These are files only for me, and helps me retrieve them later. I really can't think what other purpose filenames have in a personal data store.
I'll agree with you that modern operating systems don't use enough metadata:( I use ROX-Filer on the XFS filesystem, and so I can set filetypes independently of the name, and some operating environments let you label a file in some primative way, but that's about the most advanced metadata I'm aware of with modern OSes. (And I don't even use ROX's filetyping much any more: It usually works out the filetype automagically independentally of any such metadata, and if I edit a file with metadata, it gets lost into the æther...) That feature you mention would be the absolute best feature of any filesystem/networking apps in the world! (on top, at least, of what's normal today).
cp: cannot create regular file `mnt/This is a filename: It contains weird characters that for "some" reason, FAT doesn\'t like, doesn\'t it?': Invalid argument
This is on a GNU+Linux 2.6-based box. What are you using? What does Windows think, if it sees such filenames? (I did once manage to get a filename with characters Windows/FAT doesn't like, and not even Linux could remove it. I forget what exactly Windows thought of it.)
I don't know how KDE does it, but unless it actually shows the ID3 tags instead of the file name in the main display window (with the file name relegated to a properties dialog, or wherever), it would not satisfy me enough that I'd be tempted to stop naming my music files the way I like them named. On the other hand that would be very convenient, but probably better implemented as some sort of a (userspace?) filesystem plugin thingy, so that all programs see it in the same way, and I can just as easily rename=retag files from the command line as from my file manager.
I'm really quite happy with my current setup, except for the single time (per album) that I copy my music off my hard drive onto my media player, and it's completely not worth switching desktop environment to solve a problem that occurs once every now and again. I wasn't meant to be whingeing. I was just saying "here's what I do" in response to someone who said they did something similar but was, apparently, joking. I also identified some limitations to my approach.
(I need an music player that plays Ogg Vorbis files, given the size of my collection that is in Ogg Vorbis, so no, I don't use an iPod. Unless that's changed?)
My file manager doesn't use MP3 or OGG tags, and until recently when using my computer I've mostly used my file manager to open my music files. (Rhythmbox is now almost good enough that I use it almost all the time... although for some bizarre reason it won't let you edit the tags, and many of my files are tagless or worse badly tagged because I've rarely ever used the tags.)
And it doesn't really seem to me that using a file name to record the name of a file is "squishing" something abnormal into it. Strikes me that every character I can't put into a file name is one less than is fair... (I've sometimes been so mad as to wish I could italicise or otherwise change the fonts of parts of filenames!)
Actually, no. But perhaps that is a word I redundantly and/or gratuitously over-use too much.
(One of my lecturers at Uni uses (or at least did, when he lectured me) "as a consequence of that" as every second phrase. Almost literally. There was once a suggestion the Psych Society (he being a Psychology lecturer) should run a competition along the lines of "Guess how many lollies are in the jar" for a semester, although the prospect of winning a collection of the words "as a consequence of that", all of which have already been uttered was not particularly motivating).
Even though others apparently claim you're joking, I personally am all for gratuitous words in file names. Some times I achieve this by gratitously deep folder heirarchies, but usually I just randomly add keywords to files. I mostly use a GUI, so it doesn't stress me out too much, but makes it much easier to find them two years later.
(I also like my music files to accurately contain the name of the track, so a song like "Where is everybody?" becomes "(maybe the artists name, album etc. -) 03 - Where is everybody?.ogg". Worse, if it's "Starfuckers Inc.", it becomes "06 - Starfuckers, Inc..ogg". It quite annoys me when I try to copy the files to my music player, which has a FAT-based filesystem.)
I think I can see where the harm is. Think of Ayn Rand's novels, The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. If those were edited for content by many of today's far-Left nitwits, they would not convey the same message. The problem is that they would (presumably) be sold as the same novels written by the same author, something I am sure she would disapprove of if she were still alive today.
So? Parody is allowed under US copyright law. It exists precisely to alter the message of the original creator. And copyrighted creations are eventually meant to enter the public domain, at which point the copyright holder loses their ability to restrict redistribution (which in the case of personal works probably won't be a huge problem for them, but Disney will still be alive when Steamboat Willie finally enters the public domain). Maintenance of creative control isn't the point of copyright. I, personally, am offended by this decision, even though I would never have made use of the defendand's services.
