curlyquotes, character sets, livecode, and english

Richmond richmondmathewson at gmail.com
Sun May 26 14:41:37 EDT 2013


On 05/26/2013 09:26 PM, J. Landman Gay wrote:
> On 5/26/13 1:13 PM, Richmond wrote:
>> On 05/26/2013 08:30 PM, Dr. Hawkins wrote:
>>> There is no possibility of my application ever being used in an
>>> application
>>> other than English.
>>
>> Really?
>>
>>>
>>> For that matter, there is no possibility of it being used in a non-US
>>> country.
>>
>> Missouri German.
>>
>> Texas German.
>>
>> Amish Swiss German (steam-driven computer perhaps).
>>
>> Mexican Spanish.
>>
>> Louisiana French.
>>
>> Haight-Ashbury LSD-driven gobbledegook (pace Tom Sharp's "All Electric
>> Kool-Aid Acid Test - wow, that book really rocked my socks).
>>
>> Gullah.
>>
>> Yiddish.
>
> On the other hand, he's a US lawyer writing an app for other US 
> lawyers that concerns US law. If someone got through law school 
> speaking only Yiddish, they probably cheated. :)
>

What I really wanted to say was that a very large part of the U.S. 
population have other languages "lurking" in their backgrounds and may 
use words
which they believe to be English but might not be.

For instance, today  my wife was making some Tarator and asked me to nip 
down the stair to the garden for mint. So' slipping on my shoen, I went 
down the stair intil the garden and picked some mint and returned.

Now apart from the rather obvious Bulgarian word for that really 
fantastic yoghurt soup [ 
http://www.food.com/recipe/tarator-bulgarian-cold-cucumber-soup-62181 ]

there are 3 words there that, so my well-informed friends tell me are odd:

First, the word "stair" which my local well-meaning English friend tells 
me means what I mean when I say "step", and in English -English is used
in the plural (i.e. 'stairs') to mean what I mean by 'stair'.

Secondly, he had a problem with 'shoen' (well, to be direct, he didnae 
ken the vocable), and when I waved my baffies at him he got all hoity-toity
and said that those were 'shoes'.

Thirdly, the yob nearly punched me when I said 'intil' . . . anyway, you 
should get what I was ettlin eftir by now.

I don't know what is wrang with that jumped-up Englishman, as my 
Chambers English Dictionary has 'intil' as an English word.

Frankly the whole thing is mishugger!

Richmond.




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