On Mon, Mar 08, 1999 at 09:52:48AM +0100, Asger Alstrup Nielsen wrote:
> > > On Thu, Mar 04, 1999 at 12:04:21AM +0100, Asger Alstrup Nielsen wrote:
>
> Thank you ;-)
>
> I hope everybody realizes that I really agree with Joacim, but just hate to
> admit it.
>
> > You've got 'merged words' enabled or whatever the ispell setting is.
> > That is, 'there' + 'for' = 'therefor' which must be spelled correctly
> > because joined words are accepted.
>
> As I wrote to Amir, the rationale begind writing "therefor" is Danish spelling.
> The word in Danish is "derfor". Much shorter, much easier to spell, and much
> better. Derfor, I'll just use the Danish word from now on.
I think we all ought to. I would we all just use Danish from now on, but
they've got all those funny extra letters like å and ø to keep track of.
There's an e-mail making it's nth time around the net that IIRC is
attributed to Mark Twain, which talks about ways to improve English by
removing ambiguity. He continues describing it until the words become
unintelligbile, which I think is supposed to prove it's a dumb idea. In
fact, I think it would be a great idea, but of course it will never happen.
In Hebrew, for example, there's only one way each consonant & vowel can
sound, so given a word, there's only one way to pronounce it. Which is half
the battle. Unfortunately, there are still a couple pairs of letters that
sound the same, so there's still plenty of potential for spelling mistakes.
I guess we need to start speaking Lojban (xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/).
> Amir:
> > I would call it a Pyrrhic victory (but only because I'm trying to show off :)
>
> I just looked this up: "A Pyrrhic victory is a victory that has cost way too
> big losses for the victor" (or something like that.)
> Nah, it's not such a victory. I enjoyed writing it, and didn't loose anything
> by doing it. All the stuff about experiments and so fort was just a marketing
> stunt to get some attention. It seemed to work ;-)
In this case, I meant that you lost in the sense that the whole lyx team
lost because noone was discussing it. But then people started discussing it,
so I guess we won after all.
-Amir
