Hibou wrote:

> Le 19/04/2024 à 13:11, James Harris a écrit :
>>
>> AISI as humans we ought to  to be able to look at a particular
>> punctuation character and 'know' whether it comes before or after
>> another regardless of the context. Then an index would be usable whether
>> the book happened to be about computing, classification theory, or
>> whatever.
>
> I think that's a specialist requirement. Numbers have magnitude, so
> order themselves naturally; we use the alphabet for sorting, too - but
> there's no need for order if letters are used only for writing words.
> Why should inverted commas, ticks, 'therefore' signs, pound signs,
> hashes, and daggers come before or after each other? A big problem in
> imposing an order on them is that there are an enormous number of them,
> no-one uses more than a small subset, and so people are never going to
> know where to put most of them.
>
> <https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Unicode/List_of_useful_symbols>

I think that James Harris is mainly concerned about ASCII characters.
I'd suggest just using the order of their code calue. Programmers at
least will understand immediately.

--
Bertel
Kolt, Denmark

Mark Brader wrote:

> "Silvano":
>> > And "`" has been called "accent grave" for centuries in French.

> Jerry Friedman:
>> Only when it goes over a letter. Likewise the ^ is called a caret in
>> English, not a circumflex accent.

> Only when it goes below the baseline!
> ^ (like this)

That's the traditional place to put it when it has a certain meaning.

What do you call it when x^2 represents x squared?

--
Jerry Friedman

Jerry Friedman:
>>> Only when it goes over a letter. Likewise the ^ is called a caret in
>>> English, not a circumflex accent.

Mark Brader:
>> Only when it goes below the baseline!
>> ^ (like this)
Jerry Friedman:
> That's the traditional place to put it when it has a certain meaning.
>
> What do you call it when x^2 represents x squared?

Interesting question. I think I might pronounce it "superscript",
in reference to its meaning. But if you asked for the spelling in
terms of the actual characters used, then of course it's "circumflex".

And if someone who remembers the original 1963 version of ASCII wants
to say "up-arrow", I guess I'd accept that too.
--
Mark Brader "So the American government went to IBM
Toronto to come up with a data encryption standard
msb@vex.net and they came up with...?" "EBCDIC!"

My text in this article is in the public domain.

In article <uvqu5s$27dkk$2@dont-email.me>,
James Harris <james.harris.1@gmail.com> wrote:

>Before I checked I had a vague idea that ASCII began with the
>punctuation on the top row of some keyboards starting ! " # $ % but
>after that the correspondence does not seem to be held.

Depends on the keyboard.

There used to be two common keyboard layouts, one called "typewriter
paired", because the non-alphabetic characters were assigned to keys
according to where they were on typewriters (particularly the IBM
Selectric, which was commonly used as a computer terminal in the
1960s), and one was called "bit-paired", commonly used for early ASCII
terminals, in which the shifted and unshifted top row differed by
toggling bit 3 (value 16), saving money on encoding logic. This led
to the following layout:

plain bit-paired typewriter
1 ! !
2 " @
3 # #
4 $ $
5 % %
6 & ^
7 ' &
8 ( *
9 ) (
0 )

(Shift-zero in the bit-paired layout would correspond to SPC but was
typically used for something else.) This trick also works with the
ASCII brackets, except they are separated by bit 4 (value 32) as with
the upper- and lower-case alphabetic characters. Of course, historic
(pre-Selectric) typewriters often had different layouts -- many had
neither a zero nor a one key.

-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,
wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future. This is
Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
my employers. | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)

jerryfriedman hat am 19.04.2024 um 15:40 geschrieben:
> Peter Moylan wrote:
>
>> On 19/04/24 17:31, Mark Brader wrote:
>>> Ruud Harmsen:
>>>> More on topic, how is "locale" pronounced in English, I wonder?
>>>
>>> Low-KAL is the only way I've heard.
>
>> And Low-Carl is the only way I've heard.
>
> So the opposite of "pasta", for instance, where BrAusEtcE has /A/
> and AmE has /&/. Good, this is English, and we don't like
> consistency.

May I point that the specialists for pasta - I cooked it for lunch - use
what is explained here?
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_central_unrounded_vowel>
If I understand it correctly, it's neither /A/ nor /&/.

Personally, I agree with this statement in that article:
"However, it has been argued that the purported distinction between a
front and central open vowel is based on outdated phonetic theories, and
that cardinal [a] is the only open vowel, while [ɑ], like [æ], is a
near-open vowel." YMMV.

