Hello Alex, On 1/8/21 12:36 PM, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote: > > On 1/8/21 11:29 AM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote: >> Hi Alex, >> >> On 1/7/21 5:55 PM, Alejandro Colomar wrote: >>> Signed-off-by: Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@xxxxxxxxx> >> >> Take a look at >> >> https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=acknowledgment%2Cacknowledgement&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=5&smoothing=3 >> >> and compare American English vs British English using the drop-down. >> >> When I inherited man-pages in 2004, it was a hodge-podge mix of >> American vs British spelling. My native spelling is the latter, >> but I value consistency and felt that things needed to be >> standardized on one or other, and in computing, American is the >> norm so that is what I settled on.hodge-podge >> >> I'm largely at piece with American spelling these days (it >> is the spelling I use in most of my writing), but I guess >> the one point that still bothers me are the American spellings >> "acknowledgment" and "judgment". They just feel wrong. > > Yup > >> >> However, I now learned from the Ngrams that even in British >> English, the spelling without "e" was historically the norm. >> So it seems that it is British English that has changed, >> not American English! >> >> I was about to say that I must decline this patch. And then >> I thought I'd take a look at the POSIX standard. It seems >> to largely follow American spelling (e.g., "color", "canceled", >> "recognize", "analog").[1] But, it uses "acknowledgement"! >> (There are even a couple of instances of "judgement" in >> the standard.) It seems like others like to have the >> extra "e' in those words... >> >> So, I'm not sure what to do with this patch. > > Hey Michael, > > D'oh, I thought it was a typo! :-) > > American English surprises me. > > Yes I prefer American English, but I've also learn_ed_ British at > school, (and learnt American through the internet), so I have a weird > hodge-podge in my head too :p > > I guess many people though it was a typo from the data you put. Also see: > > $ grep -r acknowledgement \ > |wc -l; > grep: man7/.hostname.7.swp: binary file matches > 69 > $ grep -r acknowledgment \ > |wc -l; > 23 Okay -- this gets weirder and weirder. Look more closely at what the grep found. Those instances of 'acknowledgement' are almost all in the page comments containing BSD licenses! I thought to myself, that's strange: because BSD is from California... Maybe some enthusiastic person did a global edit in the distant past to change this to British spelling in the Linux manual pages. But, it doesn't seem that way. I grepped a few thousand header files that I've assembled over the years from various OSes, and in the BSD licenses, the vast majority use 'acknowledgement'. A few use 'acknowledgment', but I suspect that those were changed after importing from other places. It seems that the underground spelling resistance was strong at Berkeley. > Nevertheless, I prefer American too, so I'd invert the patch. > What about s/acknowledgement/acknowledgment/? So, I still don't know what to do. I never much liked the "American" "*dgment", but: (1) That seems to have been the historical form that British English moved away from. (2) A couple of "American" groups (BSD, POSIX) use the "British" spelling. Cheers, Michael PS I want to join the spelling resistance :-) -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/
