| Author |
Message |
Ross Howard
Guest
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 12:23 am
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning |
|
|
On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 17:37:24 +0100, "Matti Lamprhey"
<matti@official-totally-reversed.com> wrought:
| Quote: | "Ross Howard" <gguiri@yahoo.com> wrote...
"Matti Lamprhey" <matti@official-totally-reversed.com> wrought:
Perhaps I'm overimbued with the Elocutionary Principle.
The only problem with the Elocutionary Principle, is that if you apply
it you tend to end up with sentences as horribly mispunctuated as this
one.
That: begs the question.
|
To illustrate the point better than any contrived example could,
here's a fine example of the Pause School AKA the Elocutionary
Principle in action. (The author may understand singularities and
strings and things like nobody else alive, but his punctuation stinks
to high heaven.)
One can interpret these so called vacuum fluctuations, as
pairs of particles and anti particles, that suddenly appear
together, move apart, and then come back together again, and
annihilate each other. These particle anti particle pairs,
are said to be virtual, because one can not measure them
directly with a particle detector. However, one can observe
their effects indirectly. One way of doing this, is by what is
called the Casimir effect. One has two parallel metal plates,
a short distance apart. The plates act like mirrors for the
virtual particles and anti particles. This means that the
region between the plates, is a bit like an organ pipe, and
will only admit light waves of certain resonant frequencies.
-- Stephen Hawking (from a lecture on his website)
http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/warps3.html
--
Ross Howard |
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|
 |
Bob Cunningham
Guest
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 1:32 am
Post subject: Re: About that "too" |
|
|
On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 07:26:33 GMT, Jim Lawton
<usenet1@jimlawton.TAKEOUTinfo> said:
[...]
| Quote: | I'm afraid that the task was made very simple for time
clerks in those days.
|
I've never encountered the term "time clerk". I assume it's
the British equivalent of American "payroll clerk" (in the
days immediately preceding World War II anyway).
I know quite well how things were for a payroll clerk in
those days, because I was a payroll clerk in those days
(late 1930s; early 1940s; summer work while I was in high
school and full-time work for about a year after high
school). |
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Bob Cunningham
Guest
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 1:53 am
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning |
|
|
On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 17:42:46 +0100, "Matti Lamprhey"
<matti@official-totally-reversed.com> said:
| Quote: | "Bob Cunningham" <exw6sxq@earthlink.net> wrote...
"Matti Lamprhey" <matti@official-totally-reversed.com> said:
[...] Perhaps I'm overimbued with the Elocutionary Principle.
I don't know what you mean by "the Elocutionary Principle".
Does elocution have only one principle?
Hmmm ... When I Googlize it, I see "elecutionary principle"
appearing only at porn sites. What is Matti trying to tell
us?
I thought you must be joking about that until I tried it.
Amazing. Can anyone explain that?
|
I can't explain it, but I can hazard a guess that it arose
from a connection in someone's mind between "oral" and
"elocutionary".
| Quote: | (Bob's "elecutionary" was a typo, I assume.)
|
That assumption is spot on ... well, almost. When I started
to search for it, I typed it with the "e" and eventually
realized I was misspelling it. And I still typed it wrong
one of two times above. So, I guess it's a combination of
being a typo and resulting from the fact that I really want
to spell it that way.
It's probably because of the influence of "eloctronics" and
"eloctricity". |
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|
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Matti Lamprhey
Guest
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 2:00 am
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning |
|
|
"Ross Howard" <gguiri@yahoo.com> wrote...
| Quote: | "Matti Lamprhey" <matti@official-totally-reversed.com> wrought:
"Ross Howard" <gguiri@yahoo.com> wrote...
"Matti Lamprhey" <matti@official-totally-reversed.com> wrought:
Perhaps I'm overimbued with the Elocutionary Principle.
The only problem with the Elocutionary Principle, is that if you
apply it you tend to end up with sentences as horribly
mispunctuated as this one.
That: begs the question.
To illustrate the point better than any contrived example could,
here's a fine example of the Pause School AKA the Elocutionary
Principle in action. (The author may understand singularities and
strings and things like nobody else alive, but his punctuation stinks
to high heaven.)