On 18-Apr-24 20:56, Paul Wolff wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Apr 2024, at 20:01:08, Sam Plusnet posted:
>> On 18-Apr-24 15:14, jerryfriedman wrote:
>>> J. J. Lodder wrote:
>>>
>>>> jerryfriedman <jerry.friedman99@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>> Stefan Ram wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> > ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:
>>>>> >>That's a dope question, fo' sho'!
>>>>>
>>>>> >   "Dope question" meaning "excellent question" here as in
>>>>> >   the slang expression, not "dope" as in "a silly person"!
>>>>>
>>>>> Yes, that might inadvertently offended the OP.  Speaking of which,
>>>>> imitation is often used for mockery, and your imitations of non-
>>>>> standard dialects strike me as much more likely to offend people
>>>>> than, say, profanity is.
>>>
>>>> Still, it would be a nice research project:
>>>> translating for example Oxford English into American Redneck,
>>>> and vica versa.
>>>  Vice-versa is more common--for instance, the subtitled "jive" in
>>> the movie /Airplane/.
>>>  Pastor Trey Ferguson is creating the New Living Treyslation of the
>>> Bible into AAVE.
>>>  https://www.pastortrey05.com/
>>
>> This reminded me of a (very) old Peter Cook & Dudley Moore sketch:
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za08oosFmpI
>>
> Congratulations on your memory. They don't make humour like that any
> more - but I don't really see why not. Fashion, I suppose. My sense of
> humour is anchored between 1950 and 1970(+).

Recalling things like this is not a problem.

What happened to the charger for the hedgetrimmer[1]... That's a
different matter altogether.

[1] I have a dreadful suspicion that the large pile of old electrical
tat, which we took down to the "Waste Transfer Station" a month ago,
might have contained more than we intended.

--
Sam Plusnet

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 21:06:25 +1000: Peter Moylan
<peter@pmoylan.org.invalid> scribeva:

>On 19/04/24 20:50, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>> Fri, 19 Apr 2024 10:26:43 +0200: Athel Cornish-Bowden <me@yahoo.com>
>> scribeva:
>>
>>> On 2024-04-19 07:50:35 +0000, Peter Moylan said:
>>>
>>>> On 19/04/24 17:31, Mark Brader wrote:
>>>>> Ruud Harmsen:
>>>>>> More on topic, how is "locale" pronounced in English, I
>>>>>> wonder?
>>>>>
>>>>> Low-KAL is the only way I've heard.
>>>>
>>>> And Low-Carl is the only way I've heard.
>>>
>>> AOL
>>
>> What does that mean, in this context?
>
>America On Line.

Yes, that one I knew.

>It started when the company AOL handed out huge numbers of floppy disks
>which enabled beginners to sign up for a Usenet account. (And possibly
>other services; I don't know that part of the story.) All of a sudden
>lots of clueless newbies turned up in newsgroups, replying "Me too" to a
>lot of postings. As a result many of us started using "AOL" as an
>abbreviation for "Me too".

Interesting. But strange. Never heard of this before,

>You can get more of the story by googling for "eternal September".

Yes, that story is all too familiar to me. I actually use
news.eternal-september.org to access Usenet.

Live and learn.
--
Ruud Harmsen, https://rudhar.com

On 2024-04-19 01:14, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
> Fri, 19 Apr 2024 08:10:33 +0200: Ruud Harmsen <rh@rudhar.com>
> scribeva:
>> Locales C or POSIX will sort on the characters proper, (in fact,
>> bytes, of UTF8), without interpreting them.
>
> More on topic, how is "locale" pronounced in English, I wonder? I tend
> to say it as if it were Italian or Spanish. But is that right for
> English?
>
> To answer my own question:
> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/locale#English

That English audio pronunciation is Southern England.
For the US or Canadian pronunciation, see

<https://translate.google.ca/?hl=en&sl=en&tl=de&text=locale&op=translate>

and click on the English audio button.

One thing though, when I say it (and when I hear it from other
Canadians, the stress is on the second syllable.

--
ANAGRAMS
A DECIMAL POINT: I'm a dot in place.
ONE PLUS TWELVE: Two plus eleven.

