> On 2026-11-09 G. Branden Robinson wrote: > > Further, whereas one could argue that the unligated "ae" bigram > > indicates to the reader that the vowel sound is a "long e", as in "feed" > > or "meat", and one can point to "encyclop(a)edia" and "h(a)emophilia" in > > support, "(a)esthetic" breaks that pattern. One says "ezz-thetic", not > > "eeze-thetic". Alternatively, to don a fez is a fine esthetic choice, > > but "eeze-thetics" are sleazy. ;-) > > > > But for all I know they say "eeze-thetics" at Eton and Balliol College. > > Really? ;-) I would never have thought that. Some English gents have to > enter the fray here - even if you wear wigs ;)
Aussie here, amused by the expressed parochial preference for Ahmayrikahn dialect over international English. Casting an aspersion based only on internal derogatory imaginings is a helluva cheap shot, no basis for an argument. The pronunciation of aesthetic (correct international spelling) is "airsthetic" here, with the "air" shortened to about half length. The original spelling, æsthetic, uses the nordic æ, pronounced "air". (American preference for their dialect, often based on it being a frozen earlier English, might like to recognise this precedence too.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_%28typography%29 confirms it is not a ligature when a distinct vowel in early English, born of nordic roots. OK, the word seems to have reached English via the works of Alexander Baumgarten and Immanuel Kant, who would both have written it as ästhetik. That's the same teutonic vowel, with a different glyph. My favourite case in this area is "Ye", which was never Ye, but a shortage of the Middle English letter þ (thorn), as in "þe olde shoppe". Figuring that no-one would mind, the much less used letter Y was roped in as a substitute for þ. Now we have the digraph th to replace the Y which replaced þ. > >> @c We don't know the width of what at-g-at interpolates, so indentation > >> -@c might be hinky. Format for the common case of a null prefix. > >> +@c might be jittery. Format for the common case of a null prefix. > > > > That's not a typo. :) Since this is a comment, I feel that > > colloquialisms are more acceptable there than elsewhere.[1] Also, > > "jittery" is not quite the denotation I want here. The issue is not a > > quantization problem, as implied by "jitter" is the audiovisual domain > > (en_GB: "judder", a perfectly horrid word). The hazard of substituting > > `@g@` with something else in our Texinfo manual is one of inaccuracy, > > not imprecision. Having never before encountered the local dialect "hinky", I find its defence in a global effort to be rather "Go-mer Pyle". On the other hand, "jitter" is an internationally recognised technical term, often expressed in microseconds or nanoseconds of random variation in data bit periodicity, while "visual jitter" is vibratory or random placement discrepancy. ... > Generally, I think I would always hyphenate "non-" words. "non-negative" to > me is very slightly more readable that "nonnegative" (think of a reader > whose eyes are tired). Despite comfortable familiarity with almost unhinged word compounding in Danish and German, I'd have to agree. Somehow, with the mind in English mode, it doesn't work as well. Dunno why. Erik
