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Having dæmon instead of daemon in the article makes my blood boil a little, but I managed to push through. The ligature has no place in writing about computer d
by boxfire 11y ago
Having dæmon instead of daemon in the article makes my blood boil a little, but I managed to push through. The ligature has no place in writing about computer daemons. It might apply if we were having a talk about medieval literature regarding demons.
- jfb 11y agoIt's like "virii" or "octopi" or other hypercorrect mistakes. EDIT: "viruses" and "octopuses", please. Maybe possibly potentially "octopodes."
- Dylan16807 11y agoIt's a historical spelling, not misapplying a grammatical rule outside of its scope. I don't see the resemblance.
- jfb 11y agoIt's a mistake from hypercorrection. It's not a historical spelling, it's a misspelling.
- Dylan16807 11y ago>It's not a historical spelling If you don't accept online evidence, will you accept a picture of a dictionary from 1933 listing it as a valid spelling?
- jfb 11y agoIt's a new coinage, after the ae ligature had fallen into disuse. Would you expect that "browser" should be spelled "browƒer"?
- Dylan16807 11y agoUh, that's a font choice, so yes you can do that.
- anyfoo 11y agoIt is not just a font choice, it is a different set of characters that share some connection. The same way as you can't just spell any german word that contains digraphs for Umlauts with the actual Umlauts. I made the "Oehler"/"Öhler" example above. People who are named Oehler would probably be pretty annoyed at your insistence to spell their name wrong, just like people here are annoyed at your spelling of daemon. I assume you do not come from a country which has an extended latin alphabet? In Germany for example, it is pretty common to clarify how to spell such names on the phone, like saying "Mueller with U-E". If that would be a font choice, this would not be an issue.
- Dylan16807 11y agoLong s is the same character as short s. OE and Ö are not the same character. æ is a ligature in some contexts, and its own letter in others. None of which matters to the original question.
- kuschku 11y agoſ and s is not the same character – in some languages at some times, it was used to mark a sharper s. Combined with the z, from ſz came ß later.
- jfb 11y agoConceded. I still think the ae ligature in "Unix daemon" is a misspelling or usage failure.
- anyfoo 11y agoThere were no operating system daemons in 1933. You are proving the wrong thing, namely that the ligature is a valid way to spell a mythological daemon.
- stephengillie 11y agoThe videogame Natural Selection introduced fictional alien monsters, among them the "Onos", which resembles an elephant with the head of a rhinoceros. There were many debates about how to pluralize this - both "Onoses" and "Onii" feel improper.
- anyfoo 11y agoYeah, it's an attempt at being overly correct where it is, in fact, not correct. It's a little bit comparable to taking a german name like "Oehler" and writing it "Öhler", because you realize that "Oe" is a digraph for "Ö" (and the name's pronunciation matches that), when in fact the name "Oehler" is written as "Oehler". For exactly the same reason you might be tempted to write daemon as "dämon" because, again, digraph and pronunciation match, and the german word Dämon is actually correct, yet it still wouldn't be right to do that for what is known as a "daemon" in operating systems.
- Dylan16807 11y ago>Until the early twentieth century, the œ and æ ligatures had been commonly used to indicate an etymological connection with Latin or Greek. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_that_may_be_spelled_with_a_ligature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_that_may_be_spel... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/daemon https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/daemon https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/d%C3%A6mon https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/d%C3%A6mon Can you provide a solid source so I can fix all of this apparently-wrong information?
- anyfoo 11y agoThe word for computer "daemon" has an etymological connection to the daemon you are linking to here, it does not mean that it is the same word.
- Dylan16807 11y agoWhen you take an existing word and add a trade-specific meaning, you are not creating a new word.
- anyfoo 11y agoIf that were the true, Etymology itself would be meaningless, because words coming from other words would be considered "the same".
- anyfoo 11y agoIf that were the true, Etymology itself would be meaningless, because words coming from other words would be considered "the same".
- geofft 11y agoYes, but the spellings valid in the trade context may differ from the spellings valid for the other meanings of the word. Consider "dialog" vs. "dialogue", or "disc" vs. "disk" (which have different connotations for the two spellings).
- corysama 11y ago
- dingaling 11y ago> The ligature has no place in writing about computer daemons. Surely we only write the simplified 'daemon' because for several decades mass-market typesetting was too limited to handle the ligature? Under the covers, if you will, it has always had æ in it but the UI was unable to render it. Pedantically we should still all write encyclopædia but it fell out of custom in casual use because of the awkwardness of typing it.