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I'm still a curmudgeon when it comes to "e-mail". It's electronic mail — just like e-book, e-signature, e-reader, e-ticket, e-file, e-learning, e-commerce, e-c

I'm still a curmudgeon when it comes to "e-mail". It's electronic mail — just like e-book, e-signature, e-reader, e-ticket, e-file, e-learning, e-commerce, e-check, and so on. The lowercase "e-" prefix is broadly used and has a particular meaning. The hyphen makes it read better, just like A-bomb, I-beam, O-ring, S-curve, U-turn, V-neck, or X-ray. Without the hyphen it looks like the stress should lean on the second syllable ("em-AIL"); "email" looks as awkward to read as "abomb", "ibeam", or "oring". I know the ship has long since sailed on "e-mail". But to put it simply, it feels better to me.

flowerbreeze 4y ago
I always write e-mail too. Perhaps because in my native language the word "email" means "enamel" and it feels like it would be a strange thing to send somebody.
- zestyping 4y ago
  Exactly, I think of enamel as well.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  So what are your words for 'mail', and 'electronic'? Shouldn't then 'e/mail', be literally translated to be the correct thing to send to somebody (in your language)?
  - rdlw 4y ago
    Welcome to speaking about technology in a language other than English! I know that in Icelandic, the Icelandic Language Council is proactive about coming up with equivalents for new words, but even there English words tend to sneak in if they're not fast enough or if their alternatives aren't well liked. In Polish, you have mejl for email, and spam for spam. The problem is, people who are on the cutting edge of technology just tend to use the most popular name for it, in this case the English name. So by the time that anyone is thinking about what it should be called in their language, the English term already has some momentum and it can be hard to change. Of course, language always evolves—it's not like anyone's worried that English borrowed too many words from French. But it's a little strange to speak a language during such a great influx of foreign words. E: I don't know what language GP speaks, but Polish Wikipedia says (unsourced, so, y'know) that listel and el-poczta were proposed for Polish ('list' means letter and 'poczta' means mail), but they were ultimately unsuccessful.
    - kergonath 4y ago
      Slightly off-topic, but > Of course, language always evolves—it's not like anyone's worried that English borrowed too many words from French. I’ve known some (English) people who very much are and go out of their way to use Germanic roots instead. When they can, because it’s hard to avoid using ~a third of your language’s vocabulary. When they cannot, they pretend it’s Norman anyway.
      - rdlw 4y ago
        I once said that nobody can distinguish between Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Normans living in Britain today and that no one claims to be one rather than the other, to which an English woman in my class responded "well, except the Neo-Nazis". I guess there will always be someone, even 900 years after the fact :) (Just to clarify, I don't mean to imply those people you know are like that, just something that I'm reminded of.)
        usrn 4y ago
        I can definitely tell them apart but I'm just to the left of the nazis.
yccs27 4y ago
To me, the omission of the hyphen represents a change in attitude towards e(-)mail: from "e-mail" as the electronic version of standard mail, to email as a digital communication channel in its own right.
staindk 4y ago
I must be younger than you. Have always thought 'email' just looks and feels better... but you make good points! Maybe it has something to do with frequency of use? "email"/"e-mail" must be used much more (and in more contexts - informal, formal, verbal, professional...) than the other examples you gave, so perhaps over time it was "slangified" and the hyphen dropped?
- bqmjjx0kac 4y ago
  I have slipped into calling email "mail" and real mail "snail mail".
- adamomada 4y ago
  If I were to make a bet I’d say it’s because e happens to be a vowel. It makes email look like a proper word. If it was instead fmail (for whatever reason) I think you’d still see a hyphen
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
    >If it was instead fmail (for whatever reason) I think you’d still see a hyphen I thing “gmail” is the counter example.
    - rdlw 4y ago
      That's not a natural word, it's a brand. In that case, of course Google decided to make Gmail look more like a word, because they want it to look natural when it's used. For it to be a counterexample, it would have to have occurred naturally at first and then lost the hyphen.
- rosmax_1337 4y ago
  Further on the topic of how words change: In swedish, we have lots of english loan words in our everyday vocabulary. (To the great dismay of some!) This has lead to the creation of the word "mejl", which comes from the swedish way of pronouncing email, where the "ai"-sound easily becomes a "ej"-sound, and later this has accentuated the prounciation of the word more and more. The word now is its own noun in our dictionary following the usual grammatical rules in swedish, for example: mejl - e-mail mejlet - the e-mail mejla - sending e-mail And it is also commonly used in compound words too. Like mejlkorg (e-mail bin), mejlkonversation (e-mail conversation), bluffmejl (hoax e-mail). I'm of the younger generation, and I quite like the way this works in swedish. "Mejl" to me seems like a thing in itself, rather than the two words electronic mail abbreviated.
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
Some compounds just seem to naturally shift from hyphen-separated to no separation. Just one facet of the evolution of language, its spelling, and the randomness at play. E-mail isn't necessarily any more deserving of a hyphen than words like permafrost or sitcom are. Why didn't they get hyphens? Who knows.
johnday 4y ago
I have some bad news for you about the common words "ebook" and "ecommerce", among others.
- zestyping 4y ago
  Remember eeePC? They were so ahead of the curve.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
> The hyphen makes it read better, Along the same lines, I wish the standard for using the / required a space before and after. second/syllable second / syllable I find the latter much easier on the eye, especially when copy is dense. It's easier to read the individual words and identify the / at the same time. Without the spaces adds processing overhead imho.
svat 4y ago
Donald Knuth prefers "email" without the hyphen [1], according to his webpage which dates back to 1997 or earlier [2]: > A note on email versus e-mail > Newly coined nonce words of English are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to write “non-zero” and “soft-ware” instead of “nonzero” and “software”; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling “e-mail”. Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now! The form “email” has been well established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course, “email” has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the Netherlands much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.) [1]: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/19970526031736/https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://web.archive.org/web/19970526031736/https://www-cs-fa...

