Tony, On my system it appeared as "lacunae", which is a term used to indicate a cavity or depression, or in this context, an omission in the design.
Code set differences? John P. Baker -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tony Harminc Sent: Sunday, January 08, 2012 4:19 PM To: [email protected] Subject: OT: Lacunć John Gilmore's vocabulary and education impress many of us, and while a few complain that he is showing off, I am sure that he wishes at most to hold the rest of us to a high standard, and provide useful examples in passing. With my - as he quite rightly points out - "small Latin and less Greek", I find that I commonly recognize roots of his words that I don't know, and can almost always identify the source language or at least something of the way the word got into English. But a day or two ago, I encountered the surprising word "lacunć" in his comment on programming languages and their apologists: > Here and elsewhere he and others of his persuasion advance one > standard argument when they are confronted with examples of lacunć, > infelicities and inefficiencies in minimalist languages like Pascal > and C: An optimizing compiler will automagically eliminate them. (For the avoidance of doubt, as lawyers like to say, the last character in the word is a lower case "c" with an acute accent over it.) Now what to make of this word and its orthography? No language that I know contains such a character, and I am sure it is not in any Western Indo-European one. Where to look - the Slavic languages? Perhaps a borrowing from some remote IE language transcribed into Latin letters? Further afield - Finish or Hungarian? Basque? Turkish, with its strange dotless i and accents on unexpected letters? And what might lacunć mean in context? What reasonably goes with infelicities and inefficiencies in minimalist languages? Well, why not just Google it? A rara avis indeed: I find only 309 results for lacunć, and the snippets cover intriguing fields such as linguistics, Russian poetry, ceramics, but above all anatomy. Anatomy? How strange, since almost all our basic borrowed vocabulary in that field is from Latin and Greek. And then the penny dropped, when I saw in one anatomy document adjacent to lacunć the word lamelć, and then bursć and patellć, and realized I'd been had by the codepage translation demons, or should I say dæmons? Sure enough, in ISO 8859-1 and its friend Windows Western, the ae ligature is at position X'E6', but 8859-3 and Windows Central Europe have the c with acute at that position. What prompted the assumption of a Central European character set, I have no idea. Well, it's logically still Friday... Tony H.
