malloc + 4??

[Joona I Palaste]

Is this correct in some Spanish dialect with which I'm unfamiliar?
I thought the word for "kilogram" in Spanish was... well.. "kilogramo."
Certainly the "gramme" ending in Joona's word isn't Spanish; Spanish
doesn't double consonants. Looks like a weird Ibero-British hybrid
to me.
(After Googling: is this something like Catalan?)

I don't know how to spell Spanish correctly. I just have a general idea
of it.

The two-'l' letter is the "elle" (pronounced roughly like the
English letter "A": "A-yay"). In words, it's pronounced like the
English 'y': "me llamo" -> "may yamo". And perfectly regularly so.

Spanish used to consider both the 'll' and the 'ch' to be letters
in their own right, along with the enye (n+tilde; sorry, not in my
encoding). But IIRC recently the Spanish people in charge of the
"official" language decided to give up the separate letters for 'ch'
and 'll', and now you'll find "llama" in between "liviano" and "local"
in the dictionary.

IMHO, that's just silly. Considering a group of multiple glyphs as a
single letter can be very confusing.

I'd say, because Spanish doesn't consider 'y' either a consonant or
a vowel, just as in English. The 'y' sound is kind of in-between.
In any event, the 'y' in "yo" isn't really acting like a consonant:
it's just adding the extra "ee" sort of sound. Just like it's doing
in "hay," which without the 'y' would be pronounced "ahh." With the
'y', it's pronounced "ahh-ee," but run together into "ai."

[It's weird trying to write down phonetic descriptions in "English"
syllables, when we're talking about a *more* phonetic language in the
first place, and I know English isn't your first language in the second
place. ]

I make a distinction between the consonant and vowel forms. In some
languages, it can even affect the syllable count. Compare the two
Finnish names "Marja" and "Maria". The first is two syllables: Mar-ja.
The second is three syllables: Ma-ri-a.

Correct, AFAIK.

Sounds to me like *Finnish* is the weird one. ;-))

I have to be of the exact opposite opinion. Have you ever looked at
how similar the glyphs 'I' and 'J', or 'i' and 'j' are? And that they're
next to each other in the alphabet?
Especially since 'j' is the only consonant with a dot? It seems clear
that 'j' is intended to be the consonant form of 'i', not some silly 'tsch'
thing like your Anglosaxon has. AFAIK it *was* the consonant form of 'i'
in Latin but it got later corrupted.
Finnish is not the only language to use 'j' as the consonant form of
'i'. At least Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and German also use it.

--
/-- Joona Palaste ([email protected]) ------------- Finland --------\
\-- http://www.helsinki.fi/~palaste --------------------- rules! --------/
"A bee could, in effect, gather its junk. Llamas (no poor quadripeds) tune
and vow excitedly zooming."
- JIPsoft

 

[Dan Pop]

Dan Pop wrote :

May I know which contests? I know that an Austrian, the Prince of

I don't remember. It's 15 years since I saw something on the TV about
such a contest and I only remember that the winner was not French.

[...] getting it right when writing requires
a solid understanding of the French grammar (otherwise, it's trivially
easy to mix up, e.g. the infinitive and past participle of most regular
verbs).

Although your last example is a common mistake, it's very easy to avoid
it for a native french speaker: just replace the verb by another one
(usually "prendre") and its pronunciation discriminates between the
infinitive and the past participle.

It doesn't matter how easy it is to avoid, what really matters is that it
is a *very* common mistake. If the written form sounds correctly, far too
many people don't bother to make the slightest effort to check that it is
the correct form.

What I meant is that you don't need a "solid understanding of the French
grammar" to avoid this mistake if you are a native French speaker, as
you can use a simple method based on pronunciation.

This was only meant as an example of common problem, see the "e.g."
prefixing it. There are many other cases where the correct form cannot
be decided using a simple-minded heuristic, ranging from plain and simple
conjugation, to subjonctif vs indicatif, si conditionnel, la concordance
des temps.

However it is true
you cannot write correct French without paying some attention.

No amount of attention can compensate a solid knowledge of French grammar.

Such words are often used during French spelling contests. For example,
"les cuisseaux de veau et les cuissots de chevreuil" was used by Mérimée
in his famous spelling contest. "Cuissot" and "cuisseau" designate, with
an identical pronunciation, the same part of different animals. As they
are not a very common words, it's quite hard to get the right spelling.

That's exactly what I was talking about: using the context for
disambiguation. Of course, it can only help if you know the words and
their meanings.