But the real question is, since you obviously understood what he meant, why were you an ass in making fun of him? Does it make you feel better to belittle someone, or do you think you are doing your part to preserve the language?
You missed my motivation, which is understandable. For thousands of years, two different neutral pronouns have been used: "he" and "they". Recently, feminists and their supporters have objected to using "he" on the grounds that it is exclusionary. I have no particular objection to that objection. However, many people have decided to replace it with "she". I do object to that, because it is at least as exclusionary as "he" is. As you can see, I'm not trying to preserve the language, but I'm merely trying to help avoid exclusionary language.
In any case, as I am unfamiliar with the details of Pinyin or Mandarin Chinese, I would not have "come back with great counter-examples", regardless of how I read the OP. In any case, I do not think the particular problem you have described is insurmountable; if a phonetic orthography is our goal, it should be simple enough to alter the spelling along with the pronunciation.
Is that the same reason you object to trying to converge the written and spoken language?
I'm afraid if you actually read what I said instead of what you wanted to read, you would have seen I never particular advocated not altering the spelling of our language. But you probably think it's fun to make an arse of yourself by belittling people, or something. In fact, I spent the entire first two paragraphs of my post refuting an objection to reforming spelling i.e. that by respelling our language we would lose the record of etymology it provides. (Perhaps also you should have read how I wrote those paragraphs, in addition to what I wrote in them. There were plenty of lines to read between.)
There is a problem. The written language changes more slowly than the spoken language. So what would you do (or not do) about it?
Did you read my final paragraph? I will quote it and expand upon it here. It provides my solution to the problem of having an orthography that corresponds to the pronunciation quite closely.
Using the IPA as the basis for an orthography could have some value; but given the variability in pronunciation between different groups of people, and over time, it would not be much use. The IPA provides definitions of the different characters and in particular it is completely inappropriate to re-order the vowel symbols with respect to height, as you would have to for some dialects of English and/or to consider time. For instance, the letter "e" would probably be used for the vowel in "game", which is reasonable enough for American English, but completely inappropriate for Australian English. So Australians would not be using the IPA to write their language, even though they spelt it the same way as Americans did (which brings us to another point: different sounds are differently merged in different dialects, so many Americans pronounce "cot" and "caught" the same, whereas I pronounce "father" and "farther" the same). The best one could do would be to use symbols from the IPA, but why? So few fonts contain a nice Latin letter open e/epsilon (trust me, I've looked) that you're better off using the regular set of Latin letters, diacritics and digraphs.
Their particular proposal looks really bad, but a nifty regularisation of the orthography could be achieved that gets rid of the worst aspects while still largely being the same in different regions; some variation will need to have different spellings based on different pronuncation. Rather than having a one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes, I would aim for a many-to-one correspondence: Any sound can be spelt in more than one way, but any particular spelling will correspond only to one sound. So for me "ar" and "aa" would be pronounced the same, whereas for most Americans they would be pronounced differently. The orthography would be n
Oh yeah, I know that:) When I learnt German in high school, it was explained to the class, and it's about the only gender in German I can still remember... the other is than knife, fork and spoon each have a different gender, but I'd be damned if I can remember which is which, or what they mean (tho I only did a year of German; but I've tried to read stuff since, which has given me a half-decent passive knowledge).
(Incidentally, "maiden" is also originally a diminutive [sic] of "maid", although neither mean "girl" in English, we don't have gender, and the -en suffix is no longer productive. Cool, ay?)
OTOH, there's been some quite successful reforms in Russia and China. It works better if your government can fine publishers who don't respect the spelling reforms:)
Spelling reforms don't need to be based on how other people percieve your speech; they should be based on how you do. I speak one of the dialects that pronounce "car" as "cah", but I wouldn't want to spell it like that; just like you don't think of "th" as an aspirated t (t+h), I don't think of "ar" as a+r, but as a digraph. A spelling reform would that spelt "car" as "car" (or "kar" or "kár" or whatever) could well be acceptible.
[On the other hand, there's words that probably would need to be spelt differently for different dialects if phonetics is our guide: for instance, I say "pass" with the vowel of "parse", but "mass" with the vowel of "bat", so a spelling reform that's good for me would spell "pass" and "mass" differently: But Americans pronounce them the same, and would (probably) prefer them to be spelt the same. (Though maybe we could introduce a special letter/diacritic that Americans ignore, or something. If you had "pâss" vs "mass", Americans probably wouldn't even notice; or alternatively "pas" vs "mass"...;)]
Divising spelling reforms that account for such regional differences can be a fun way to waste time, so long as you realise you have buckleys of it being implemented.
