OT What is this? #

[Stormin Mormon]

It's a matter of breeding and society. For example the Queen of England (about year 1850) does not step out of her royal carraiage, and barn stamp a pile of horse shit.

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

I think there's another part to that. Something about Y or W?

BTW, How many English words do you know where W is a vowel?

[rbowman]

I did some patching in the months leading up to Y2K but there really wasn't that much. I was on call New Year's Eve but it passed uneventfully. Luckily someone other than myself will have to worry about Y2038.

[Don Y]

Ah! I tend not to have problems with ie (i before e, except after c or when sounding like a as in neighbor and weigh). Of course, all of these rules to cover exceptions themselves have exceptions! :>

When working on my speech synthesizer, it was frustrating to see just how many exceptions there are to the "rules" we think we know -- but actually have internalized and consciously forgotten!

E.g., think of the /w/ sound in: women what which one quick

I found that "of" is one of the most commonly encountered exceptions (there's no /f/ sound in the word!)

It's called the "nine's complement". The ten's complement is obtained by adding one to the nine's complement. In much the same way that the one's complement ant two's complements are related.

In my case, I subvocalize: "no, it's NOT flour -- so it must be fluor"; "it's not 365 (days in a year) so it must be 356"

[Don Y]

I saw "19A0" in one case. Caught me completely off guard ("Where the hell did that 'A' come from??"). But, thinking about it for a few microseconds and it was obvious...

I now keep dates as ascii strings. It's not that much more work.

The tougher problem (and it will NOT be solved, here! :> ) is thinking about temporal "REFERENCES"!

E.g., if I have an appointment "in 35 minutes" and I *bind* that to the current time (it is roughly 8:40P here), then that would suggest the appointment is at 9:15P. Assume I also have something scheduled for 10:00P.

Now, if I adjust my local clock to make "now" be 8:45P, how does that affect these two events? Is my appointment still

35 minutes in the future? And, the 10:00 event 5 minutes sooner than it would have been had I not updated my clock?

What if I then set my clock *back* 5 minutes? Has anything changed??

Silly example. But, think about things that are days or weeks hence. How do you "store" those times? And, how does your choice of storage technique (e.g., early or late binding) affect when they ACTUALLY occur?

Do you store "relative times" using a relative notation? And, store the reference from which they were originally specified? Or, convert everything to absolute times?

Do you convert absolute times to relative times and store the reference?

I.e., when a person says "I have an appointment in 35 minutes", does that really mean they will wait for the minute hand to make

35 complete revolutions before the appointment begins? Or, have they done some mental arithmetic and decided to express the ABSOLUTE time of the appointment in relative terms (for the benefit of whomever they are conversing with)?

[Don Y]

Controlling language is a way of controlling thought.

[Muggles]

Language is only one means amongst many used to communicate. It's impossible to control the thought's of anyone. What is possible is to attempt to control how people express their thoughts.

[SeaNymph]

And how do you control how people express their thoughts?

[Cindy Hamilton]

except after in C or words that say ??? [ei], as in ne ighbor and weigh.?

Does crwth count, having passed from into English to describe that particular instrument?

Cindy Hamilton

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

Yes there is a 'w' in quick. Right after the initial 'k'.

In this particular case, it IS nines'. R (for radix) makes is less inappropriately specific, since the same idea applies to all radixes (bases). I suppose you don't know that r's-1 complement is involved in how computers subtract numbers. I didn't know it yet, but I learned r's compliment in second grade.

[snip]

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

That stuff reminded my of my grandmother cooking biscuits. She wanted to leave them in the oven for 10 minutes, and seemed to have a problem with keeping track of that. Keep looking at the clock ans saying "how long has it been...".

I suggested that (when putting the biscuits in) look at the clock NOW and figure out what time it will be 10 minutes from now. Then it's easy to check for that.

Some people will not allow things to be easy.

[Mark Lloyd]

I think that's one of the two words. I don't know about the other (although I seem to remember similar origin).

[Don Y]

The 'w' in "one" is more interesting (esp when you are designing rules to convert spellings to sounds).

Spend any amount of time (i.e., hundreds of hours) trying to understand why certain combinations of letters are pronounced one way or another and you end up pulling your hair out -- English is just chock full of exceptions!

I most certainly do! Having had to design ALU's, you quickly learn that you perform subtraction by putting a "programmable inverter" (XOR gate) in front of each bit and force the carry-in to '1' on your ADDER. Voila! A-B with the same hardware that performs A+B!

Look at "casting out nines" and "casting out 11's". Trachtenberg addition relies on the latter.

[Don Y]

W is a semivowel. Vowels are "voiced" and produced with the vocal tract "unobstructed". Voiced consonants build pressure above the glottis by obstructing the vocal tract.

The "y" and "w" sounds are closer to vowels in their formation -- yet tend to form syllable boundaries (think: beYond)

[Don Y]

Growing up, we had pasta at least once a week. (short) mother kept it on the top shelf -- and always had to ask me to get it down for her.

"Sheesh! Why don't you just LEAVE IT ON THE COUNTER, we eat it often enough?!!"

[Muggles]

Try out being hearing impaired and you can't actually hear the "w" in the word "one".

[Mr Macaw]

I read a website that called it pound and wanted to know if Americans were really that ignorant. It appears the answer is yes.

[Mr Macaw]

PKB.

[Mr Macaw]

It's hash. Always has been, always will be.

WTF? Why?!?

As in erection?

No, a virgule is a comma. Like this: ,

[Mr Macaw]

Easy enough to turn off. I use it too, and mine doesn't spam.