And the cuissot vs cuisseau issue is the perversity of a French linguist.
As a result, confusion reigns: try Google searches for
cuisseau-de-chevreuil and cuissot-de-veau and enjoy the results ;-)

Dan

 

[Mark Henning]

Joona I Palaste wrote...

IMHO, that's just silly. Considering a group of multiple glyphs as a
single letter can be very confusing.

Nevertheless, it seems to be a very common concept. I now know of three
languages that do this, and i wouldn't be suprised to find out that the
latin letter 'W' originated in this way.

M Henning.

 

[Irrwahn Grausewitz]

Arthur J. O'Dwyer <[email protected]> scribbled the following:


IMHO, that's just silly. Considering a group of multiple glyphs as a
single letter can be very confusing.

But it's a concept not unheard of; other examples of ligatures are
the dutch 'ij' ("kijk"), the danish 'ae' (example?), the french 'oe'
("oevre") or the german 'sz' ("Floß").

I have to be of the exact opposite opinion. Have you ever looked at
how similar the glyphs 'I' and 'J', or 'i' and 'j' are? And that they're
next to each other in the alphabet?
Especially since 'j' is the only consonant with a dot? It seems clear
that 'j' is intended to be the consonant form of 'i', not some silly 'tsch'
thing like your Anglosaxon has. AFAIK it *was* the consonant form of 'i'
in Latin but it got later corrupted.
Finnish is not the only language to use 'j' as the consonant form of
'i'. At least Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and German also use it.

Sorry, no j/J in either Latin or Greek, AFAICT. Interestingly
enough, in German the letter 'j' is named "Jot", cf. greek "Iota"
for 'i'. Confusion complete. 8^S

Regards

 

[Dan Pop]

But it's a concept not unheard of; other examples of ligatures are
the dutch 'ij' ("kijk"), the danish 'ae' (example?), the french 'oe'
("oevre") or the german 'sz' ("Floß").

Is the German 'ß' really a ligature for "sz"? If I were to write "Floß"
in ASCII, I'd use "Floss"... And my dictionary seems to agree, as
"Floß" is before "Flosse".

Dan

 

[Joona I Palaste]

Is the German 'ß' really a ligature for "sz"? If I were to write "Floß"
in ASCII, I'd use "Floss"... And my dictionary seems to agree, as
"Floß" is before "Flosse".

It was originally indeed a ligature for "sz", but its "expansion"
changed to "ss" after the ligature was established as a single letter.

 

[Irrwahn Grausewitz]

Is the German 'ß' really a ligature for "sz"?

It indeed is. It's more obvious when you look at fractura(?) fonts
or suetterlin scripts: if you move an "inner" 's', meaning the long
vertically strectched one as opposed to the round "normal" 's'
(which is the only 's' used in modern fonts), very close to the
somewhat '3'-shaped olde 'z', you get the original sz-ligature glyph:

/
|
|___
| /
| \
| |
| _/
|

The sz-ligature somehow survived the death of the scripts/fonts it
originates from. BTW, the name the corresponding character entity
is, consequently, &szlig;.

If I were to write "Floß"
in ASCII, I'd use "Floss"... And my dictionary seems to agree, as
"Floß" is before "Flosse".

It's debatable where in dictionary sort order the 'sz' should be
placed, since it's neither really two letters [1] nor one letter
of it's own right. However, at least my old Duden dict suggests to
transcript it to 'SZ' when writing all caps - should be "FLOSZ" then.
Nobody does this anymore nowadays in favor of "FLOSS", though, but
what's definitely utterly wrong is "FLOß", since there exists no
glyph for the uppercase sz-ligature.

[1] It's a sharpened 's', which does *not* force a preceeding vowel
to be shortened, as it usually happens before doubled consonants,
hence it's wrong to write "Floss" when you mean "Floß", or "Mass"
when you mean "Maß". Otherwise unwanted ambiguities could lead
to semantic problems, consider: what does "Sie tranken in Massen."
really mean?
When constrained to write in plain 7-bit ASCII things are of
course different, but then the sz problem throws me off much less
compared to the umlaut transcription mess.

Regards

 

[Martin Dickopp]

It was originally indeed a ligature for "sz", but its "expansion"
changed to "ss" after the ligature was established as a single letter.

Also note that German originally had two glyphs for the letter s: one
for word endings, which looks like the modern letter s, and one for the
middle of words, which looks like the letter f without the horizontal
line. If you imagine a ligature of the latter letter and the letter z,
the similarity to the letter ß is easy to see.

Martin

 

[Joona I Palaste]

Also note that German originally had two glyphs for the letter s: one
for word endings, which looks like the modern letter s, and one for the
middle of words, which looks like the letter f without the horizontal
line. If you imagine a ligature of the latter letter and the letter z,
the similarity to the letter ß is easy to see.