Common misconception. Not all American/British spelling differences as the result of Webster. "Color" was already a valid spelling before Webster made his dictionary, and "programme" wasn't actually used in English until after Webster's time. Actually, most of Websters successful changes was when he made the primary spelling a spelling that was already widespread. Unfortunately, by standardising one of two options, and introducing a bunch of new options not previously used, Webster condemned other parts of the world to using more illogical spellings like "colour".
(It also introduces a bunch of misconceptions regarding spelling. For instance, the Australian Labor Party is so spelt largely because "labor" (and "color" etc.) was a valid spelling in Australia around the turn of the 20th century. Unfortunately in the interim, these spellings have all but been ousted by British reactionary spellings. Is a pity, but I still use them...)
Simplifying English spelling would eradicate the link between words and etymologies, causing words to become mere signifiers of sounds.
Considering English spellings like "could", "delight" and "island" bear no relation to their etymologies in spite of their irregular spellings, anyone interest in the etymology of words must use the etymology section of a dictionary. Why then should we half-satisfy the needs of one group, and leave everyone with an orthography that's useless for that purpose? (Those three words had their spelling altered on the basis of "would/should", "light" and "isle", sometimes in full knowledge that there was no etymological link, only a phonetic one.)
OTOH, everyone gets by just fine with "pronounce" and its derivative "pronunciation" being spelt differently, and probably everyone knows they're derivatives of each other! Or "join" and "junction" are likewise spelt differently. The English orthography is not a record of etymology, any more so than it is a record of pronunciation.
Ask any Chinese-speaking individual what she'd think of the idea, and she'd say it's malarky.
All Chinese-speaking individuals are female?
If Americans really wanted to do this -- simplify spelling to eliminate inconsistencies between words and sound -- it would be a slightly better idea to make everyone use the IPA at least.
That's even more malarky. Using the IPA as the basis for an orthography could have some value; but given the variability in pronunciation between different groups of people, and over time, it would not be much use. Their particular proposal looks really bad, but a nifty regularisation of the orthography could be achieved that gets rid of the worst aspects while still largely being the same in different regions; some variation will need to have different spellings based on different pronuncation. (We already have different spellings based on etymology for pairs like "color" (from Latin) vs "colour" (from French), and we can understand someone when they say "tomaito" so it shouldn't make it any harder to read than currently.)
The primary way of determining a noun's gender (in languages that use gender widely) is how the noun ends.
Only in some languages, like Italian. In others like the Germanic languages, you simply must know, and so a foreign learner will learn the noun in conjunction with its article.
Every language has irregularities, but English, drawn as it is from so many linguistic sources, has irregular verbs out the wazoo. Check any English grammar reference you like -- the list of irregular verbs and participles will go on for several pages.
Almost without exception, English's irregular verbs come from a single source: earlier forms of English. The vashingly small number that don't were modified in English in the basis of those that do come from English. Furthermore, most irregular verbs can be drawn from a relatively small set of options, such as sing~sang~sung swim~swam~swum as one pattern; or burn~burnt, learn~learnt; or dream~dreamt, keep~kept. The most significant truely irregular verbs are "to be" (which is the combination of three! verbs from Old English) or "to go" (which is the combination of two verbs).
(Irregular nouns do frequently come from foreign languages like cactus~cacti, but in generally (a) these are even more rule-based than the irregular verbs that come from English and (b) these are almost without exception option i.e. "cactuses" is perfectly good English. And even the irregular nouns that are native, these are still more rule-based than the already rule-based irregular verbs. Just because no-one taught you about umlaut/i-mutation or Latin and Greek declensions doesn't mean they aren't simple rules.)
noun declination,
Declination is an astronomical term. Nouns have a declension.
There is 'I' and 'My' (Nominative), and 'me' and 'mine' (Accusative, Dative, etc).
Actually, "I" is the subject form; "me" is the object form; "mine" is possesive. "My" is not a pronoun at all, but a form of adjective. Terms like "nominative" and "accusative", which are used in Latin or German, do not apply well to English.
