Re: Article on Finno-Ugric in the Economist


Ar an t-ochtú lá is fiche de mí na Nollaig, scríobh Jukka K. Korpela:

> > > Which UK,
> >
> > The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
>
> And who has the authority to speak for her?

The government of a country has the authority to speak for that country in
many capacities, but that’s mostly irrelevant here, because I said “The UK
took up [this] convention three decades ago” and as I cited, it was Her
Majesty’s Government that took up the convention. As such, “the UK” means
the same thing as it does in:

“The Foreign Secretary says the UK has to show some flexibility in budget
negotiations [...]” -- from http://www.fco.gov.uk/

“The UK has several overseas territories, including Gibraltar and the
Falkland Islands [...]” -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom

“The UK has made spam a criminal offence to try to stop the flood of
unsolicited messages.” -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3120628.stm

> > > which convention?
> >
> > The US convention for numbers in the billions and trillions.
>
> Really? Yet you wrote about the other convention (dashes).

I wrote about two conventions in two separate paragraphs; I do beg your
pardon if you found that confusing.

> > [...] in 1974 [...] Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced to the
> > House of Commons that the meaning of "billion" in papers concerning
> > Government statistics would thenceforth be 10^9, in conformity with U.S.
> > usage.
>
> Usage in papers concerning Government statistics covers about one
> thousandth (or less) of all English language used in the UK. What about
> the rest?

Journalism and finance use the “billion” = ten to the ninth convention. The
number of fields that have a need to describe the concept often is not
large, but my 1999 Oxford Duden English-German dictionary gives the
definition for the English word as so, where „die Billion“ is ten to the
twelfth and „die Milliarde“ is ten to the ninth:

billion /ˈbɪljən/ n. -> 1352 A (thousand million) Milliarde, die; B
(esp. Brit. dated: million million) Billion, die

The table of numerals in English on page 1352 to which it refers doesn’t
even list the ten to the twelfth convention. And while it describes American
English too, this dictionary is not biased towards it.

> > Despite this, the U.S. meaning is still rare outside journalism and
> > finance, [...]
>
> So even your source says that the UK adopted no such convention.

It doesn’t say any such thing.

> > > Sorry, but anyone who writes that an em dash has the width of "m"
> > > cannot be taken seriously in matters of dash usage.
> >
> > Or maybe he’s been exposed to different publishers ...
>
> Irrelevant. Either you know what you are writing about, or you don't.

And it seems that on this, you don’t.

> > Is it absolutely wrong to use ASCII quotation marks for a piece of
> > German text cited in English?
>
> What are you asking about? The quotation marks around a quotation belong
> to the language of the quoting document,

I regard them as a border between the two, and I don’t see a reason--beyond
typographic convenience--to prefer the language of the first document for
them.

Note also that ten years ago, citations in US books from English-language
sources that didn’t use US spelling conventions would be respelled without
a second thought, and vice versa. This is changing with more exposure to
typeset matter from the other tradition.

> [...] ASCII quotation marks are of course wrong in any case. If you are
> forced to use them due to technical limitations, you might be
> excused. Using _wrong_ dashes when you can use dashes is surely wrong,
> with no excuse.

It’s not surely wrong, when there is no universal convention for the
behaviour in question.

> It is even more wrong to use a dash without spaces around it when
> purportedly presenting a verbatim quote of a text in a language that
> never uses and never used a punctuation dash that way.

If it’s conformant to house style, and there’s no more universally accepted
convention, then it can’t be ‘wrong.’ This is not mathematics.

> [...] "Shall" means "shall" unless specified otherwise. In this case, it
> is a matter of a norm of civilized language. You either quote the
> original, or you present some translation. Using something in between,
> like original text with messed-up punctuation or orthography, is just
> barbaric. Quoting sources that violate such principles proves nothing.

Well, sufficent sources would ideally prove that your stated norm for
civilised language isn’t observed in actuality, and as such the entire world
(less Peter T. Daniels’ WWS, of course) is barbaric in your view. Such a
perspective is not optimal for winning arguments.

--
I AM IN JAIL AND ALLOWED SEND ONLY ONE CABLE SINCE WAS ARRESTED WHILE
MEASURING FIFTEEN FOOT WALL OUTSIDE PALACE AND HAVE JUST FINISHED COUNTING
THIRTY EIGHT THOUSAND FIVE HUNDERED TWENTY TWO NAMES WHOS WHO IN MIDEAST.
.

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