The same style was true for Finnish (s for word endings and f without a
horizontal line elsewhere), in the bad old days when some foreign big
shot decreed that only Swedish may be written with readable letters,
Finnish must be written with those fancy posh Fraktura letters that no
one can read without starting at each one of them for at least five
seconds.

--
/-- Joona Palaste ([email protected]) ------------- Finland --------\
\-- http://www.helsinki.fi/~palaste --------------------- rules! --------/
"'It can be easily shown that' means 'I saw a proof of this once (which I didn't
understand) which I can no longer remember'."
- A maths teacher

 

[Alberto =?iso-8859-1?Q?Gim=E9nez?=]

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El Tue, 13 Apr 2004 21:36:25 GMT, Stephen Sprunk escribió:

"kilogramo" or just "kilo" are the words I know in Spanish, by the way.
However, since 'k' is not in the Spanish alphabet, I presume the correct
spelling is "quilogramo".

k forms part of spanish alphabet (but rarely used). Both words are
accepted.

- --
Alberto Giménez, SimManiac en el IRC
http://www.almorranasozial.es.vg
GNU/Linux Debian Woody 3.0 GnuPG ID: 0x3BAABDE1
Linux registered user #290801
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[Alberto =?iso-8859-1?Q?Gim=E9nez?=]

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El Tue, 13 Apr 2004 20:30:03 -0400, Joe Wright escribió:

With all due respect, Spain (Iberia) has four (more?) regions with
their own languages. Castille, Andalusia, Catalonia, Basque, etc.
Which of these are you talking about?

Spanish is Spanish, everywhere. Another thing is dialects, or people's
pronounciation. Other topic is Catalan, Basque, "gallego" (don't know
translation), which are languages on their own.

An "andaluz" *should* write spanish exactly as a "castellano" would, but
they pronnounce diferently. It's about "andaluz" dialect, not about
Spanish as a language

Phonetic spelling is tedious so bear with me if you can.
In Spain it is 'tor-TILL-ya' and is very much like an omelette.
In Mexico it is 'tor-TEE-ya' and is a dry corn pancake.

I think this is not what we are discussing here. You are talking about
different meanings of a word. It's not about pronounciation or grammar
rules. Well, south american spanish is quite like a "dialect" of
Spain's, by their pronounciation, but written is the same. A mexican
would write "tortilla" where I write "tortilla"

Reading this thread, and your posts, I've seen that spanish has a lot of
grammar and so peculiarities which i don't care, perhaps because i'm
used with the language...

Can I change my opinion and say that spanish is not quite 1-1? (of
course, it is more 1-1 than english or french (I also speak catalan,
that is similar to the last one, and has a lot more of peculiarities
than spanish)).

- --
Alberto Giménez, SimManiac en el IRC
http://www.almorranasozial.es.vg
GNU/Linux Debian Woody 3.0 GnuPG ID: 0x3BAABDE1
Linux registered user #290801
WinError 01E: Timing error - Please wait. And wait. And wait. And wait.
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[Joona I Palaste]

Can I change my opinion and say that spanish is not quite 1-1? (of
course, it is more 1-1 than english or french (I also speak catalan,
that is similar to the last one, and has a lot more of peculiarities
than spanish)).

In fact, having studied quite a few of the Indo-European languages, I
have come to the conclusion that English and French are pretty much
the *only* languages who are not even close to 1-1. The others are
*almost* (but not quite) 1-1.

 

[CBFalconer]

.... snip ...

Also note that German originally had two glyphs for the letter s: one
for word endings, which looks like the modern letter s, and one for the
middle of words, which looks like the letter f without the horizontal
line. If you imagine a ligature of the latter letter and the letter z,
the similarity to the letter ß is easy to see.

That was also present in English. Supplies all your preffing
needs.

 

[Keith Thompson]

In fact, having studied quite a few of the Indo-European languages, I
have come to the conclusion that English and French are pretty much
the *only* languages who are not even close to 1-1. The others are
*almost* (but not quite) 1-1.

French, unlike English, is very nearly 1-many (or should I say
many-1). Given the spelling of a French word, you can almost always
determine how it's pronounced; going the other way is much more
difficult.

English, on the other hand, is many-many. The spelling of a word is
often insufficient to determine how it's pronounced, and the
pronunciation is often insufficient to determine how it's spelled.
See Dr. Seuss's "The tough coughs as he ploughs the dough" (pronounced
"The tuff coffs as he plows the doe").

