3 ms·
At first I thought the author had inadvertently let some typos slip through, and that slightly annoyed me. Then I realized on further reading that the author wa
by RyanMcGreal 16y ago
At first I thought the author had inadvertently let some typos slip through, and that slightly annoyed me. Then I realized on further reading that the author was deliberately using third-person pronoun neologisms, and that seriously annoyed me.
- roel_v 16y agoDo you mean as in "Ask any five year old child, and ey can tell you that death is bad." ? I've only ever seen it in this post and I figured it were a couple of typos, or a CMS eating 'th' for some reason.
- sesqu 16y agoI assumed it was a parser eating the code point for a dental fricative, added in some misguided attempt to re-introduce ligatures at the data level. Pronoun neologisms never occurred to me. It seems there's real harm in knowing about useless things.
- roel_v 16y agoOk so you got me curious :) since I only know ligatures as, in my simple understanding, two glyphs that are joined together for typographic (visual) purposes. Googling 'dental fricative', that seems to be about phonetic spelling. Would you mind explaining? Is the unicode code point for a 'dental fricative' the same as the bytes of t and h in succession? How does the ligature fit in?
- sesqu 16y agoI can't properly explain something I was wrong about. But yes, "dental fricative" is the "th" sound made by pressing your tongue against your teeth. An example would be the sound in "teeth", written "ti:θ" with the international phonetic alphabet. I assumed someone had read about how, say, "the" was once written "þe" and gone off to restore the usage, as certain people are wont to do. Except that would be overly confusing, so I further assumed that what they found was instead a ligature, a combination of two letters for mostly shorthand and visual purposes, here for the digraph "th". Turns out that there is no such unicode code point - the visually closest thing I can find is ᵺ, and as seen above, it's not even a symbol for the fricative.
- loewenskind 16y agoBizarrely, the first one really stood out for me (I came to the conclusion you did) but I didn't notice it anymore after that.
- cruise02 16y agoI just started reading it in a Cockney accent and it turned out fine. ;)
- pjscott 16y agoI just figured that the author was winking while being partially serious, and it turned out fine.