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 14:48:12 +0200: Athel Cornish-Bowden <me@yahoo.com>
scribeva:

>On 2024-04-19 11:06:25 +0000, Peter Moylan said:
>
>> On 19/04/24 20:50, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>>> Fri, 19 Apr 2024 10:26:43 +0200: Athel Cornish-Bowden <me@yahoo.com>
>>> scribeva:
>>>
>>>> On 2024-04-19 07:50:35 +0000, Peter Moylan said:
>>>>
>>>>> On 19/04/24 17:31, Mark Brader wrote:
>>>>>> Ruud Harmsen:
>>>>>>> More on topic, how is "locale" pronounced in English, I
>>>>>>> wonder?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Low-KAL is the only way I've heard.
>>>>>
>>>>> And Low-Carl is the only way I've heard.
>>>>
>>>> AOL
>>>
>>> What does that mean, in this context?
>>
>> America On Line.
>>
>> It started when the company AOL handed out huge numbers of floppy disks
>> which enabled beginners to sign up for a Usenet account. (And possibly
>> other services; I don't know that part of the story.) All of a sudden
>> lots of clueless newbies turned up in newsgroups, replying "Me too" to a
>> lot of postings. As a result many of us started using "AOL" as an
>> abbreviation for "Me too".
>>
>> You can get more of the story by googling for "eternal September".
>
>I'm surprised that Ruud didn't know that.

Yes, this detail I somehow missed. Not AOL, but AOL in that sense, and
not eternal September.

>He claims to have been around for a long time.

I don't claim that, it's provable fact. First internet experience,
including usenet, 1988/1989, then again 1994, uninterrupted until
today. More than 30 years, almost half of my life.

Believe it or not, I don't care. I know the facts of my life.

--
Ruud Harmsen, https://rudhar.com

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 13:40:16 +0000: jerry.friedman99@gmail.com
(jerryfriedman) scribeva:

>Peter Moylan wrote:
>
>> On 19/04/24 17:31, Mark Brader wrote:
>>> Ruud Harmsen:
>>>> More on topic, how is "locale" pronounced in English, I wonder?
>>>
>>> Low-KAL is the only way I've heard.
>
>> And Low-Carl is the only way I've heard.
>
>So the opposite of "pasta", for instance, where BrAusEtcE

SouthBrit, some late Usenet hero used to call that.

>has /A/
>and AmE has /&/. Good, this is English, and we don't like
>consistency.

--
Ruud Harmsen, https://rudhar.com

Silvano wrote:

> jerryfriedman hat am 19.04.2024 um 15:40 geschrieben:
>> Peter Moylan wrote:
>>
>>> On 19/04/24 17:31, Mark Brader wrote:
>>>> Ruud Harmsen:
>>>>> More on topic, how is "locale" pronounced in English, I wonder?
>>>>
>>>> Low-KAL is the only way I've heard.
>>
>>> And Low-Carl is the only way I've heard.
>>
>> So the opposite of "pasta", for instance, where BrAusEtcE has /A/
>> and AmE has /&/. Good, this is English, and we don't like
>> consistency.

> May I point that the specialists for pasta - I cooked it for lunch - use
> what is explained here?
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_central_unrounded_vowel>
> If I understand it correctly, it's neither /A/ nor /&/.

You may, and I hope I may point out, first, that I'm pretty sure
the vowel of Italian "pasta" doesn't exist in my English, and
second, that the fact that "pasta" and "piano" have the same
accented vowel in Italian (according to Wiktionary) has no bearing
on the vowels I use for them in English. Likewise the fact that
"locale", "façade", and "parade" have the same vowel in the second
syllable in French has no bearing on the three different vowels I
use for them (changing a spelling to "facade") in English.

I say "specialists in pasta" or "pasta specialists", by the way.

> Personally, I agree with this statement in that article:
> "However, it has been argued that the purported distinction between a
> front and central open vowel is based on outdated phonetic theories, and
> that cardinal [a] is the only open vowel, while [ɑ], like [æ], is a
> near-open vowel." YMMV.

I may not even have mileage on it.

