Hi Erik, Damian, and John, At 2026-11-09T23:06:20+0000, dvalin--- via discussion of the GNU roff typesetting system and related software wrote: > > 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.
Parochial jibes usually aren't! > The pronunciation of aesthetic (correct international spelling) is > "airsthetic" here, with the "air" shortened to about half length. Yes, that's more or less how I pronounce the word myself, and since my personal dialect is rhotic, I feel there's even less ambiguity in the vowel sound. No intrusive or linking "r", either! > The original spelling, æsthetic, uses the nordic æ, pronounced "air". I believe the word is borrowed from ancient Greek, αἰσθητικός (aisthetikos). In Early Modern English, someone--perhaps the OED staff know who--decided to map the Greek diphthong "αἰ" to the ligature "æ". That unfortunately doesn't tell us as much as it might, as (AIUI), the Anglicizations of ancient Greek in English and in the United States took different paths, to some degree in spelling (witness the present discussion) but even more so in vowel pronunciation. It seems the Erasmian reconstruction of ancient Greek was adopted in the U.S. and on "the continent" (of Europe), but not in the U.K. itself. Hence the oft-noted discord in the names of some Greek letters. β -> "bayta" vs. "beeta" θ -> "thayta" vs. "theeta" Which is more correct? Well, apparently, that depends on whether you want your Anglicized Greek to sound vaguely more like the Koine Greek of the New Testament or vaguely more like classical Attic Greek. I imagine that native English speakers of any era and national origin would sound like uncouth barbarians to time travellers from 400 BCE and 100 CE. And who would then promptly fall to arguing about correctness with each other, much as we are. > (American preference for their dialect, often based on it being a > frozen earlier English, might like to recognise this precedence too.) No language freezes until it is no longer spoken (or written). > 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. Yes, as a youngster I was most cross that the _History of the English Language_ by Albert C. Baugh presumed from the very first chapter that the reader knew what vowel sound æ stood for. Amusingly, it's the vowel in "flat", "mat", "cat", and the _second_ vowel in how the _English_ pronounce the Italian city "Milan", which isn't how Americans pronounce it, which ironically enough given the distances involved, is closer to the Italian pronunciation. It seems that the English--at least around the Estuary--circa the time of the trap-bath vowel shift of early 19th century that served so nicely to distinguish them from uncouth Yanks, found that their vowel inventory was becoming too narrow for the demands of the lexicon, and so certain vowels shifted, especially in loan words like geographical sites, to where they really had no place being on any sort of etymological or mutual intelligibility with the people actually from such places. > 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. Here I am confident you are incorrect. The vowel represented by "æ" or "ae" in "encyclop(a)edia" is not remotely near the one represented by "æ" in Old English orthography nor in IPA. (The latter two uses happen to coincide.) Ask the Web! Or a phonologist if you happen to have one tucked away in the cupboard. > 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. That's consistent with my understanding. I wish English had retained --or converged with, as I'm unsure of the historical processes here--the Icelandic alphabet. If we were to adopt it today we could solve some major problems of orthography. But as with Icelandic banking regulations--t'ain't a chance in hell. ["hinky"] > > > That's not a typo. :) Since this is a comment, I feel that > > > colloquialisms are more acceptable there than elsewhere.[...] > > > 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". As a jumped-up piece of (vaguely) Southern poor white trash, I am entirely accustomed to classist or regionalist attacks on the quality of my learning. > 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. I agree completely, and that's why it's an _inappropriate_ term to label the varying results one encounters when configuring the groff "command prefix". The magnitude of the effect is not only aperiodic, but much too large to be usefully described by "jitter"/"judder". > > 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). I think this is likely a promising line of orthographic reform for groff's Texinfo manual, man pages, and diagnostic messages. > 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. I have no real exposure to Danish, but a little bit of (quite stale now) education in German. Like Spanish, German is staggeringly regular in its spelling, at least compared to English. I would venture that the mental processes involved in analyzing a word with respect to its morphophonemic boundaries, which we do both to decide its pronunciation and often to try and elicit its meaning if it is unfamiliar, are taxed much more heavily in English than in German. Even though German has some frighteningly long compound words, once one gets over the initial intimidation, they break down in predictable ways. I haven't looked at a King James Bible in a long time, but it used to be standard practice by publishers, at least in the white trash parts of the U.S. that I'm from, to typeset these such that untranslated words (usually proper names) had hyphens in them to indicate to the reader where the syllable breaks were, much as you'd do in a lyric score. As a fake example, you'd see specimens like, "and Neb-u-chad-nezz-ar begat Me-thu-se-lah." And yes, I know I've just committed a crime against genealogy with that statement. Nebuchadnezzar's issue instead featured Evil-Merodach, which for my money is the best character name in the whole Bible. Someday I'll use that as a social media handle. "Evil Merodach". 