Cato's Grammar Grumble

[kishnevi]

Vwls r ovrrtd

dnt nd thm

Hebrew and Arabic are often written/printed without vowels (it is in fact the preferred form for Hebrew books);  in the case of Hebrew at least (not sure about Arabic) vowel signs (under, over or after the consonant) are a relatively new fangled invention,  from the very early medieval period (meaning about 600-900CE), and Torah scrolls and other manuscripts used for ritual purposes do not have vowels.  There has developed a system of inserting certain consonants (mainly vav and yod) to indicate certain vowels, and two consonants are effectively place holders for vowels (aleph and ayin).   (Thus CaTo would be probably be written CTV, with the V(vov) being a placeholder for the 'o' vowel.  In cases where different vowels can lead to different meanings, context or memory of Biblical texts usually comes to the aid of the reader.   (DeNT NoD THeM or DoNT NeeD Them?)

[The Six]

The pronouncing of Ts as Ds is nothing new. It's possible a certain company here has never pronounced its name correctly...


http://www.youtube.com/v/YC6ErD7KRyc

[The Six]

[aquablob]

Ken M is an excellent troll.

[DaveF]

Ken M is an excellent troll.

There's trolling... and there's gently poking fun at po-faced members, who don't realise they're having fun poked at them - very funny.

Anyway, the real point of the message was to have a grumble about Microsoft's "Smart Quotes" - which most of the time are very smart (converting the straight single- and double-quotes to the curly ones, Alt-145 to 148 inclusive).  But how to stop Word getting it wrong with archaic contractions like 'tis, 'twas, 'twould etc.?  The software sees a quote with a word immediately following it and puts in an open-quote (Alt-145), when what I want is a close-quote, an apostrophe to indicate contraction/omission, Alt-146.  Even doing a search for Alt-145 and replace with Alt-146 doesn't work, as the smart function intervenes and puts it "right" for you instantaneously.  Short of turning off smart quotes completely, does anyone know an automatic way around this one?

DF

[Karl Henning]

Thank you for grumbling about that!

[Cato]

.  Short of turning off smart quotes completely, does anyone know an automatic way around this one?

DF

Over-riding a program, or evading its "thought" process, is difficult, as we all know, but at times not impossible.

I will check with my Mathematician/Computer Scientist son about this tonight, if nobody else has solved it by then.

[Gurn Blanston]

My last 2 versions of Word (2003 & 2010) both put a tiny mark, a sort of little line, next to where they have made a 'smart' correction. If you click on it, there is a short menu that says 'undo the smart correction', 'stop making this smart correction', or smart properties. So you can choose from the list at each instance. It isn't automatic, I know, but the instances of needing it must be rather uncommon, yes? If not, I would simply choose 'stop making this correction'.

[Ten thumbs]

My old 1998 version gave up on correcting when I insisted. The most annoying 'correction' was converting to upper case after ? or ! when small case is required, i.e. when the tone indicator replaces a comma, colon or semi-colon.

[North Star]

My old 1998 version gave up on correcting when I insisted. The most annoying 'correction' was converting to upper case after ? or ! when small case is required, i.e. when the tone indicator replaces a comma, colon or semi-colon.

Where? does that happen? I must have seen this use somewhere, but can't think of an example at the moment.

[DaveF]

Thanks for all the thoughts, folks.

My last 2 versions of Word (2003 & 2010) both put a tiny mark, a sort of little line, next to where they have made a 'smart' correction.

I can't see it in 2013, to which I've recently upgraded.  I'll have a look at 2010 on the old laptop, when I have half-an-hour to spare to wait for it to boot up.

I think the "solution" is to do the smart search-and-replace on apostrophes (which I do a lot; I copy quite a lot of poetry and prose from websites for displays in the library where I work), then turn off "smart correction" and to a global search-and-replace on Alt-145 followed by lower-case t (which all these words seem to begin with), replacing with Alt-146.

Where? does that happen? I must have seen this use somewhere, but can't think of an example at the moment.

I write like that quite a lot! because putting the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence would risk having the reader forget what I'd been exclaiming about in the first place.

DF

[kishnevi]

Seemed to be the best place to put this link.
Found via a friend's FB page.
http://imgur.com/r/latin/rO1PQmj


I suppose from the perspective of absolute accuracy, it should really be iolo, iolas, iolat

[Karl Henning]

A mild orthographic grumble, that last.

Very nice!

[The Six]

Here's a conversation an English learner posted between him and his teacher.

Me: When I was cooking dinner, she was reading a book.
Teacher: We can't use "WHEN" here because we can only use WHEN in a sentence when there are two actions in a sentence that happened at DIFFERENT TIMES.

What.

[North Star]

Here's a conversation an English learner posted between him and his teacher.

What.

When you're wrong, you're wrong.

[Cato]

When you're wrong, you're wrong.

  Amen!   0:)

As far as "Yolo" being Latin to equal "you only live once:"

Hmmm!

You
Only
Live
Once.

  What are the odds?   

Tell it to James Bond!

[Karl Henning]

Cringed a bit (well, more than a bit) as I overheard a co-worker say on the phone, "Literally, they will walk you through it . . . ."

[Ten thumbs]

Where? does that happen? I must have seen this use somewhere, but can't think of an example at the moment.

The commonest occurrence is in any hymnbook: Hark! the herald angels sing.

If you use colons and semicolons to separate connected sentences, it is bound to crop up from time to time.
Another instance is the list of questions, which would have been separated by commas with a final 'and' - not And!

[Cato]

In a report on how Putin, everybody's favorite dictator these days, has hired lobbying firms in Washington D.C. to improve his image (and Russia's in general), a news reporter mentioned that the Putin regime hired a firm called Maslansky, whose specialty for this curious client was "language massaging."      

How exactly do you "massage" a phrase like "We have illegally invaded the Ukraine!"   

Maybe you knead that nasty sentence into "We have protected Russians living in the Ukraine!"   

[Mookalafalas]

Cringed a bit (well, more than a bit) as I overheard a co-worker say on the phone, "Literally, they will walk you through it . . . ."

  Perhaps he's in the national guard and was talking about this weekend's minefield training session.