation is
a travesty, while Irish English is a decent regional variation in my
book. `U' pronunciation is a deliberate mangling of the language.
Rowland McDonnell
Rowland McDonnell
> Rowland McDonnell <real-addr...@flur.bltigibbet> wrote:
[snip]
> > Phooey. I'll spell the way I want and damn the opinion of anyone else -
> > provided I'm backed up by a dictionary.
>
> If you write for a newspaper for example
I first wrote professionally for a couple of technical magazines.
> your private spellings may be inacceptable to your editor,
> or they may be corrected without you being asked about it.
Indeed, but when you're sat next to your editor, things can be worked
out on a nice informal basis. And when you *are* the editor, as I ended
up...
Rowland McDonnell
> Rowland McDonnell <real-addr...@flur.bltigibbet> wrote:
>
> > J. J. Lodder <nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
> >
> > > Rowland McDonnell <real-addr...@flur.bltigibbet> wrote:
> > >
> > > > I suspect that the cut-off has to do with words which were
> > > > Dutchified by `natural' processes, rather than official diktat.
> > >
> > > Je bedoelt wllicht 'diktaat'?
> >
> > I'm afraid I don't speak Dutch; in any case, diktat in English derives
> > from the German word for `dictate' - quite similar to the Dutch
> > `dictaat' from what I can gather from my dictionaries here.
>
> Real Dutch don't know anymore whether it should be
> 'dictaat' or 'diktaat' in Dutch without consulting a dictionary.
The one I've got is dated 1958...
> That's what you get with spelling changes.
> But never 'diktat', or 'dictat'.
>
> And the Dutch of course also has 'Diktat',
> in the same (very specific) meaning as in English. (Versailles)
Coo - that, I didn't know. It's missing from my Dutch/English
dictionary.
> And Dutch TV has copied Pivot with a yearly 'Nationaal dictee':
> a TV program that demonstrates that the average Dutch
> will make 50 errors or so in half a page of dictated text.
Blimey. Mind you, the average person isn't much above pond life in
terms of intelligence.
> The Belgians almost always win:
> they practice in teams all winter for the event.
> The Dutch just don't care.
>
> Maybe an idea for BBC :-)
Thankfully, I live without a telly.