flowerbreeze 4y ago

I always write e-mail too. Perhaps because in my native language the word "email" means "enamel" and it feels like it would be a strange thing to send somebody.

zestyping 4y ago
Exactly, I think of enamel as well.
InCityDreams 4y ago
So what are your words for 'mail', and 'electronic'? Shouldn't then 'e/mail', be literally translated to be the correct thing to send to somebody (in your language)?
- rdlw 4y ago
  Welcome to speaking about technology in a language other than English! I know that in Icelandic, the Icelandic Language Council is proactive about coming up with equivalents for new words, but even there English words tend to sneak in if they're not fast enough or if their alternatives aren't well liked. In Polish, you have mejl for email, and spam for spam. The problem is, people who are on the cutting edge of technology just tend to use the most popular name for it, in this case the English name. So by the time that anyone is thinking about what it should be called in their language, the English term already has some momentum and it can be hard to change. Of course, language always evolves—it's not like anyone's worried that English borrowed too many words from French. But it's a little strange to speak a language during such a great influx of foreign words. E: I don't know what language GP speaks, but Polish Wikipedia says (unsourced, so, y'know) that listel and el-poczta were proposed for Polish ('list' means letter and 'poczta' means mail), but they were ultimately unsuccessful.
  - kergonath 4y ago
    Slightly off-topic, but > Of course, language always evolves—it's not like anyone's worried that English borrowed too many words from French. I’ve known some (English) people who very much are and go out of their way to use Germanic roots instead. When they can, because it’s hard to avoid using ~a third of your language’s vocabulary. When they cannot, they pretend it’s Norman anyway.
    - rdlw 4y ago
      I once said that nobody can distinguish between Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Normans living in Britain today and that no one claims to be one rather than the other, to which an English woman in my class responded "well, except the Neo-Nazis". I guess there will always be someone, even 900 years after the fact :) (Just to clarify, I don't mean to imply those people you know are like that, just something that I'm reminded of.)
      - usrn 4y ago
        I can definitely tell them apart but I'm just to the left of the nazis.

yccs27 4y ago

To me, the omission of the hyphen represents a change in attitude towards e(-)mail: from "e-mail" as the electronic version of standard mail, to email as a digital communication channel in its own right.

staindk 4y ago

I must be younger than you. Have always thought 'email' just looks and feels better... but you make good points! Maybe it has something to do with frequency of use? "email"/"e-mail" must be used much more (and in more contexts - informal, formal, verbal, professional...) than the other examples you gave, so perhaps over time it was "slangified" and the hyphen dropped?

bqmjjx0kac 4y ago
I have slipped into calling email "mail" and real mail "snail mail".
adamomada 4y ago
If I were to make a bet I’d say it’s because e happens to be a vowel. It makes email look like a proper word. If it was instead fmail (for whatever reason) I think you’d still see a hyphen
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  >If it was instead fmail (for whatever reason) I think you’d still see a hyphen I thing “gmail” is the counter example.
  - rdlw 4y ago
    That's not a natural word, it's a brand. In that case, of course Google decided to make Gmail look more like a word, because they want it to look natural when it's used. For it to be a counterexample, it would have to have occurred naturally at first and then lost the hyphen.
rosmax_1337 4y ago
Further on the topic of how words change: In swedish, we have lots of english loan words in our everyday vocabulary. (To the great dismay of some!) This has lead to the creation of the word "mejl", which comes from the swedish way of pronouncing email, where the "ai"-sound easily becomes a "ej"-sound, and later this has accentuated the prounciation of the word more and more. The word now is its own noun in our dictionary following the usual grammatical rules in swedish, for example: mejl - e-mail mejlet - the e-mail mejla - sending e-mail And it is also commonly used in compound words too. Like mejlkorg (e-mail bin), mejlkonversation (e-mail conversation), bluffmejl (hoax e-mail). I'm of the younger generation, and I quite like the way this works in swedish. "Mejl" to me seems like a thing in itself, rather than the two words electronic mail abbreviated.

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

Some compounds just seem to naturally shift from hyphen-separated to no separation. Just one facet of the evolution of language, its spelling, and the randomness at play. E-mail isn't necessarily any more deserving of a hyphen than words like permafrost or sitcom are. Why didn't they get hyphens? Who knows.

johnday 4y ago

I have some bad news for you about the common words "ebook" and "ecommerce", among others.

zestyping 4y ago
Remember eeePC? They were so ahead of the curve.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

> The hyphen makes it read better, Along the same lines, I wish the standard for using the / required a space before and after. second/syllable second / syllable I find the latter much easier on the eye, especially when copy is dense. It's easier to read the individual words and identify the / at the same time. Without the spaces adds processing overhead imho.

svat 4y ago

Donald Knuth prefers "email" without the hyphen [1], according to his webpage which dates back to 1997 or earlier [2]: > A note on email versus e-mail > Newly coined nonce words of English are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to write “non-zero” and “soft-ware” instead of “nonzero” and “software”; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling “e-mail”. Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now! The form “email” has been well established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course, “email” has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the Netherlands much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.) [1]: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/19970526031736/https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://web.archive.org/web/19970526031736/https://www-cs-fa...