One can interpret these so called vacuum fluctuations, as
pairs of particles and anti particles, that suddenly appear
together, move apart, and then come back together again, and
annihilate each other. These particle anti particle pairs,
are said to be virtual, because one can not measure them
directly with a particle detector. However, one can observe
their effects indirectly. One way of doing this, is by what is
called the Casimir effect. One has two parallel metal plates,
a short distance apart. The plates act like mirrors for the
virtual particles and anti particles. This means that the
region between the plates, is a bit like an organ pipe, and
will only admit light waves of certain resonant frequencies.
-- Stephen Hawking (from a lecture on his website)
http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/warps3.html
|
If you read that to yourself, pausing slightly at those commas, you are
guaranteed to understand (modulo Hawking) the stuff without needing
occasionally to backtrack. This means that there is much utility to
this style of punctuation, odd as it seems to us now. I confidently
predict that it will come back into fashion.
The fact, that the passage was transcribed from a lecture, is no
coincidence, I would submit.
Matti |
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Bob Cunningham
Guest
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 2:39 am
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning |
|
|
On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 19:24:58 +0200, trio@euronet.nl (Donna
Richoux) said:
| Quote: | Matti Lamprhey <matti@official-totally-reversed.com> wrote:
"Bob Cunningham" <exw6sxq@earthlink.net> wrote...
"Matti Lamprhey" <matti@official-totally-reversed.com> said:
[...] Perhaps I'm overimbued with the Elocutionary Principle.
I don't know what you mean by "the Elocutionary Principle".
Does elocution have only one principle?
Hmmm ... When I Googlize it, I see "elecutionary principle"
appearing only at porn sites. What is Matti trying to tell
us?
I thought you must be joking about that until I tried it. Amazing. Can
anyone explain that? (Bob's "elecutionary" was a typo, I assume.)
Oh, that mysterious word salad thing. I think the only genuine mention
of Elocutionary punctuation is a paragraph from the Encyclopedia
Britannica:
|
Saying "the only" is sorta like -- or maybe worse than --
saying "never" or "always", both of which experience has
shown to be best avoided in alt.usage.english.
| Quote: | Since the late 16th century the theory and practice
of punctuation have varied between two main schools
of thought: the elocutionary school, following late
medieval practice, treated points or stops as
indications of the pauses of various lengths that
might be observed by a reader, particularly when he
was reading aloud to an audience; the syntactical
school, which had won the argument by the end of the
17th century, saw them as something less arbitrary,
namely, as guides to the grammatical construction of
sentences. Pauses in speech and breaks in syntax
tend in any case to coincide; and although
English-speaking writers are now agreed that the
main purpose of punctuation is to clarify the
grammar of a text, they also require it to take
account of the speed and rhythm of actual speech.
|
Rumors of the death of elocutionary punctuation may be
greatly exaggerated. At http://tinyurl.com/95zm8 , or
http://www.id.iit.edu/visiblelanguage/VLCatalogueSearch/VLChronologicalTables/VolumeAbstracts25.html
, I reed the following:
======= Begin excerpt =======
Title: Intonation and the Comma Vol: 25.1
Author(s): Cruttenden, Alan
Abstract: A special issue of Visible Language (Winter
1978, 12:1) was devoted to the interface between reading and
listening. It is significant that, among the six articles in
that issue, there is no mention of punctuation or of
intonation. These two topics are among the least-studied
aspect of visual and auditory language. This article
represents an effort to explore one aspect of the
relationship between intonation and punctuation. The
historical developments of marks of punctuation is outlined,
and uses and prescriptions for the comma from the sixteenth
century onwards are described. Prescriptive recommendations
for the comma in the twentieth century are examined in
detail and compared with what is known about the division of
connected speech into intonation-groups. It is suggested
that, where syntactic prescription and intonational usage
conflict, a return to more elocutionary punctuation would in
many cases aid intelligibility.
======= End excerpt =======
And at
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:UMUoXjYFr6YJ:www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/tech-reports/1998/BU-CEIS-9812.ps++%22elocutionary+punctuation%22&hl=en
, or http://tinyurl.com/7wn2u , I reed the following:
======= Begin excerpt =======
Scholes and Willis [1990] recite an experiment where
university students, when asked to read a text aloud,
interpreted punctuation marks as elocutionary even when the
marks had other (semantic) effects.
======= End excerpt =======
I will continue to interpret commas as elocutionary in many
cases. |
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|
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R H Draney
Guest
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 2:46 am
Post subject: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web site |
|
|
Evan Kirshenbaum filted:
| Quote: |
You could hear it from there? Sigh. Let's try again.