--
Jerry Friedman

On 2024-04-19 00:10, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
> Thu, 18 Apr 2024 15:24:09 -0600: lar3ryca <larry@invalid.ca> scribeva:
>
>> On 2024-04-18 10:18, Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:
>>> jerryfriedman wrote:
>>>
>>>>>> At least in English, unlike French, there's a nearly complete
>>>>>> consensus on the names of the numbers. But does _101 Dalmatians_
>>>>>> come before or after (*wikips*) the Korean TV series _100 Days
>>>>>> My Prince_?
>>>>
>>>>> When alphabetizing titles and such I would ignore all non-letters.
>>>>
>>>> So you'd put both of those under D?
>>>
>>> My mistake. I should have written "special characters". I would sort
>>> numbers before letters. It was the underscore which I would ignore.
>>
>> One thing that bothers me about Linux (or at least the distro I am
>> using" is that leading special characters are not in alphabetical order.
>> This means that I can't use punctuation to place something at the
>> beginning of a list.
>
> That's not Linux, and not the distro. That's locale, or an option to
> sort(1) or qsort(3). You probably have some option 'dictionary sort'
> active.
>
> Locales C or POSIX will sort on the characters proper, (in fact,
> bytes, of UTF8), without interpreting them.
>
>> To do that, O generally put a digit in front of the '_'.
>
> Shouldn't be necessary, given the right locale.

Thanks Ruud!
it also had the effect of listing the digits in the 'right' order.
Previously they were listed in numeric value, considering all the digits
of a number.

My 'Linux buddy' likes the default, and did not tell me there was a
choice. I shall admonish him gently.

--
To decode this comment into a readable form, rot13 it twice.

Ruud Harmsen wrote:

>>It started when the company AOL handed out huge numbers of floppy disks
>>which enabled beginners to sign up for a Usenet account. (And possibly
>>other services; I don't know that part of the story.) All of a sudden
>>lots of clueless newbies turned up in newsgroups, replying "Me too" to a
>>lot of postings. As a result many of us started using "AOL" as an
>>abbreviation for "Me too".
>
> Interesting. But strange. Never heard of this before,

Do you know "ACK" with the same meaning, but another history?

--
Bertel
Kolt, Denmark

On 2024-04-19 07:36, jerryfriedman wrote:
> Peter Moylan wrote:
>
>> On 19/04/24 20:46, Gleb Hlebov wrote:
>>> On Fri, 19 Apr 2024 10:14:50, Ruud Harmsen <rh@rudhar.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>> Locales C or POSIX will sort on the characters proper, (in fact,
>>>>> bytes, of UTF8), without interpreting them.
>>>> More on topic, how is "locale" pronounced in English, I wonder? I
>>>> tend to say it as if it were Italian or Spanish. But is that right
>>>> for English? To answer my own question:
>>>> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/locale#English
>>>
>>> Locale is French ("e" drops), Finale is Italian ("e" retains).
>>>
>>> Although, Genre is French (but "e" retains).
>
>> The "e" is retained in any French word that ends in a consonant followed
>> by "re". Centre, être, and a whole lot of others.
>
> "Macabre" is often an exception in the U.S.  There might be one of
> two others.

In Canada as well.. 'ma cab' The two vowels are similar, though the
first is often a schwa..

> And of course, the -re is pronounced differently in "genre" from
> "ogre".

Same for 'centre' and 'theatre'.

--
English is difficult.
It can be understood through tough, thorough thought, though.

lar3ryca wrote:

> One thing though, when I say it (and when I hear it from other
> Canadians, the stress is on the second syllable.

Until now I have pronounced it "loCAYle", but I haven't heard it
pronounced.

--
Bertel
Kolt, Denmark

In article <8003ec53f010df75d66f32d0a6f7145d@www.novabbs.com>,
jerryfriedman <jerry.friedman99@gmail.com> wrote:

>You may, and I hope I may point out, first, that I'm pretty sure
>the vowel of Italian "pasta" doesn't exist in my English, and

The subject we are apparently discussing here is what dialectologists
(at least those who were presenting at the American Dialect Society's
annual meeting in January) refer to as "foreign /a/", and it is well
documented that foreign /a/ is realized as [A] (FATHER) in most
American dialects and [&] (TRAP) in RP and RP-influenced dialects;
most Englishes do not have [a]. The [&] pronunciation is also found
in Canada, especially Toronto, but some researchers found that in
other parts of Ontario, [&] is misapprehended as the *American*
pronunciation and stigmatized for that reason.

A small number of AmE speakers preserve a [a]-[A] contrast but most do
not distinguish them. I'm not sure what the BrE situation is that
causes the [&] for [a] substitution.