That is patently untrue. It makes a number of mistakes. Firstly, even if language does not drift apart, it still changes. Secondly, the conditions still exist for language varieties to become more different and the language of different communities to diverge. There is not even evidence that the rate of change has slowed, let alone stopped and reversed!
On the first count, language has continued to change. For instance, the sound of long "oo" as in "spoon" is changing in most English dialects from being a sound somewhat like French ou/German u (IPA [u]) to French u/German ü (IPA [y]). This has been occurring at different rates in all of Australia/New Zealand, most of the US/Canada and significant parts of England. The purpose of language change is not that we're too stupid to reproduce accurately what our parents said: Otherwise very quickly all languages would become mutually (un)intelligible and have one consonant, one vowel and one syllable type. Language change, just like fashion/music changes, occurs to distinguish ourselves from our parents, but is a largely subconcious process. Now, obviously a complete change of one sound into another isn't going to affect how phonetic an orthography is/require spelling reform, but there's certainly plenty of changes occurring even now that are resulting in changes that do affect the orthography; but as these tend to be dialect-specific, I'll discuss them in another paragraph.
You do not need significant isolation for languages to drift apart. In the past century, New Zealand English has gained more and more difference from Australian English, and Australian English has began separating (for instance, Victorians provably speak differently from New South Welshfolk; (younger) Victorians pronounce "celery" and "salary" alike, and generally render "el" as "al"). Likewise, in parts of America, two or all of "merry", "marry" and "Mary"; or "pin" and "pen" are becoming homophones: But exactly the progress varies in different areas. Now, obviously these changes aren't enough to make the dialects different languages, but already I find it difficult to understand some Americans or Scotts, and it will simply be the addition of these small changes that cause the dialects to eventually diverge. Furthermore, it's worth noting that languages have separated since the dawn of the industrial age, one example being Serbo-Croatian.
Now might be a better time than ever for standardising English pronunciation, but only in the same way that summer is a better time to try and catch the sun by jumping than winter. It is not something that can ever occur; the only languages with a fixed pronunciation are dead.
As I understand it, this sort of thing is up to the state governments, rather than the Commonwealth Government. In Victoria, I've been told it's entirely up to the police/executive whether to prosecute. Of course, they're capable of taking the wishes of the victim into consideration, but they don't. OTOH, I don't know whether it's like that in Queensland: but seeing as the Queensland police have commented that there's insufficient evidence, I'd guess Qld law is more like Victorian law than American law in this regard. But IANAL.
Just as a warning: Note that "living wills" are not enforceable in most jurisdictions; or to the extent that they are, they can easily be worked around. Particularly if you're asking to die: How is anyone to know that five minutes before you became unconcious, you didn't change your mind? It's quite common for people to think they'd never want to live as a barely alive invalid, and then change their mind when they are that barely alive invalid, kept alive in spite of their earlier wishes. In the end, it'll often still come down to a decision made by the doctors and your family.
So... a living will can let people know what you think, in writing; but in no way should you believe it will be enforced.
(IANAL, but this was a part of ethics in psychology, which I have studied.)
They had an incorrect link on their webpage (it pointed somewhere, but there was no information on what was meant to be there... info about their automatic currency conversion I think). I sent them an email, informing of this. It was clear and had direct links exact quotes and so forth. They actually asked me for a screen shot of the problem. (I'll point out it's very hard to screenshot of a link that points to a working page that has no information about what the link asked for!)
Anyway, it seems they've fixed the problem up by now, but I just thought it was funny, and relates to their customer service. Then, the Internet's a great place to find poor CS.
G'day. It's not free, and probably not open source, if you can't redistribute it to whomsoever you please. For instance, I come from Australia, but I've got friends in the EU. Why shouldn't those friends in the EU be able give me their modified version of Windows, if it's free software?
(Also, how would they get the source? Doesn't it live in the US? So with no source code available, it's just freeware, not free and not open source.)
So why not... change the law, so they can keep charging tolls once they've paid back the whole bond? Obviously it's going to make users of the road unhappy, but seriously, they're going to be paying about the same anyway, even if it's through higher taxes or some such...
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These are files only for me, and helps me retrieve them later. I really can't think what other purpose filenames have in a personal data store.
