On 1/8/21 2:23 PM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote: > 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 :-) Hello Michael, That made me think about it again, and well, a language isn't what books say, but what people actually use. That's something I learnt from the Catalan language, which some institutions constantly try to normalize differently than common usage, and it's weird, very very weird. So, if most people use *dgement, I'd say the word is correctly spelled *dgement. But we need a common spelling, because I was searching in vim for the word, and it was very weird because I knew the word was there, but it didn't show it to me. I had to manually move to the line to see that it was written differently, on the same page! :/ So I hereby insist on my initial patch :-} Cheers, Alex -- Alejandro Colomar Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/
