English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Cerberus

00:00

And many good etym. dict. have fairly large proportions too, depending on what you would put in notes (because they don't have notes, just endless brackets).

tchrist

> Sidenotes give more life and variety to the page and are the easiest of all to find and read. If carefully designed, they need not enlarge either the page or the cost of printing it.

@Cerberus That is what Chris Tolkien did in his History of Middle Earth series.

The quote is of course Bringhurst.

Cerberus

@tchrist Yes, that is the standard way. Still not easy at all to switch between main text and commentary. Ideally, you just print two booklets.

This is what may happen if you have large notes.

You need lots of carriage returns in both columns.

Or vertical white space.

Because each note needs to be aligned with the right paragraph.

And it gets even worse if you want the note to start at the right line, or if you have several notes per paragraph.

tchrist

The notes should be in a column that is not as wide, and at a smaller point size.

Cerberus

Yes, possibly.

tchrist

If that does not solve it, then your notes are too long and are not notes.

Cerberus

00:08

That would mitigate the problem to some extent. But still.

End notes and footnotes are a bit more flexible.

tchrist

Footnotes aren’t.

Cerberus

But in general I am a huge fan of marginal notes, if at all practical.

tchrist

Endnotes are.

Cerberus

Well, you usually don't waste a lot of space with footnotes.

tchrist

Footnotes screw with your footer-space.

Cerberus

00:10

In case of an emergency, you can even let them flow over to the next page. *shudders

tchrist

And give you a variable-length page.

And you SHALL NOT let them spill!

Cerberus

I know, I know. But sometimes it is the better option.

Or the only option.

Suppose you have a footnote that is larger than a page.

tchrist

No. Do not write footnotes that long. Period. It is a failing of good sense, good taste, and good typesetting.

Then you are doing it wrong.

Cerberus

I have seen such footnotes in pocket editions.

Consider Jack Vance.

He does it.

tchrist

Put it in the main text if it is that long. It is by definition not a footnote when it is that long. It is not omissible.

has to answer door

Cerberus

00:12

The alternative is endnotes. He has some of those in some editions, but I strongly prefer his all-too-long footnotes, because leafing to the end section and back is worse than anything.

@tchrist It is a literary feature, a functional element of style. It is adds something to have a long description of a planet in a footnote, it is funny.

He might have put them in the main text.

I'm not sure what my opinion is.

It is more readable, but less quaint and imitative of the genre he is imitating.

Mechanical snail

00:51

Proposed edit

1

Q: What does Alma Mater mean?

I was wondering if Alma Mater refers to all the schools you have been in or just college. For example if someone has a major in mathematics, a masters degree and a phd all from different institutions would all three of them be his alma mater?

meaning

Cerberus

@Mechanicalsnail Approved!

KitFox

Hi.

Cerberus

Yo.

KitFox

Guess what's not exciting me tonight?

Robusto

@tchrist No. Length is for questions and answers on EL&U, of course.

Cerberus

01:00

Sex?

Robusto

@tchrist SOPHISTRY, n. The controversial method of an opponent, distinguished from one's own by superior insincerity and fooling. This method is that of the later Sophists, a Grecian sect of philosophers who began by teaching wisdom, prudence, science, art and, in brief, whatever men ought to know, but lost themselves in a maze of quibbles and a fog of words — Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

KitFox

Nope.

tchrist

@Robusto The devil came calling?

Robusto

@KitFox What's wrong with sex?

@tchrist Just a sophist. Welcome.

KitFox

@Robusto Nothing. It doesn't not excite me tonight.

Cerberus

01:02

We?

KitFox

Wiring receptacles.

Cerberus

If wiring receptacles are not exciting you tonight, you should buy some!

tchrist

@Cerberus I added a new paragraph at the bottom here. Sure wish you’d been around when I was trying to work this stuff out a couple years ago.

Cerberus

They can save any dull party.

KitFox

Buy some what now?

tchrist

01:04

No bison needed.

I checked with some folks who did various flavors of Greek, and they were dubious of the Unicode casing rules as something that didn’t really get used in newspapers and such.

Would somebody who’s closer to him (or whose boot is closer to him) please give Jasper a swift kick in the bottom for his constant identity crises?

KitFox

What for?

Cerberus

@tchrist I have no idea about New Greek typography to be honest.

tchrist

@KitFox It befuzzles me.

Cerberus

In Ancient Greek, in all caps, you would indeed write all iotas in full.

tchrist

In current Greek, too.