:( I use ROX-Filer on the XFS filesystem, and so I can set filetypes independently of the name, and some operating environments let you label a file in some primative way, but that's about the most advanced metadata I'm aware of with modern OSes. (And I don't even use ROX's filetyping much any more: It usually works out the filetype automagically independentally of any such metadata, and if I edit a file with metadata, it gets lost into the æther...) That feature you mention would be the absolute best feature of any filesystem/networking apps in the world! (on top, at least, of what's normal today).
I'll agree with you that modern operating systems don't use enough metadata
cp: cannot create regular file `mnt/This is a filename: It contains weird characters that for "some" reason, FAT doesn\'t like, doesn\'t it?': Invalid argument
This is on a GNU+Linux 2.6-based box. What are you using? What does Windows think, if it sees such filenames? (I did once manage to get a filename with characters Windows/FAT doesn't like, and not even Linux could remove it. I forget what exactly Windows thought of it.)
I don't know how KDE does it, but unless it actually shows the ID3 tags instead of the file name in the main display window (with the file name relegated to a properties dialog, or wherever), it would not satisfy me enough that I'd be tempted to stop naming my music files the way I like them named. On the other hand that would be very convenient, but probably better implemented as some sort of a (userspace?) filesystem plugin thingy, so that all programs see it in the same way, and I can just as easily rename=retag files from the command line as from my file manager.
I'm really quite happy with my current setup, except for the single time (per album) that I copy my music off my hard drive onto my media player, and it's completely not worth switching desktop environment to solve a problem that occurs once every now and again. I wasn't meant to be whingeing. I was just saying "here's what I do" in response to someone who said they did something similar but was, apparently, joking. I also identified some limitations to my approach.
Yeah, I know :) Even does escaping properly, too :)
(I need an music player that plays Ogg Vorbis files, given the size of my collection that is in Ogg Vorbis, so no, I don't use an iPod. Unless that's changed?)
My file manager doesn't use MP3 or OGG tags, and until recently when using my computer I've mostly used my file manager to open my music files. (Rhythmbox is now almost good enough that I use it almost all the time ... although for some bizarre reason it won't let you edit the tags, and many of my files are tagless or worse badly tagged because I've rarely ever used the tags.)
And it doesn't really seem to me that using a file name to record the name of a file is "squishing" something abnormal into it. Strikes me that every character I can't put into a file name is one less than is fair... (I've sometimes been so mad as to wish I could italicise or otherwise change the fonts of parts of filenames!)
Actually, no. But perhaps that is a word I redundantly and/or gratuitously over-use too much.
(One of my lecturers at Uni uses (or at least did, when he lectured me) "as a consequence of that" as every second phrase. Almost literally. There was once a suggestion the Psych Society (he being a Psychology lecturer) should run a competition along the lines of "Guess how many lollies are in the jar" for a semester, although the prospect of winning a collection of the words "as a consequence of that", all of which have already been uttered was not particularly motivating).
Even though others apparently claim you're joking, I personally am all for gratuitous words in file names. Some times I achieve this by gratitously deep folder heirarchies, but usually I just randomly add keywords to files. I mostly use a GUI, so it doesn't stress me out too much, but makes it much easier to find them two years later.
(I also like my music files to accurately contain the name of the track, so a song like "Where is everybody?" becomes "(maybe the artists name, album etc. -) 03 - Where is everybody?.ogg". Worse, if it's "Starfuckers Inc.", it becomes "06 - Starfuckers, Inc..ogg". It quite annoys me when I try to copy the files to my music player, which has a FAT-based filesystem.)
I think I can see where the harm is. Think of Ayn Rand's novels, The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. If those were edited for content by many of today's far-Left nitwits, they would not convey the same message. The problem is that they would (presumably) be sold as the same novels written by the same author, something I am sure she would disapprove of if she were still alive today.
So? Parody is allowed under US copyright law. It exists precisely to alter the message of the original creator. And copyrighted creations are eventually meant to enter the public domain, at which point the copyright holder loses their ability to restrict redistribution (which in the case of personal works probably won't be a huge problem for them, but Disney will still be alive when Steamboat Willie finally enters the public domain). Maintenance of creative control isn't the point of copyright. I, personally, am offended by this decision, even though I would never have made use of the defendand's services.
For thousands of years
That should've read "For a thousand years" or "For hundreds of years". I apologise for the exaggeration.
