[oclug] Save the Limited Computer Resources

[Andrew Hutton]

Actually, both Brits and Yanks spelled it Color originally, during a
"French influenced" languange revisal in the UK, they added the extra
letters to make the works more elegant sounding.

...now back home from the UK. :)

On Sat, Feb 24, 2001 at 10:17:28AM -0800, Francis Pinteric wrote:
> --- Vic Gedris <vic at worldwidepunk.com> wrote:
> > Francis,
> > 
> > You'd save precious bandwidth/typing time/storage/etc if you
> > spelled it
> > "programs" not "programmes".  ;-)
> > 
> 
> I admit that my grammar of late has been atrocious, but I still
> attempt to spell English words in English not in what passes for the
> language south of us. At the least the extra bandwidth serves the
> purpose of preserving the language, worth cause. If you really wanted
> to preserve bandwidth, we could all start conversing in Latin. That
> is a very elegant and concise language.
> 
> But, you remind me of a little bit of history. The reason why the
> American spelling of words is truncated in many cases has much to do
> with printing. When type was hand set, and even when the first
> machines began to appear to set type, page space was a valuable
> resource, and so was the time required to set the type. Why waste
> that resource on "extra" letters. So they now have colour being
> mispelled as color as so forth. A more recent abuse is night
> mispelled as nite. And of course, programme mispelled as program.
> 
> G. B. Shaw advocated scrapping the entire labourious and
> contradictory spelling of words and replacing it with a purely
> phonetic system much the way that Russian, Polish and the Slavic
> languages are. German, to some degree, is fairly phonetic but can get
> out of hand because new words can be constructed by stringing
> existing ones together. Swiss-German is the ultimate expression of
> that. English has had that property to some degree for centuries but
> the practice seems to have died out towards the end of the 19th
> century. (In fact, I'm currently reading a book called "The Grammar
> of Assent" by John Henry Cardinal Newman published in 1872. My God!
> I've forgotten how convoluted the English language used to be!)
> 
> Ave Linux, 
> 
> >>>--fja->
> 
> P.S. As always,I'm being facetious, since that seems to have been
> lost on many people on this list of late
> 
> =====
> There are no stupid questions, but there are a LOT of inquisitive idiots.
> 
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-- 
Andrew J. Hutton, 
Ottawa Linux Symposium, International Linux Developers Conference
http://www.linuxsymposium.org/    July 25th-28th, 2001