The question is the headline-case situation.

Cerberus

01:08

Yes, subscriptum...I think...or perhaps not. No two capitals in any case: perhaps a minuscle.

Let me find you an example...

My Master's name.

tchrist

Ok. The problem was finding samples, since I think Greek tends to use just first-word capped the way most European newspapers do, and unlike American ones.

KitFox

@tchrist He's usually Jasper, or sometimes Clark Kent, Will Hunting, or Jason Bourne. That's about it.

tchrist

So you need an iota subscript in the first letter of the first word.

KitFox

So... lands the hot on the brass terminal I thought maybe we could have some kind of EL&U chat room orgy.

Cerberus

archimedes.fas.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/…

tchrist

01:11

GLARES

KitFox

Geez, sorry.

tchrist

@KitFox I can see that your hypomania is blossoming into full-blown mania.

Cerberus

They use a minuscle a when they use a iota subscriptum.

I don't know why. It looks odd.

KitFox

It's not mania. It's a deadline.

Cerberus

Of course any typographical conventions must be modern, not Ancient, because the Greeks didn't care.

tchrist

01:12

Right.

Which diacritics from polytonic Greek were actually used in real Greek, and which were the inventions of later scholars to aid in reading?

Cerberus

Uhh...

What is real Greek, and what is later?

KitFox

grumbles @aedia would have had an orgy with me.

Cerberus

I think they were invented in the Roman age.

Or possibly Alexandrian.

In any case not before 300.

tchrist

@Cerberus Sorry. I mean in texts written then — the autographs, as it were — versus those written now of old stuff. New copies.

Cerberus

Well, that depends on the writer.

Homer didn't write at all.

If he existed.

In Plato's time, no accents were written yet.

At some point people started adding written accents, when they copied older writers.

tchrist

01:18

Ahah.

Cerberus

> standard polytonic orthography (invented in the Hellenistic age, but not adopted universally until Byzantine times)

I think the spiritus are a bit older.

tchrist

I always got the idea that it was perceived as more legit than the macrons later writers used for Latin.

Cerberus

Possibly introduced by the time they stopped writing H for /h/? Which again was probably not long before H came to be used for long open e (and omega for l.o. o).

@tchrist Those macrons are just for dictionaries.

tchrist

That’s what I thought.

Cerberus

Probably 19th century or so.

tchrist

01:21

The Romans wrote grammar books, no?

So they must have spelt out which inflections had long vowels, I would think.

Or maybe they thought it was too obvious?

Cerberus

From the Renaissance onwards, however, they did use some sort of accent-like diacritic in some Latin prints, presumably to indicate long vowels, but I never understood when or why, because they were often used when there could be no doubt at all, and when the vowel was in fact short. Perhaps they didn't know any better.

@tchrist They did, but they just said so, without any special notations, so far as I know. At least no universally accepted ones.

Or at least none that have survived the Middle Ages.

tchrist

Pericles. Well, Thucydides, at least.

5th century, negative.

Of course, that is a modern rendering.

Cerberus

Actually, I think those Latin diacritics I mentioned were used later than the Renaissance, I don't know when that started. S.XVI? S.XIX?

@tchrist Yes, what about it?

tchrist

You know I am probably the only one in this chat who would understand that abbreviation. :)

Cerberus

I did that for your entertainment.

And for convenience.

tchrist

01:26

So when Thucydides wrote that, he probably did not use all those doodlemarks?

Cerberus

Certainly not.

Possibly spiritus, but I doubt it. It also varied greatly, no doubt. One manuscript was different from the next, depending on the tradition of the scribe.

tchrist

Which? Asper or lenis?

Cerberus

I don't know.

tchrist

Yes, all the old mss were each unique unto themselves.

Cerberus

By the way, I think minuscles were quite recent anyway.

Probably also Roman era.

tchrist

01:29

9–10th.

Greek minuscule

The minuscule script was a writing style in the history of Greek writing which was used as a book hand in Byzantine manuscripts since the 9th and 10th centuries. It replaced the earlier style of uncial writing, from which it differed in using smaller, more rounded and more connected letter forms, and in using a large number of ligatures. Many of these forms had previously developed as parts of more informal cursive writing. The basic letter shapes used in the minuscule script were the ancestors of modern lower case Greek letters. From the 10th century onwards, most Byzantine manuscripts ...