But the real question is, since you obviously understood what he meant, why were you an ass in making fun of him? Does it make you feel better to belittle someone, or do you think you are doing your part to preserve the language?
You missed my motivation, which is understandable. For thousands of years, two different neutral pronouns have been used: "he" and "they". Recently, feminists and their supporters have objected to using "he" on the grounds that it is exclusionary. I have no particular objection to that objection. However, many people have decided to replace it with "she". I do object to that, because it is at least as exclusionary as "he" is. As you can see, I'm not trying to preserve the language, but I'm merely trying to help avoid exclusionary language.
In any case, as I am unfamiliar with the details of Pinyin or Mandarin Chinese, I would not have "come back with great counter-examples", regardless of how I read the OP. In any case, I do not think the particular problem you have described is insurmountable; if a phonetic orthography is our goal, it should be simple enough to alter the spelling along with the pronunciation.
Is that the same reason you object to trying to converge the written and spoken language?
I'm afraid if you actually read what I said instead of what you wanted to read, you would have seen I never particular advocated not altering the spelling of our language. But you probably think it's fun to make an arse of yourself by belittling people, or something. In fact, I spent the entire first two paragraphs of my post refuting an objection to reforming spelling i.e. that by respelling our language we would lose the record of etymology it provides. (Perhaps also you should have read how I wrote those paragraphs, in addition to what I wrote in them. There were plenty of lines to read between.)
There is a problem. The written language changes more slowly than the spoken language. So what would you do (or not do) about it?
Did you read my final paragraph? I will quote it and expand upon it here. It provides my solution to the problem of having an orthography that corresponds to the pronunciation quite closely.
Using the IPA as the basis for an orthography could have some value; but given the variability in pronunciation between different groups of people, and over time, it would not be much use. The IPA provides definitions of the different characters and in particular it is completely inappropriate to re-order the vowel symbols with respect to height, as you would have to for some dialects of English and/or to consider time. For instance, the letter "e" would probably be used for the vowel in "game", which is reasonable enough for American English, but completely inappropriate for Australian English. So Australians would not be using the IPA to write their language, even though they spelt it the same way as Americans did (which brings us to another point: different sounds are differently merged in different dialects, so many Americans pronounce "cot" and "caught" the same, whereas I pronounce "father" and "farther" the same). The best one could do would be to use symbols from the IPA, but why? So few fonts contain a nice Latin letter open e/epsilon (trust me, I've looked) that you're better off using the regular set of Latin letters, diacritics and digraphs.
Their particular proposal looks really bad, but a nifty regularisation of the orthography could be achieved that gets rid of the worst aspects while still largely being the same in different regions; some variation will need to have different spellings based on different pronuncation. Rather than having a one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes, I would aim for a many-to-one correspondence: Any sound can be spelt in more than one way, but any particular spelling will correspond only to one sound. So for me "ar" and "aa" would be pronounced the same, whereas for most Americans they would be pronounced differently. The orthography would be n
Oh yeah, I know that :) When I learnt German in high school, it was explained to the class, and it's about the only gender in German I can still remember ... the other is than knife, fork and spoon each have a different gender, but I'd be damned if I can remember which is which, or what they mean (tho I only did a year of German; but I've tried to read stuff since, which has given me a half-decent passive knowledge).
(Incidentally, "maiden" is also originally a diminutive [sic] of "maid", although neither mean "girl" in English, we don't have gender, and the -en suffix is no longer productive. Cool, ay?)
OTOH, there's been some quite successful reforms in Russia and China. It works better if your government can fine publishers who don't respect the spelling reforms :)
Spelling reforms don't need to be based on how other people percieve your speech; they should be based on how you do. I speak one of the dialects that pronounce "car" as "cah", but I wouldn't want to spell it like that; just like you don't think of "th" as an aspirated t (t+h), I don't think of "ar" as a+r, but as a digraph. A spelling reform would that spelt "car" as "car" (or "kar" or "kár" or whatever) could well be acceptible.
;)]
[On the other hand, there's words that probably would need to be spelt differently for different dialects if phonetics is our guide: for instance, I say "pass" with the vowel of "parse", but "mass" with the vowel of "bat", so a spelling reform that's good for me would spell "pass" and "mass" differently: But Americans pronounce them the same, and would (probably) prefer them to be spelt the same. (Though maybe we could introduce a special letter/diacritic that Americans ignore, or something. If you had "pâss" vs "mass", Americans probably wouldn't even notice; or alternatively "pas" vs "mass"...
