On Tuesday 29 August 2006 11:07, Tim wrote:
Tim:
> > Some time ago our newspapers started using American spelling, which
> > *is* "incorrect" to do in Australia. One reason given was that it
> > was a complete pain trying to work around the American spell checker.
Gene Heskett:
> Humm, if it results in less miss-understandings between the peoples by
> pushing the people toward a common ground for language usage, I can't
> see as its an undesirable effect.
Okay, let's see the yanks fall in line with origins of their language,
rather than subverting someone else's... ;-)
In our defense, I believe that some of the more technical terms we've
bastardized from the kings english (did you ever try to read that?) have
been improvements over the original, whose exact meanings seem to have
become somewhat foggy with age.
Besides that, we also suffer from the majority rules mentality and there's
220 million of us these days. :)
> In the above case, I believe there are English(GB) versions of
the
> spell checkers available, so why don't they use them?
My guess would be along the lines that a dedicated news paper's printing
system was a bit more limited in software choices than the average desk
top computer word processor. I did say "some time ago", I've no idea
what their current excuse is.
I should have pointed that out. When you're running macs because that what
all publishers use for composition chores, the choices are going to be
somewhat more limited than for x86 platforms.
For what it's worth, Australian English is distinctly different
than
other countries. You do need to regionalise such things. Trying to
tell another country to spell things in a foreign way is insulting.
We'll inventitate our own languages, thank you very much...
Ok, start by defineing 'inventitate' so the rest of the world knows what
you are saying. Sounds rather like something we came up with in the 60's
as a phrase applied to a redesign effort to remove superfulous parts. We
called in 'simplicating' at the time. And probably still do in some
circles...
--
(Currently running FC4, in case that's important to the thread)
Couldn't prove it one way or the other to me, I'm still on FC2 here at the
Heskett Ranchette.
Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
I read messages from the public lists.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
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Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.