-GAWollman

--
Garrett A. Wollman | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,
wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future. This is
Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
my employers. | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)

On 19/04/24 23:36, jerryfriedman wrote:
> Peter Moylan wrote:
>
>> On 19/04/24 20:46, Gleb Hlebov wrote:
>>> On Fri, 19 Apr 2024 10:14:50, Ruud Harmsen <rh@rudhar.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>> Locales C or POSIX will sort on the characters proper, (in
>>>>> fact, bytes, of UTF8), without interpreting them.
>>>> More on topic, how is "locale" pronounced in English, I wonder?
>>>> I tend to say it as if it were Italian or Spanish. But is that
>>>> right for English? To answer my own question:
>>>> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/locale#English
>>>
>>> Locale is French ("e" drops), Finale is Italian ("e" retains).
>>>
>>> Although, Genre is French (but "e" retains).
>
>> The "e" is retained in any French word that ends in a consonant
>> followed by "re". Centre, être, and a whole lot of others.
>
> "Macabre" is often an exception in the U.S. There might be one of
> two others.
>
> And of course, the -re is pronounced differently in "genre" from
> "ogre".

Sorry, I meant French words in French, not French words that have been
adopted into English. We do pronounce "genre" and "cadre" the French
way, but not many others. I haven't heard "macabre" often enough to be
certain of an AusE pronunciation.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW

On 20/04/24 01:52, Mark Brader wrote:
> Jerry Friedman:
>>>> Only when it goes over a letter. Likewise the ^ is called a caret in
>>>> English, not a circumflex accent.
>
> Mark Brader:
>>> Only when it goes below the baseline!
>>> ^ (like this)
>
> Jerry Friedman:
>> That's the traditional place to put it when it has a certain meaning.
>>
>> What do you call it when x^2 represents x squared?
>
> Interesting question. I think I might pronounce it "superscript",
> in reference to its meaning. But if you asked for the spelling in
> terms of the actual characters used, then of course it's "circumflex".
>
> And if someone who remembers the original 1963 version of ASCII wants
> to say "up-arrow", I guess I'd accept that too.

Especially for those who remember The Telnet Song.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW

On 20/04/24 07:12, Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:
> Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>
>>> It started when the company AOL handed out huge numbers of floppy
>>> disks which enabled beginners to sign up for a Usenet account.
>>> (And possibly other services; I don't know that part of the
>>> story.) All of a sudden lots of clueless newbies turned up in
>>> newsgroups, replying "Me too" to a lot of postings. As a result
>>> many of us started using "AOL" as an abbreviation for "Me too".
>>
>> Interesting. But strange. Never heard of this before,
>
> Do you know "ACK" with the same meaning, but another history?

NAK.

Sorry, just joking.

The Irish word for "is not" is "nil", which sounds funny to an English
speaker. And the word for "not" in front of a verb is "ní", which will
appeal to Monty Python fans.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW

On 19/04/24 23:40, jerryfriedman wrote:
> Peter Moylan wrote:
>> On 19/04/24 17:31, Mark Brader wrote:
>>> Ruud Harmsen:

>>>> More on topic, how is "locale" pronounced in English, I
>>>> wonder?
>>>
>>> Low-KAL is the only way I've heard.
>
>> And Low-Carl is the only way I've heard.
>
> So the opposite of "pasta", for instance, where BrAusEtcE has /A/ and
> AmE has /&/. Good, this is English, and we don't like consistency.

I didn't realise that. I thought it was BrE that had /&/ in "pasta".

Unusually, AusE has /a/ in "pasta". (But not in most other words.)
That's because we have a large Italian population.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW

On 2024-04-18, Peter Moylan wrote:

> On 18/04/24 14:39, Silvano wrote:
>> Garrett Wollman hat am 17.04.2024 um 23:43 geschrieben:
>
>>> For someone
>>> actually using the index, who probably just wants to find the meaning
>>> of that '`' character, they may not know that backtick is inexplicably
>>> called "GRAVE ACCENT" in the Unicode table.
>>
>> Inexplicably? How else do you call it?
>>
>> I do not know about mathematicians, but the linguists who invented
>> Unicode are trying to list there letters, ideograms and other symbols
>> used in all known languages. And "`" has been called "accent grave" for
>> centuries in French.
>
> Backtick is a new one to me. Is that used anywhere?

I'd use "backtick" if it's paired around something, e.g.,

FILES=`ls some/path`

although my IDEs tell me to use

FILES=$(ls some/path)

instead (I can't remember why it's better); and "grave accent" or
"accent grave" (depending on whether I'm speaking/writing in English
or French) if it's going over a vowel.