😈 At 2026-11-10T11:43:51+1100, Damian McGuckin wrote: > On Mon, 9 Nov 2026, dvalin--- via discussion of the GNU roff > typesetting system and related software wrote: > > > 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. > > Yes. Even Wikipedia (no ae) spells this word exclusively as > 'Aesthetic' without any reference to 'esthetic'. I makes a habit of > using British and American English in other cases like 'Haemophilia'. Americans spell that "hemophilia". https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2826620 > I have encountered the word 'esthetique' when reading, writing and > speaking French (which has deteriorated since I lived in Switzerland > long ago). I know absolutely nothing about what rules exist for...Frankification? of ancient Greek. I dare not guess except to prepare for my Compose key to be involved. > Some Aussies and Kiwis even emphasise the 'A' so you hear the 'A' if > you listen hard enough. Most Americans have trouble distinguishing the Aussie accent from the Kiwi one. After living for a while in Sydney, I got to where I could, but only insofar as the NZ accent spun its vowels a bit differently. I don't feel like I've really grasped an accent until I can _do_ it. Some of my coworkers there were amused by my ability to put on Irish, U.K. (more or less BBC newscaster RP), German, and on one occasion, Aussie accents. I wasn't all that happy with my Aussie accent--it was too broad. Not quite Steve Irwin bad but close. No Aussie I _worked_ with had such a strong one, and I didn't want to give unintended offense by implying that all the Sydneysiders I encountered sounded to me like a shirtless Queenslander. (I _did_ have a bogan neighbor for over a year who had only one vowel sound in his entire repertoire, and sure enough it was "æ".) > While I am not a fan of AI, a quick check says that the > use of 'Aesthetic' is a more common spelling across the US Oh yes. I first was exposed to the word via philosophy, and I'd be surprised if more than one working philosopher in the U.S. uses the "a"-less spelling. > although the 'esthetic' variant is used within the US professional > beauty, spa, and licensed skincare fields Yes, "esthetician" is common, and maybe the only spelling in wide use when suffixed thus. > which is a bit outside groff's remit. Our remit is the written word in any language for which we have glyph coverage! :D > Some quick emails to a few friends in California and Arizona shows > they spell this word as 'Aesthetic' - none had ever seen that > 'esthetic' spelling. That said, they all used the word 'hemophilia' > even though publications like Scientific American use Haemophilia I think SA is an outlier here. See my JAMA cite above. > (which my Aussie friends and I pronounce as Hay-mo-filly-ya) > > > > 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. > > I would concur 100% > > Also, while groff is not an international standard, I think that a > cursory consideration of language standards such as those used in > international or ISO standards would be wise given that we want > maximum appeal. Please bear in mind that we're discussing a source code comment. > Except for some very specific words, even ISO standards which > originate as American standards use Oxford English with the '-ize' > suffix for Greek-derived words. '-ize' is an interesting case. It used to be standard British English, but some reformers jumped up and decided to make the language look superficially more French. I don't know if it's related, but I've also seen some Canadians spell "practice" as "practise", which appears to have no etymological foundation whatsoever. Possibly it was an innovation by people who (wrongly) thought '-ize' was an Americanism, and the farther away one can get from American English, the better. > I have seen this with the rules governing the spelling in both ISO > 9899 (the C standard) and ISO 60559 (a.k.a. IEEE 754 Floating Point). > A long time ago, DEC used a subset of English grammar and vocabulary > which was very neutral and was devoid of Americanisms and was very > easy to read by all, including non-native speakers. In all my reading > of Bell Labs documents, I never noticed Americanisms. In writing pedagogically, which is the sense of nearly all of my output in groff's documentation, I attempt my own approximation of "transatlantic" or "international" English because my aim is to communicate effectively with an audience that is learning some aspect of groff or needs a refresher on its operation. Code comments, and to some extent change logs, have a different audience, and I think it's not only acceptable but proper for an author to give a little bit of one's own personality some expression. groff is developed by people, not an LLM simulation of the averaged properties of its mailing list participants (which is the pool from which all our developers are drawn). On that note, I'll observe that I don't try to "Americanize", let alone impose my own idiolect on, documents in groff that are maintained by other people. Examples include Bertrand Garrigues's document on Automake, Peter Schaffter's _mom_ documentation, and Deri's articles on the "sboxes" package and, newly to groff 1.25, "Groff PDF Features". I'll employ an editorial red pen for _other_ purposes, for instance to give a group-maintained document like our _ms_ manual a unified voice, and I will be perhaps annoyingly prescriptivist about the technical lexicon we use to describe the groff system, because I find lack of clarity in technical documentation to be a cardinal sin. Thus, there at least are two things I'd have no problem with, which, given the tenor of this thread, might surprise people. 