@PauloCereda That's a "pronunciation" issue. Very few Latin-based languages have strong consonants like Italian; I'd say that "caro" and "carro" in Spanish differ for the sound of the "r" (they are different phonemes), while in Italian the differ only for the intensity of the "r" (same phoneme). What about the difference in Portuguese?
Internet is really awesome at establishing communication between people. I doubt anyone 20 years ago would expect to ask a question on a public website and get an answer from, say, Peter Shor.
@egreg hm interesting, I think Portuguese is similar to Spanish. "rr" is a "strong r", like in "carro". A single "r" in the beginning of a word also sounds like "rr", like in "rosa". Now, when it is in the middle, it sounds like in "caro".
In case it matters I am using TeXnicCenter with miktex, LaTeX => PDF configuration.
If I do the following:
\includegraphics[scale=0.08]{figure.png}
I get a PDF which looks fine in Adobe Reader. And when the cursor is over the image, it becomes a cross. Selecting it the image is highligh...
@egreg Yes, that's correct, at least between vowels. In Brazilian Portuguese, the orthographic 'r' is also pronounced like the 'rr' in many contexts, but never as a geminate (what you are calling 'strong') consonant.
To continue bragging about interesting reps, my rep is 4096 = 2^12 now. It will take me a while to reach the nearest perfect number from this point, though!
@Raphink Clue's in the name: Normans ... North mans. They weren't French (ie not Franks) but were from Viking stock. They'd only been in modern-day France a couple of generations before they hopped over the channel to smash the English. So we were never conquered by the French, but by the Vikings. Again. And again. And again.
@AndrewStacey But they spoke French, not any Scandinavian language. (Although it was plausibly the earlier battle at Stamford Bridge against the King Harald's Norwegians that contributed to the loss at Hastings.)
@AlanMunn Well, you're the expert in languages. I thought that "geminate" would not suggest much to a Portuguese speaking guy: we hear them all the time, they don't. Actually in my region we don't really use geminate consonants: our dialect doesn't have them and many people use them almost at random when they try speaking good Italian.
@AlanMunn I have no idea what they spoke, and certainly many French words entered the English language around about this point, but they were still of Scandinavian origin and only a couple of generations at that.
@egreg That's interesting,(although not terribly surprising) that there are some dialects without geminates. I remember the first time I was in Italy being chastised for not putting the geminate in "freddo" (even though there's no non-geminate competing word.) BTW, I wasn't trying to correct your use of 'strong', but just to add the linguistic term to the conversation.
@AndrewStacey Just like the Americans of the 1830s are really British :-).
@AlanMunn At my most pedantic, I'd say that these aren't comparable. If we're talking about the modern American (as opposed to native Americans) then they didn't exist until the Brits (and others) became them. So you could say that as soon as the Europeans landed and settled in America then they became Americans. But there was a tribe living in modern-day France that have a strong claim to be called "The French", namely the Franks, and the Normans were most definitely Not Them.
I mean, "living in the place which nowadays we call France". That sentence got a bit convoluted.
@AndrewStacey I'll take you at your least pedantic, if you don't mind. It's certainly true that the Normans came to France from Scandinavia, and were distinct from the Franks. Whether they are still Vikings is by the time of the Norman invasion is certainly debatable. That's why I raised the issue of their language, which, although influenced by Old Norse, is largely French, not Scandinavian.
Speaking of French words brought to the English language: The History of English in 10 minutes, part 2: http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/english-language/the-history-english-ten-minutes?track=ae050bd400
@AlanMunn 11 is clearly palindromic. So n is palindromic in base n – 1; this accounts for the case when n > 2; but 0, 1 and 2 are clearly palindromic in base 10. :) Just one of those useless things mathematicians are fond of. :)
From reading Knuth's TeX Book (Chapter 14 How TeX Breaks Paragraphs into Lines), I understand that entire paragraphs are read in and then "massaged" by the "line-breaking algorithm" in an optimal way (p 91):
One of typesetting system's chief duties is to take long sequences of
words and to ...
@egreg I hadn't thought about the 11 case. Cute. I was mainly objecting to the single digits as palindromes idea, which although clearly reasonable, is intuitively unsatisfying.
@AlanMunn If one digit numbers are not allowed, then 0, 1 and 2 are not palindromic in any base.
Of course it's more interesting to know what is the minumum base such that a given number > 2 is palindromic. Now we know that such a base exists, so there's also the minimum one.
In case it matters I am using TeXnicCenter with miktex, LaTeX => PDF configuration.
If I do the following:
\includegraphics[scale=0.08]{figure.png}
I get a PDF which looks fine in Adobe Reader. And when the cursor is over the image, it becomes a cross. Selecting it the image is highligh...
From reading Knuth's TeX Book (Chapter 14 How TeX Breaks Paragraphs into Lines), I understand that entire paragraphs are read in and then "massaged" by the "line-breaking algorithm" in an optimal way (p 91):
One of typesetting system's chief duties is to take long sequences of
words and to ...
