Hi Michael, Ping! And now I noticed, while searching for this email: Debian uses "acknowledgement" too :p [ From: "Debian Bug Tracking System" <owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@xxxxxxxxx> Subject: Bug#978945: Acknowledgement (thunderbird: Message subwindow tilts (resizes in a loop)) ] Kind regards, Alex On 1/8/21 2:34 PM, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote: > 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/