You mean that people should be able to talk about
URL:http://www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm> and
URL:http://www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm.> or even
URL:http://www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm with spaces> without
those getting confused?
For what it's worth, my reader recognized them as links, but IE
couldn't figure out what to do with the resulting URLs.
|
Newsguy recognized all three as links, and in all three cases sent me to the
page described by the first...I can paste the URLs directly into the browser
(IE), and they all go to the right places...(the link *on* the third page,
however, goes back to the second; I suspect copied-and-not-modified HTML is
responsible)....r |
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|
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Evan Kirshenbaum
Guest
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 3:06 am
Post subject: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web site |
|
|
"Skitt" <skitt99@comcast.net> writes:
| Quote: | "Evan Kirshenbaum" wrote:
"Skitt" writes:
Yes, there are newsreaders that do not process clickable links
properly. Users of those should remove the colon, or whatever
closely follows the URL. My newsreader (OE) recognizes the true
URL, even with a colon or a parenthesis after it. I thought that
all of the more recent newsreaders did that, especially ones that
cost money.
Such newsreaders would have had an interesting time with a URL I
posted within the last couple of days, which ended in two colons.
Since I followed the standard and enclosed it in "<URL:" and ">", I
presume that any non-broken reader got it, but I gave the tinyurl
just to be sure.
If this the one you are referring to
http://tinyurl.com/27xa4
URL:http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2004/june9/
diaconis-69.html
then the carriage return after the last slash is what prevented proper
handling by OE.
|
No, it was
http://tinyurl.com/axcbt
<URL:http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?mussm:10:./
temp/~ammem_rdO6::>
without the breaks (which OE should ignore, the URL is
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?mussm:10:./temp/~ammem_rdO6::
which is a perfectly valid URL.
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |The skinny models whose main job is
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |to display clothes aren't hired for
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |their sex appeal. They're hired
|for their resemblance to a
kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com |coat-hanger.
(650)857-7572 | Peter Moylan
http://www.kirshenbaum.net/ |
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|
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Skitt
Guest
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 3:21 am
Post subject: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web site |
|
|
Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:
| Quote: | "Skitt" writes:
"Evan Kirshenbaum" wrote:
"Skitt" writes:
Yes, there are newsreaders that do not process clickable links
properly. Users of those should remove the colon, or whatever
closely follows the URL. My newsreader (OE) recognizes the true
URL, even with a colon or a parenthesis after it. I thought that
all of the more recent newsreaders did that, especially ones that
cost money.
Such newsreaders would have had an interesting time with a URL I
posted within the last couple of days, which ended in two colons.
Since I followed the standard and enclosed it in "<URL:" and ">", I
presume that any non-broken reader got it, but I gave the tinyurl
just to be sure.
If this the one you are referring to
http://tinyurl.com/27xa4
URL:http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2004/june9/
diaconis-69.html
then the carriage return after the last slash is what prevented
proper handling by OE.
No, it was
http://tinyurl.com/axcbt
URL:http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?mussm:10:./
temp/~ammem_rdO6::
without the breaks (which OE should ignore, the URL is
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?mussm:10:./temp/~ammem_rdO6::
|
OK, this is what I got:
Temporary file not found. Display failed.
The URL up in the address window was:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?mussm:10:./temp/~ammem_rdO6
| Quote: |
which is a perfectly valid URL.
|
Hmm. Adding the two colons at the end of the URL produced
Temporary file open error. Display failed.
I there supposed to be a file there?
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
www.geocities.com/opus731/ |
|
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|
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Evan Kirshenbaum
Guest
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 3:35 am
Post subject: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web site |
|
|
"Skitt" <skitt99@comcast.net> writes:
Well, there was when I posted my message. I guess that queries on the
Library of Congress site produce links that are only valid for a
certain length of time (hence the "temp" in the URL).
If you go to
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/mussmhtml/mussmhome.html
do a search, and select an item, you'll wind up on a page whose URL
ends with two colons. If you delete the colons, you'll get the
"Temporary file not found" error. If you put the colons back, you'll
get the page you were on before.