1. Deri putting a comment in gropdf.pl along these lines. # I once did this differently but the groff maintainer is a prat. 2. You using your preferred dialect and register for the GNU eqn tutorial document you've been working on for quite a while. I look forward to shipping that, and the only changes I can imagine making would be for _uncontroversial_ grammar/spelling/style issues, and to beseech consistent usage of the "groff lexicon". Bottom line: I don't intend to impose en_US spelling on a document for which I lack primary responsibility as maintainer. At 2026-11-10T23:28:49+1100, John Gardner wrote: > Aussie here. Yanklish spellings have been a pet peeve of mine ever > since I was old enough to read. It took me a few years to encounter UK spellings. By the time I was 9 years old or so, I'd been reading for 5+ years, and learned via Target (the publisher) paperback Doctor Who novels that UK English differed. > > I consider those forms to be Commonwealth English affectations. They > > should be discarded with powdered wigs, fox hunts, and the monarchy. > > ;-) > > I'd like to remind you that the entire Anglosphere agrees on spelling > differences apart from Canada (who use -ize suffixes) and the United > States, ...and the Philippines, and Liberia. I note your careful use of "Anglosphere", which conveniently omits places where English is seldom a person's _first_ language but might well be their second, including places with highly industrial economies and large populations like Japan and South Korea. All of these named places use U.S. conventions. One could, of course, protest that these places only suffer the burden of ghastly incorrect Yankee orthography because of the United States's shameful legacy of colonial expansion and exploitation. We shall therefore pass over in silence how many countries came to adopt the orthographic conventions of southern and easterly parts of the island of Britain. > a backwards, failed experiment in democracy Every experiment in democracy fails. The more successful the experiment, the more unwelcome military attention it attracts from global powers. This is why I recommend to every person even mildly interested in geopolitics the history of the Spanish Civil War. The Roman Catholic Church, Comintern (Stalin), Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Stanley Baldwin, and Franklin D. Roosevelt all agreed that Catalonia had to be destroyed. They differed only in the relative proportions of rolling tanks, aerial bombing, and blockade to be applied in achieving the objective.[1] All bosses everywhere are opposed to worker self-management. > whose citizens prefer to lampshade their country's illogical > inconsistencies than fix them (e.g., continued use of their former > overlord's measurement system ("Freedom" Units). My country has the most powerful propaganda apparatus the world has yet seen. It takes immense resources to suppress the consciousness of the working class. As NYC mayoral then-candidate (and socialist!) Zohran Mamdani observed, the wealthy spent far more opposing his candidacy than his proposed taxes would collect.[2] When one understands why such expenditure is economically rational nevertheless, one has independently rediscovered Marxist analysis. The subjugation of others is a pearl of great price. > Moreover, if any country claims the right to be a central authority on > "standard" English, it's Britain (or to be more specific, England). Will it surprise you to learn that I'm predisposed to suspicion of a "central authority" in _any_ area? > I understand that the FSF is based in the US, and therefore, most of > their projects' codebases are written in Yanklish. I don't think that's a higher-order factor. People from all over the world have originated GNU software projects, and if there's a GNU style guide favoring any dialect of English, I'm not aware of it. > But FFS, please don't try to justify that decision beyond a *"we're > retaining consistency with how it was originally written"* (which is > Wikipedia's policy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:ENGVAR> to > spelling variations in articles whose subject matter doesn't pertain > to a specific nation or region of the world). As articulated above, I apply a different principle: consistency of a document's authorial voice. > Yours truly, > — A speaker of English, addressing a speaker of Yanklish You can call me a seppo. I won't be bothered. Regards, Branden [1] FDR is said to have later regretted the disproportionate effects of applying an arms embargo on "both sides". That tells us nothing about how cold his blood was when he signed the relevant Neutrality Act. A recurring theme in U.S. politics is the haste with which centrist leaders decide that it's time to "turn the corner" and "start the healing process". Thus Abraham Lincoln threw over Hannibal Hamlin for Andrew Johnson in 1864, with dire consequences for black emancipation, and FDR ejecting Henry Wallace in favor of Harry Truman in 1944. [2] https://www.ms.now/all-in/watch/they-re-spending-more-than-i-d-tax-them-mamdani-slams-mega-donors-funding-cuomo-250864197906
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