Divising spelling reforms that account for such regional differences can be a fun way to waste time, so long as you realise you have buckleys of it being implemented.
Common misconception. Not all American/British spelling differences as the result of Webster. "Color" was already a valid spelling before Webster made his dictionary, and "programme" wasn't actually used in English until after Webster's time. Actually, most of Websters successful changes was when he made the primary spelling a spelling that was already widespread. Unfortunately, by standardising one of two options, and introducing a bunch of new options not previously used, Webster condemned other parts of the world to using more illogical spellings like "colour".
(It also introduces a bunch of misconceptions regarding spelling. For instance, the Australian Labor Party is so spelt largely because "labor" (and "color" etc.) was a valid spelling in Australia around the turn of the 20th century. Unfortunately in the interim, these spellings have all but been ousted by British reactionary spellings. Is a pity, but I still use them...)
Simplifying English spelling would eradicate the link between words and etymologies, causing words to become mere signifiers of sounds.
Considering English spellings like "could", "delight" and "island" bear no relation to their etymologies in spite of their irregular spellings, anyone interest in the etymology of words must use the etymology section of a dictionary. Why then should we half-satisfy the needs of one group, and leave everyone with an orthography that's useless for that purpose? (Those three words had their spelling altered on the basis of "would/should", "light" and "isle", sometimes in full knowledge that there was no etymological link, only a phonetic one.)
OTOH, everyone gets by just fine with "pronounce" and its derivative "pronunciation" being spelt differently, and probably everyone knows they're derivatives of each other! Or "join" and "junction" are likewise spelt differently. The English orthography is not a record of etymology, any more so than it is a record of pronunciation.
Ask any Chinese-speaking individual what she'd think of the idea, and she'd say it's malarky.
All Chinese-speaking individuals are female?
If Americans really wanted to do this -- simplify spelling to eliminate inconsistencies between words and sound -- it would be a slightly better idea to make everyone use the IPA at least.
That's even more malarky. Using the IPA as the basis for an orthography could have some value; but given the variability in pronunciation between different groups of people, and over time, it would not be much use. Their particular proposal looks really bad, but a nifty regularisation of the orthography could be achieved that gets rid of the worst aspects while still largely being the same in different regions; some variation will need to have different spellings based on different pronuncation. (We already have different spellings based on etymology for pairs like "color" (from Latin) vs "colour" (from French), and we can understand someone when they say "tomaito" so it shouldn't make it any harder to read than currently.)
The primary way of determining a noun's gender (in languages that use gender widely) is how the noun ends.
Only in some languages, like Italian. In others like the Germanic languages, you simply must know, and so a foreign learner will learn the noun in conjunction with its article.
Every language has irregularities, but English, drawn as it is from so many linguistic sources, has irregular verbs out the wazoo. Check any English grammar reference you like -- the list of irregular verbs and participles will go on for several pages.
Almost without exception, English's irregular verbs come from a single source: earlier forms of English. The vashingly small number that don't were modified in English in the basis of those that do come from English. Furthermore, most irregular verbs can be drawn from a relatively small set of options, such as sing~sang~sung swim~swam~swum as one pattern; or burn~burnt, learn~learnt; or dream~dreamt, keep~kept. The most significant truely irregular verbs are "to be" (which is the combination of three! verbs from Old English) or "to go" (which is the combination of two verbs).
(Irregular nouns do frequently come from foreign languages like cactus~cacti, but in generally (a) these are even more rule-based than the irregular verbs that come from English and (b) these are almost without exception option i.e. "cactuses" is perfectly good English. And even the irregular nouns that are native, these are still more rule-based than the already rule-based irregular verbs. Just because no-one taught you about umlaut/i-mutation or Latin and Greek declensions doesn't mean they aren't simple rules.)
noun declination,
Declination is an astronomical term. Nouns have a declension.
There is 'I' and 'My' (Nominative), and 'me' and 'mine' (Accusative, Dative, etc).
Actually, "I" is the subject form; "me" is the object form; "mine" is possesive. "My" is not a pronoun at all, but a form of adjective. Terms like "nominative" and "accusative", which are used in Latin or German, do not apply well to English.
