Domain: i18nguy.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to i18nguy.com.
Comments · 13
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Re:save your pageclicks.
In correct English
No such thing. English is an amalgamation of a bunch of languages.
Glue rhymes with poo.
Anybody who tries to give a universal rule for English is going to be wrong in several corner cases. As evidence, I offer this, or this.
English is much less definable and explainable than people like to admit. Which is what makes it infinitely malleable and capable of doing things nobody thought of.
I'm not convinced there is a single rule which says "in English you always
..." which is actually accurate in all cases. Because English borrows words from Latin, French, German, Spanish, Gaelic .. and every other language which we ever encountered.It's got more exceptions than most people will ever fully have a handle on. It's not that kind of language.
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Re:Easy grammar
A human-spoken language designed from scratch to be simple and easy to learn? It's been done, Esperanto.
Esparanto has been around for more than a century, and has failed to catch on. Like it or not, English is the standard international language. So fixing the worst problems with English makes more sense than trying to start something from scratch. We could change the spelling of words like "through" and "tough" to "thru" and "tuff". Get rid of some of the irregular verbs and irregular plurals.
Mark Twain made a very reasonable proposal, that could be a framework for reform.
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Re:Sigh
Here's an idea, imagine if someone wrote a book, that started in English, then began substituting foreign words and phrases, and by the end switched completely to the foreign language. Something like this, but with languages instead of spelling. And novel length. Then by the end, you've learned a language.
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Re:Demise of the English langauge
Heretic!
English is perfect! There is no room for improvement! Mark Twain was wrong!
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Re:Other options?
The fix is just to check if the names are the same if they're both lcase'd
Bzzt... also wrong.
Comparing two strings after converting both to lower case is not the same as comparing with a case-insensitive comparison. Upper-casing strings to normalize them for comparison is somewhat more reliable, but still not as good as just using the correct API in the first place. Take a look at the casing rules for the Turkish language, for an example of how this kind of naive assumption can result in subtle bugs.
Either way, you'd want to use exactly the same comparison as whatever the filesystem expects, and that's hard, because NTFS is not the only filesystem supported by Windows. There is still FAT32 support, xFAT, and various unpredictable remote filesystems.
The real WTF is using system folder names as display names in a GUI -- it is guaranteed to cause a few bugs like this.
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Re:GNOME and screen real estate
That also depends on which international region the user has set things to.
For example in Arabic you read from right to left. So the order of things would make more sense the other way round.
See this:
http://www.i18nguy.com/MiddleEastUI.html
It was a pain, but seems they have a lot of money there and we wanted some of it :). -
Re:Comments on simple suggestionsI've been reading this thread and did not know what nofollow was, so I decided to look it up. Anyone else who is curious can look here.
Short description so you don't have to click the link: nofollow means that Google won't raise the page rank of, for instance, "beatles" searches for submissions by the user "* * Beatles Beatles".
ROBOTS <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="ALL">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,NOFOLLOW">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NONE">
CONTENT="ALL | NONE | NOINDEX | INDEX| NOFOLLOW | FOLLOW | NOARCHIVE"
default = empty = "ALL"
"NONE" = "NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"The CONTENT field is a comma separated list:
INDEX: search engine robots should include this page.
FOLLOW: robots should follow links from this page to other pages.
NOINDEX: links can be explored, although the page is not indexed.
NOFOLLOW: the page can be indexed, but no links are explored.
NONE: robots can ignore the page.
NOARCHIVE: Google uses this to prevent archiving of the page. See http://www.google.com/bot.html -
Re:Chicken
For all sorts of poor name choices, check out:
http://www.i18nguy.com/translations.html
I am sure someone will mention the Chevy Nova legend, but that's just what it is--a legend. -
Re:Not TwainActually, they're not sure who wrote it. It was either Twain, or it was Shields in a letter to Twain. See note 1 here.
For added fun, see note 2 as well.
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Re:well that was thoroughly frightening
Errr...
Not according to This site.
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Re:Best PursuasionSo you've been reading up on the net's most read resources about argument and persuasion? Or just Insult Monger, you malodourous toad?
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Re:Pi the movie
Not necessarily... it really just all depends on what exactly the number's significance was. You seem to be assuming the number was some sort of ratio, like Pi or e or phi. It doesn't have to be.
One thing that seems significant to me is that the number was 216 digits in our number system, but was also 216 digits in hebrew. This doesn't seem to make sense-- I don't totally understand hebrew numbers as far as I'm aware it seems like you aren't going to get the same number of digits in both systems for a single value. If I'm right about this, and this isn't just a plot hole, this (plus the way in which the movie implies the location of the digits within the number was as important as the value itself) suggests the number was not so much a value as a pattern.
Stephen Wolfram surmised that if you took the physical laws of the universe down to the absolute most bare postulates, you could describe the entire universe as a cellular automata that could be described in maybe two or three lines of "code". Apply this code to whatever the universe's initial conditions were, and you'd have a perfect simulation of the universe from the beginning. Perhaps the Number was an encoding of that sort of automata, or something of that sort. There are many possibilities.
I had always figured all the really fundamental numbers were irrational. After thinking about it and looking up on the internet it seems there are actually only 6: pi, e, i, 1, 0, and phi
1, 0 and (depending on definitions) i are rational. Moreover, you can easily *describe* e and pi in a single, rational integer such as the 216 digit number: just take the binary representation of a perl program which calculates the digits of e or pi. -
Re:Mark Twain had it right:
... and he also had some fairly radical proposals on the subject of spelling.