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |It does me no injury for my neighbor
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |to say there are twenty gods, or no
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |God.
| Thomas Jefferson
kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com
(650)857-7572
http://www.kirshenbaum.net/ |
|
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|
|
Robin Bignall
Guest
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 3:36 am
Post subject: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web site |
|
|
On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 11:01:32 -0700, "Skitt" <skitt99@comcast.net>
wrote:
| Quote: |
"Evan Kirshenbaum" wrote:
"Skitt" writes:
Yes, there are newsreaders that do not process clickable links
properly. Users of those should remove the colon, or whatever
closely follows the URL. My newsreader (OE) recognizes the true URL,
even with a colon or a parenthesis after it. I thought that all of
the more recent newsreaders did that, especially ones that cost
money.
Such newsreaders would have had an interesting time with a URL I
posted within the last couple of days, which ended in two colons.
Since I followed the standard and enclosed it in "<URL:" and ">", I
presume that any non-broken reader got it, but I gave the tinyurl just
to be sure.
If this the one you are referring to
http://tinyurl.com/27xa4
URL:http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2004/june9/
diaconis-69.html
then the carriage return after the last slash is what prevented proper
handling by OE.
|
Agent 3.1 has that same problem with the carriage return.
--
Robin
Hoddesdon, England |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Ross Howard
Guest
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 3:56 am
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning |
|
|
On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 21:00:55 +0100, "Matti Lamprhey"
<matti@official-totally-reversed.com> wrought:
| Quote: | "Ross Howard" <gguiri@yahoo.com> wrote...
"Matti Lamprhey" <matti@official-totally-reversed.com> wrought:
"Ross Howard" <gguiri@yahoo.com> wrote...
"Matti Lamprhey" <matti@official-totally-reversed.com> wrought:
Perhaps I'm overimbued with the Elocutionary Principle.
The only problem with the Elocutionary Principle, is that if you
apply it you tend to end up with sentences as horribly
mispunctuated as this one.
That: begs the question.
To illustrate the point better than any contrived example could,
here's a fine example of the Pause School AKA the Elocutionary
Principle in action. (The author may understand singularities and
strings and things like nobody else alive, but his punctuation stinks
to high heaven.)
One can interpret these so called vacuum fluctuations, as
pairs of particles and anti particles, that suddenly appear
together, move apart, and then come back together again, and
annihilate each other. These particle anti particle pairs,
are said to be virtual, because one can not measure them
directly with a particle detector. However, one can observe
their effects indirectly. One way of doing this, is by what is
called the Casimir effect. One has two parallel metal plates,
a short distance apart. The plates act like mirrors for the
virtual particles and anti particles. This means that the
region between the plates, is a bit like an organ pipe, and
will only admit light waves of certain resonant frequencies.
-- Stephen Hawking (from a lecture on his website)
http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/warps3.html
If you read that to yourself, pausing slightly at those commas, you are
guaranteed to understand (modulo Hawking) the stuff without needing
occasionally to backtrack. This means that there is much utility to
this style of punctuation, odd as it seems to us now. I confidently
predict that it will come back into fashion.
The fact, that the passage was transcribed from a lecture, is no
coincidence, I would submit.
|
Yabbut, isn't it the other way round -- a "transdict" rather than a
transcript? Mustn't he have written it first, so that his speech
synthesiser could then deliver the lecture?
--
Ross Howard |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Oliver Cromm
Guest
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 4:00 am
Post subject: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web site |
|
|
* Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:
| Quote: | URL:http//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm> and
URL:http//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm.> or even
URL:http//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm with spaces> without
|
and later:
| Quote: | URL:http://www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm> and
URL:http://www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm.> or even
URL:http://www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm with spaces> without
those getting confused?
For what it's worth, my reader recognized them as links, but IE
couldn't figure out what to do with the resulting URLs.
Interestingly, given another current thread, the error message I got
on the first was that it could't find
http://www.http.com//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm
It's best guess appears to have been that "http" must have been the
host name, and it tried adding both "www" and "com" (presumably when
"http" by itself didn't work).
|
Very interesting here, that the first set of links opened in IE instead
of my standard browser (Firefox) - apparently because the protocol
wasn't http, there was a fallback to a more general "open URL". You made
me wonder if I messed up my settings.
The error, though, with the first one, was that it could not find the
server for:
http://http//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm
So IE here didn't try to expand the "http" to a more likely domain name.
Whatever that behavior depends on.
When I copy the above link (without angle brackets and "URL:") into
Firefox' address bar, it brings me to http://www.spiegel.de.