-chen is neuter. Even Mädchen meaning "girl" is neuter, because it ends in -chen.
That is patently untrue. It makes a number of mistakes. Firstly, even if language does not drift apart, it still changes. Secondly, the conditions still exist for language varieties to become more different and the language of different communities to diverge. There is not even evidence that the rate of change has slowed, let alone stopped and reversed!
On the first count, language has continued to change. For instance, the sound of long "oo" as in "spoon" is changing in most English dialects from being a sound somewhat like French ou/German u (IPA [u]) to French u/German ü (IPA [y]). This has been occurring at different rates in all of Australia/New Zealand, most of the US/Canada and significant parts of England. The purpose of language change is not that we're too stupid to reproduce accurately what our parents said: Otherwise very quickly all languages would become mutually (un)intelligible and have one consonant, one vowel and one syllable type. Language change, just like fashion/music changes, occurs to distinguish ourselves from our parents, but is a largely subconcious process. Now, obviously a complete change of one sound into another isn't going to affect how phonetic an orthography is/require spelling reform, but there's certainly plenty of changes occurring even now that are resulting in changes that do affect the orthography; but as these tend to be dialect-specific, I'll discuss them in another paragraph.
You do not need significant isolation for languages to drift apart. In the past century, New Zealand English has gained more and more difference from Australian English, and Australian English has began separating (for instance, Victorians provably speak differently from New South Welshfolk; (younger) Victorians pronounce "celery" and "salary" alike, and generally render "el" as "al"). Likewise, in parts of America, two or all of "merry", "marry" and "Mary"; or "pin" and "pen" are becoming homophones: But exactly the progress varies in different areas. Now, obviously these changes aren't enough to make the dialects different languages, but already I find it difficult to understand some Americans or Scotts, and it will simply be the addition of these small changes that cause the dialects to eventually diverge. Furthermore, it's worth noting that languages have separated since the dawn of the industrial age, one example being Serbo-Croatian.
Now might be a better time than ever for standardising English pronunciation, but only in the same way that summer is a better time to try and catch the sun by jumping than winter. It is not something that can ever occur; the only languages with a fixed pronunciation are dead.
As I understand it, this sort of thing is up to the state governments, rather than the Commonwealth Government. In Victoria, I've been told it's entirely up to the police/executive whether to prosecute. Of course, they're capable of taking the wishes of the victim into consideration, but they don't. OTOH, I don't know whether it's like that in Queensland: but seeing as the Queensland police have commented that there's insufficient evidence, I'd guess Qld law is more like Victorian law than American law in this regard. But IANAL.
Just as a warning: Note that "living wills" are not enforceable in most jurisdictions; or to the extent that they are, they can easily be worked around. Particularly if you're asking to die: How is anyone to know that five minutes before you became unconcious, you didn't change your mind? It's quite common for people to think they'd never want to live as a barely alive invalid, and then change their mind when they are that barely alive invalid, kept alive in spite of their earlier wishes. In the end, it'll often still come down to a decision made by the doctors and your family.
... a living will can let people know what you think, in writing; but in no way should you believe it will be enforced.
So
(IANAL, but this was a part of ethics in psychology, which I have studied.)
They had an incorrect link on their webpage (it pointed somewhere, but there was no information on what was meant to be there ... info about their automatic currency conversion I think). I sent them an email, informing of this. It was clear and had direct links exact quotes and so forth. They actually asked me for a screen shot of the problem. (I'll point out it's very hard to screenshot of a link that points to a working page that has no information about what the link asked for!)
Anyway, it seems they've fixed the problem up by now, but I just thought it was funny, and relates to their customer service. Then, the Internet's a great place to find poor CS.
G'day. It's not free, and probably not open source, if you can't redistribute it to whomsoever you please. For instance, I come from Australia, but I've got friends in the EU. Why shouldn't those friends in the EU be able give me their modified version of Windows, if it's free software?
(Also, how would they get the source? Doesn't it live in the US? So with no source code available, it's just freeware, not free and not open source.)
Yeah, if the state's Zimbabwe. I think the stakes are a little different when we're talking about the EU...
So why not ... change the law, so they can keep charging tolls once they've paid back the whole bond? Obviously it's going to make users of the road unhappy, but seriously, they're going to be paying about the same anyway, even if it's through higher taxes or some such...
My only question is ... what would a sidewalk to the moon be beside?