I always think of majusules as big blocky things fit for inscriptions on monuments more than I think them fit for handwriting.

Chiselled, not penned.

The chancery ligatures are so cute.

Cerberus

This is what Greek looked like in 340 BC.

tchrist

That’s a lot more legible than the blackletter-like mimnimimimmuunum stuff.

Cerberus

Uhuh.

tchrist

George Douros has made some fonts specifically to look like that.

Cerberus

But no doubt they used other, less legible hands in less formal genres...

This is during the Roman Empire.

tchrist

01:39

Still not so bad. So what happened during medieval times that the hands all got so awful?

Anaktoria:

Cerberus

They never got extremely awful in book script, I think; it's just that we are beginning to have manuscripts in cursive from the Middle Ages, probably.

tchrist

Analecta:

Cerberus

Uhh...

JSBձոգչ

@tchrist roman cursives were pretty bad, too

it's just that we have fewer exemplars of them

tchrist

Yes, I know.

Those fonts are from here.

If you get the zipballs, there are READMEs that say what each was made for/from.

They are all completely free, but quite well done.

JSBձոգչ

01:48

i do find it interesting that ancient greek and roman are still completely legible to someone familiar with their modern forms

while hebrew generally is not

altho... actually let me check my dates

RainbowHat

An active and smart developer
Any alternative to this? Developer in the sense of software development. I need something that feels more powerful. Thanks in advance

tchrist

@JSBձոգչ Are they?

You mean the glyphs?

JSBձոգչ

the glyphs, yes

tchrist

¡MOAR POWAH!

Well, that’s because we still use them. Try Phoenician.

JSBձոգչ

having learned how to read latin and greek in their modern typeset forms, i can read ancient mss pretty easily

that's what i find remarkable

cornbread ninja

01:52

@KitFox do you call a milkshake a frap?

RainbowHat

...

tchrist

And yet the language itself has so changed. Pick any language you know, any language at all. Now compare its current form with its form from a mere 1,000 years ago.

simchona

I just reported a bunch of my posts on this latest scraper

8

Q: http://english.seeore.com/ scraping EL&U content

The site http://english.seeore.com/ appears to be reposing a lot of EL&U content plastered with ads (5,047 posts at time of writing). I can't see any proper attribution, other than this footer which is probably just scraped and points back to them anyway: Welcome to http://english.seeore....

discussion copyrights

Hopefully we can maneuver another full takedown.

tchrist

I saw that.

Reported to whom?

simchona

Google. They run Blogger.

tchrist

01:53

Oh. ok.

simchona

@tchrist You can go here to file.

tchrist

@RainbowHat No comment.

simchona

@RainbowHat Be polite. You can't just barge in and expect your wishes to be granted.

RainbowHat

ok

boo

JSBձոգչ

@tchrist oh, i didn't mean that. it would be silly to claim that you could read latin based on knowing french.

tchrist

01:54

@JSBձոգչ heh. :)

JSBձոգչ

anyway, i take back what i said about hebrew. it turns out that the dead sea scrolls have very modern letter-shapes

Cerberus

@JSBձոգչ That is because we had two Renaissances.

Even book script drifted away in between.

JSBձոգչ

@Cerberus what does that have to do with it?

KitFox

@cornbreadninja frappe Not usually.

Cerberus

@JSBձոգչ What was perceived as true Roman script was revived during each Renaissance.

JSBձոգչ

01:56

interesting

Cerberus

And capitals usually survive for much longer on their own because of inscriptions visible to all.

I think.

Although cursive capitals are the worst of all.

You will pray for cursive minuscles.

JSBձոգչ

off-topic, but i was pleased and surprised to find that i got a gold badge on cooking.se, despite the fact that i have only ~300 total rep there

Cerberus

For example, Merovingian and 16th-century cursive are among the hardest scripts, just before the Carolingian and Humanist Renaissances, resp.

KitFox

Oh sure. Now everyone shows up for the orgy.

I'm done wiring now.

simchona

@KitFox Better late than never

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

01:58

orgy?

KitFox

Actually, for orgies, you really don't want to show up at the end.

Cerberus

@JSBձոգչ Someone probably looked at those when modern Hebrew print was designed in the 16th century or so.

tchrist

@KitFox ’Pends whose end. :)

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@KitFox depends on what you're there for. Incriminating photos, say.

Cerberus

Or, well, the Dead Sea Scrolls probably remained undiscovered in the 16th century.

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