 

[Michael Wojcik]

Yes, and this means that neither Spanish nor English is "pronounced
as written". Finnish is *almost* - the 'n' in "ng" or "nk" is not
pronounced like a normal 'n'. Otherwise it's "pronounced as written".

Japanese is pronounced as written, if you write it that way.

(OK, n' can be pronounced as /n/ or /m/, but that's a trivial
difference and a mistake would never cause confusion.)

If you write Japanese normally, of course, pronunciation can be a
real mystery, particularly for proper nouns.

Japanese can be written phonetically, using the kana syllabaries, but
no one other than young children and people beginning to study
Japanese as a foreign language does that, because it's almost
useless; Japanese is so full of homonyms that it becomes very
ambiguous. So proper written Japanese uses a mix of kana and kanji,
which are logographs adapted from Chinese. Typically kanji represent
the roots of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and kana is used
for grammatical suffixes and particles, other particles that serve as
postpositions, for sounding out onomatopoeia and foreign-origin
loan-words, and so forth.

Since each kanji typically has more than one pronunciation (often
due to associating it with both a spoken Japanese word and the
spoken (in whatever dialect) Chinese word it was adopted from),
reading written Japanese aloud often requires recognizing what word
is meant and then recalling how it's pronounced. And if it's a
proper name, there are often two or more reasonable choices; you
have to find someone who's familiar with the thing being named to
be sure.

Whether that's better or worse than English is a matter of taste.
You have to learn more symbols (about 2000) with Japanese, but
fewer wierd rules and exceptions. And with Japanese it's often
easier to understand the sense of a sentence even when you're not
sure how it should be pronounced.

--
Michael Wojcik (e-mail address removed)

Thanks for your prompt reply and thanks for your invitatin to your
paradise. Based on Buddihism transmigration, I realize you, European,
might be a philanthropist in previous life! -- supplied by Stacy Vickers

 

[Ian Woods]

But it's a concept not unheard of; other examples of ligatures are
the dutch 'ij' ("kijk"), the danish 'ae' (example?), the french 'oe'
("oevre") or the german 'sz' ("Floß").

English had (and still does, occasionally, have) ligatures and 'single
character' replacements too. Most of the silliness of "Ye Olde Print
Shoppe" being pronounced as "Yeee old print shop" was caused by the Herr
Guttenberg's device not having a 'thorn' character. The 'Y' was closest
glyph to it available (as standard), and hence it was common in print.
The thorn character was eventually replaced with 'th'. Remember folks:
"Ye" is just "The"!

(The thorn glyph was used by JRR Tolkien in the runes on the map Thorin
had in the hobbit. It sort of looks like:

|\
|/
|

)

Ian Woods

 

[Dan Pop]

El Tue, 13 Apr 2004 20:30:03 -0400, Joe Wright escribió:

Spanish is Spanish, everywhere. Another thing is dialects, or people's
pronounciation. Other topic is Catalan, Basque, "gallego" (don't know
translation), which are languages on their own.

Then, why do I see "Castellano" on so many DVDs, instead of "Español"?

Dan

 

[Irrwahn Grausewitz]

English had (and still does, occasionally, have) ligatures and 'single
character' replacements too. Most of the silliness of "Ye Olde Print
Shoppe" being pronounced as "Yeee old print shop" was caused by the Herr
Guttenberg's device not having a 'thorn' character. The 'Y' was closest
glyph to it available (as standard), and hence it was common in print.

That's interesting, I always wondered about the 'Ye' thing.
Luckily, 'Y' and not 'P' was chosen as a substitute... ;-)

Regards

 

[Thomas Stegen]

But it's a concept not unheard of; other examples of ligatures are
the dutch 'ij' ("kijk"), the danish 'ae' (example?),

The 'ae' is scandinavian and not purely danish. It is a single letter
though and has its own place in the alphabeth (it is number 27).

Norwegian examples: "baer" (berry), "skjaere" (cut) (also of interest is
is the skj sound, does not exist in english really, sort of like "ssh").

The ae is a single glyph though, æ.

So the above examples would be "bær" and "skjære".

 

[Joona I Palaste]

The 'ae' is scandinavian and not purely danish. It is a single letter
though and has its own place in the alphabeth (it is number 27).

Norwegian examples: "baer" (berry), "skjaere" (cut) (also of interest is
is the skj sound, does not exist in english really, sort of like "ssh").

The ae is a single glyph though, æ.

So the above examples would be "bær" and "skjære".

It's *NOT* "Scandinavian". Only Danish and Norwegian (and maybe
Icelandic) use it. Finnish and Swedish use ä and ö instead of æ and ø.