TeX, LaTeX and Friends - 2015-03-04 (page 3 of 3)

11:00 PM

And, again, it matters for mutation tudalen -> y dudalen; theori -> y theori. [Both feminine so both subject to soft mutation following y.]

@yo' But then you will end up with a very looonnngg alphabet, will you not?

yo'

@AlanMunn Another thing is: CH has a proper proper name in Czech, it's not "cé há", it's "chá"

@cfr "The Czech alphabet consists of 42 letters." says Wikipedia :)

cfr

@yo' Welsh also. Ll is 'ell' - not 'el el'. But the names of letters are not used much in Welsh. (Unlike English.)

Wikipedia says Welsh as 28 but then gives a table containing 29.

[The Problem of J.]

yo'

@cfr we wouldn't use them either, unless you say something like: "ziegler, written with Z" (because it can also be written "cígler")

cfr

@yo' Do you use them to give spellings? We mostly don't although in the south we need to distinguish i from u as they sound the same here.

yo'

@cfr we rarely need to spell anything, but when we do, yes, we use them. They are also what you read from the white tableau at the eye doctor :)

cfr

11:08 PM

@yo' We tend to use the sounds for spelling, when necessary, rather than the names. Names get used in saying acronyms, though, for example. (S4C is *es pedwar ec'.)

yo'

@cfr ah acronyms, right, that's where we use them quite often. We use them for spelling to distinguish sounds that could be mis-interpreted, for instance Š = EŠ and Ž = ŽÉ or ŽET

Alan Munn

@cfr Yes, I agree with the first part of your description but not the last. Certainly your use of 'letter' is absolutely not what English means by the term. Not that your version isn't completely coherent: it is (and is basically the definition I gave above.)

yo'

@SeanAllred nice :-)

Sean Allred

@yo' :)

Canageek

@JosephWright Question: If journals are paying people to retype the paper anyway, why do they care about what LaTeX you use?

Sean Allred

11:21 PM

@Canageek you know, that's a good point. >:(

yo'

@Canageek that's a very good point. The truth is: the ones that send the papers to India do not care :)

David Carlisle

@Canageek in at least some they try to typeset it (using in house styles if they use tex) or convert it (if they don't) so if that works good, but if not just printing it and getting it re-keyed can be more cost effective than trying to debug some weird private macro collection,

cfr

@AlanMunn Well, I bet it is what bilingual speakers mean by 'letter' here. (I'm not even bilingual but I learnt an alphabet of such letters as a child and it never occurred to me that English speakers would reject our letters.)

yo'

@cfr I love the word "reject" in your last post :-)

@JosephWright Does an awarded bounty moves a low-vote answer forward?

Alan Munn

@cfr Yes, I don't doubt that. But there are many places in which speakers use what appears to be the same word with different meanings. 'quite' in the US doesn't mean what it means in the UK, for example.

cfr

11:34 PM

@AlanMunn Indeed. I'm not denying that there may be a sense of 'letter' in which Ch is two. I am claiming that Ch is a single letter in a perfectly good sense of 'letter'. Since that claim has been disputed, it is being defended. I'm not trying to prove that this sense is the only legitimate one - merely that it is a perfectly legitimate one.

Alan Munn

@cfr Well I do agree that your definition absolutely defensible, just not what English speakers mean by it. (Bilingual Welsh English speakers excepted...) :)

cfr

@AlanMunn How would you define 'alphabet'? Presumably not as (merely) consisting of letters, since alphabets clearly can contain things which you would not classify that way?

yo'

@cfr me thinking of yers...

cfr

[Or is yr wyddor not a bona fide alphabet either?]

@yo' 'yers'?

yo'

Soft sign

The soft sign (Ь, ь, italics Ь, ь), (Russian: мягкий знак Russian pronunciation: [ˈmʲæxʲkʲɪj znak]) also known as the front yer or front er, is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Old Church Slavonic, it represented a short (or "reduced") front vowel. As with its companion, the back yer ‹ъ›, the vowel phoneme it designated was later partly dropped and partly merged with other vowels. In the modern Slavic Cyrillic writing systems (all East Slavic plus Bulgarian and Church Slavic), it does not represent an individual sound, but rather indicates palatalization of the preceding consonant. ‹Ь› was also...

cfr

11:42 PM

@yo' Interesting. Is that closer to the 'symbol' sense of 'letter'?

yo'

@cfr it's closer to a diacritic sign :)

cfr

@yo' It seems to fit @AlanMunn & @JosephWright 's sense of 'letter' better than ours...

yo'

@cfr indeed :)

Alan Munn

@cfr An alphabet is a set of the things that the language in question calls 'letters'. :)

yo'

But they are correctly considered letters. Wikipedia also reads that "Polish additionally uses the digraphs ch, cz, dz, dź, dż, rz, and sz. Digraphs are not given any special treatment in alphabetical ordering. For example, ch is treated simply as c followed by h, and not as a single letter as in Czech."

@AlanMunn that's the most proper definition of both notions, yet a bit alibist

reminds me of: The IQ is a measure of the ability to pass the IQ tests.

cfr

11:51 PM

@AlanMunn What happens when the language can't agree?! Is J a letter in the Welsh alphabet or not? On the other hand, nobody disputes Ll etc. (Well people do on the talk page of Wikipedia, but they don't seem to be Welsh speakers. They just object on principle.)

Virtuous or vicious circularity...?

yo'

@cfr what?

cfr

@yo' the definition of 'alphabet'. I suspect there will be circularity here... but whether it is vicious or virtuous, I'm not sure...

Alan Munn

@cfr I missed the discussion of Welsh J. If it's not a letter is it a diacritic?

yo'

@AlanMunn no, it's simply not used in the language at all. Like that Ш is not used in English :D

cfr

'Vicious circularity' means: circular in a question-begging way. 'Virtuous circularity' means: a circle which is not problematic.

Alan Munn

11:54 PM

@yo' Oh, but necessary for borrowed words like English 'John'?

yo'

@AlanMunn and what about Tomáš Hejda coming to an English-speaking conference? :D

cfr

@yo' @AlanMunn Well, the problem is that it is used in the language. But it is 'borrowed' from English. Without it, we have no jam and we can't keep anything in the garej.

Alan Munn

@cfr So then it's letter, I would say. Because once you've borrowed a bunch of words you either respell them or congratulations, you just gave birth to a baby letter. :)

cfr

There is no problem with other cases: v, z, k, q just are not letters. If Quine comes to the conference, he's Quine, but it doesn't make Q a letter in Welsh.

yo'

@cfr well, "the Czech way" would put it in the alphabet. We have four these letters: G, Q, W and X. There's a name for them I think, but I can't remember it.

Alan Munn

11:57 PM

@cfr Yes, I agree with that.

yo'

@cfr ah that's how you manage to make the alphabet so small!

cfr

@AlanMunn Yes, I think J is a letter. But traditionalists seem to baulk.

@yo' We have more letters than English. (29 versus 26.)

yo'

@cfr but you're far from 42 :D

cfr

[Was 28 but we just got the baby J.]

@yo' Does Czech have 42? That's a fantastic number to have!

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