Huh? YMWV. It's where you go when you type in "http//" (not "http") at
Google and click "I'm feeling lucky" - at least with my browser
(language) and Google settings.
--
People are more likely to change their religion
than change their writing system.
-- Charles Hockett, 1952 |
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Skitt
Guest
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 4:33 am
Post subject: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web site |
|
|
Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:
| Quote: | "Skitt" writes:
Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:
No, it was
http://tinyurl.com/axcbt
URL:http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?mussm:10:./
temp/~ammem_rdO6::
without the breaks (which OE should ignore, the URL is
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?mussm:10:./temp/~ammem_rdO6::
OK, this is what I got:
Temporary file not found. Display failed.
The URL up in the address window was:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?mussm:10:./temp/~ammem_rdO6
which is a perfectly valid URL.
Hmm. Adding the two colons at the end of the URL produced
Temporary file open error. Display failed.
I there supposed to be a file there?
Well, there was when I posted my message. I guess that queries on the
Library of Congress site produce links that are only valid for a
certain length of time (hence the "temp" in the URL).
If you go to
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/mussmhtml/mussmhome.html
do a search, and select an item, you'll wind up on a page whose URL
ends with two colons. If you delete the colons, you'll get the
"Temporary file not found" error. If you put the colons back, you'll
get the page you were on before.
|
OK, I tried. I couldn't find any addresses that had two colons at the end.
Many search results had them in the middle of extremely long URLs, though.
All links worked just fine.
I just realized that the URL you gave above with the two colons at the end
is only a small part of the actual URL, and everything after the two colons
got chopped off in your post. That is why there was no file to be found.
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
www.geocities.com/opus731/ |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
nancy13g
Guest
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 4:41 am
Post subject: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web site |
|
|
Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:
| Quote: | If you go to
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/mussmhtml/mussmhome.html
do a search, and select an item, you'll wind up on a page whose URL
ends with two colons. If you delete the colons, you'll get the
"Temporary file not found" error. If you put the colons back, you'll
get the page you were on before.
|
Actually, you can get there even if you only put back *one* colon.
Curiouser and curiouser. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Matti Lamprhey
Guest
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 5:40 am
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning |
|
|
"Ross Howard" <gguiri@yahoo.com> wrote...
| Quote: | "Matti Lamprhey" <matti@official-totally-reversed.com> wrought:
"Ross Howard" <gguiri@yahoo.com> wrote...
"Matti Lamprhey" <matti@official-totally-reversed.com> wrought:
"Ross Howard" <gguiri@yahoo.com> wrote...
"Matti Lamprhey" <matti@official-totally-reversed.com> wrought:
Perhaps I'm overimbued with the Elocutionary Principle.
The only problem with the Elocutionary Principle, is that if you
apply it you tend to end up with sentences as horribly
mispunctuated as this one.
That: begs the question.
To illustrate the point better than any contrived example could,
here's a fine example of the Pause School AKA the Elocutionary
Principle in action. (The author may understand singularities and
strings and things like nobody else alive, but his punctuation
stinks to high heaven.)
One can interpret these so called vacuum fluctuations, as
pairs of particles and anti particles, that suddenly appear
together, move apart, and then come back together again, and
annihilate each other. These particle anti particle pairs,
are said to be virtual, because one can not measure them
directly with a particle detector. However, one can observe
their effects indirectly. One way of doing this, is by what is
called the Casimir effect. One has two parallel metal plates,
a short distance apart. The plates act like mirrors for the
virtual particles and anti particles. This means that the
region between the plates, is a bit like an organ pipe, and
will only admit light waves of certain resonant frequencies.
-- Stephen Hawking (from a lecture on his website)
http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/warps3.html
If you read that to yourself, pausing slightly at those commas, you
are guaranteed to understand (modulo Hawking) the stuff without
needing occasionally to backtrack. This means that there is much
utility to this style of punctuation, odd as it seems to us now.
I confidently predict that it will come back into fashion.
The fact, that the passage was transcribed from a lecture, is no
coincidence, I would submit.
Yabbut, isn't it the other way round -- a "transdict" rather than a
transcript? Mustn't he have written it first, so that his speech
synthesiser could then deliver the lecture?
|
That seems likely; in which case he presumably added the commas to
ensure that the speech synthesizer paused at the appropriate places.
Matti |
|
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|
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