--
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet?

On 2024-04-17, Ross Clark wrote:

> On 18/04/2024 4:17 a.m., James Harris wrote:
>> If preparing a book it's natural to append an index of key words and to
>> list them in alphabetical order. But what if one wanted to index a
>> technical book in which a reader may want to look up 'symbols' which
>> begin with or are made up of punctuation characters? What order should
>> they appear in?
>>
>> For example, should a symbol such as
>>
>>   %%
>>
>> come before of after a symbol such as
>>
>>   !=
>>
>> and where would
>>
>>   $
>>
>> fit in?
>>
>> I thought about following ASCII but it has its punctuation characters in
>> an unintuitive order - for example, its single and double quotes are not
>> adjacent and it has backslash in between opening and closing square
>> brackets. Neither of those makes much sense to a human.
>>
>> Hence the query: does anyone know of a suitable standard or
>> human-friendly ordering for punctuation symbols?
>>
>
> Don't these symbols have names? E.g. percent, exclamation, dollar...
> That would seem to be a simple way of alphabetizing them in an index.
> They wouldn't be all together, of course, but why would you need that?

Some of them have more than one name in English.

# hash, pound sign, octothorpe

/ slash, forward slash [which I find annoying]

.. period, full stop, dot

! exclamation mark, bang

--
I never met a people who were better at not getting to the
point than the Brits. ---Rich Hall

Peter Moylan wrote:

> On 19/04/24 23:40, jerryfriedman wrote:
>> Peter Moylan wrote:
>>> On 19/04/24 17:31, Mark Brader wrote:
>>>> Ruud Harmsen:

>>>>> More on topic, how is "locale" pronounced in English, I
>>>>> wonder?
>>>>
>>>> Low-KAL is the only way I've heard.
>>
>>> And Low-Carl is the only way I've heard.
>>
>> So the opposite of "pasta", for instance, where BrAusEtcE has /A/ and
>> AmE has /&/. Good, this is English, and we don't like consistency.

> I didn't realise that. I thought it was BrE that had /&/ in "pasta".
...

My mistake. I wrote it backwards.

--
Jerry Friedman

Garrett Wollman wrote:

> In article <8003ec53f010df75d66f32d0a6f7145d@www.novabbs.com>,
> jerryfriedman <jerry.friedman99@gmail.com> wrote:

>>You may, and I hope I may point out, first, that I'm pretty sure
>>the vowel of Italian "pasta" doesn't exist in my English, and

> The subject we are apparently discussing here is what dialectologists
> (at least those who were presenting at the American Dialect Society's
> annual meeting in January) refer to as "foreign /a/", and it is well
> documented that foreign /a/ is realized as [A] (FATHER) in most
> American dialects and [&] (TRAP) in RP and RP-influenced dialects;

What interested me was that "locale" went the opposite way.

> most Englishes do not have [a]. The [&] pronunciation is also found
> in Canada, especially Toronto, but some researchers found that in
> other parts of Ontario, [&] is misapprehended as the *American*
> pronunciation and stigmatized for that reason.

That's interesting too.

> A small number of AmE speakers preserve a [a]-[A] contrast but most do
> not distinguish them. I'm not sure what the BrE situation is that
> causes the [&] for [a] substitution.

Some British speakers here used to be quite clear on that. French
"chat" and English "chat" had the same vowel, they said, so why
would you use any other one?

--
Jerry Friedman

Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote:

> >> Hence the query: does anyone know of a suitable standard or
> >> human-friendly ordering for punctuation symbols?
> >>
> >
> > Don't these symbols have names? E.g. percent, exclamation, dollar...
> > That would seem to be a simple way of alphabetizing them in an index.
> > They wouldn't be all together, of course, but why would you need that?
> >
>
> Some of them have more than one name in English.
>
> # hash, pound sign, octothorpe
>
> / slash, forward slash [which I find annoying]

Also 'solidus', 'stroke', 'oblique'.

Blame the BBC for the idiotic 'forward slash'
(to distinguish it from 'backslash')

>
> . period, full stop, dot
>
> ! exclamation mark, bang

Also 'pling'.

--
^Ï^. Sn!pe, PA, FIBS - Professional Crastinator

My pet rock Gordon admires J. Alfred Prufrock.