Re: Is Unicode character a vowel?
"Joseph M. Newcomer" <newcomer@flounder.com> wrote in message
news:vc64431n1lj2vuku9b5a1lumq468m246k9@4ax.com...
...
Pittsburgh is noted for its own local jargon, largely unintelligible to
visitors from
anywhere else in the U.S. A common Pittsburgh contraction is to drop the
"to be" in
passive voice
the windows need washed
instead of
the windows need to be washed
It's an oddity that our small island has a much wider variety of Englishes
than the enormous USA and we have a lot of strange dialectical idioms -
though I must admit I didn't know that one. A lot of it goes back to
differences between the ancient Anglo Saxon kingdoms: Wessex, Mercia,
Northumbria,... and the fact that printing "standardised" on the one where
the printing press was set up, but didn't eliminate the others :-) [Eg my
father in law still says "up-over" for "upwards" - essentially the same as
the modern Norwegian word and a pure viking import into Northumbria.]
The teaching of English has now matured here somewhat. Kids are taught that
there is nothing wrong with their dialect for communication between
themselves, but that for success in the wider world they have to master
Standard English and know when to use it. [UK Standard English is slightly
different from US Standard English of course.] Furthermore the "Standard"
is nothing to do with pronunciation - just grammar and vocabulary.
("Received pronunciation" is definitely on the way out as a social
necessity - I cringe when I hear BBC broadcasts from the 1950s.)
OTOH, "zu dem" => "zum" and that set of rules usually confuses people
learning German, and
the idiomatic speech of Germany can be quite unintelligible to someone who
didn't grow up
there. And I was completely confused in Bavaria, which has a different
set of
pronounciations from, say Berlin (or American textbooks!)
Having learned German in Zurich, a Bavarian accent is easier than many for
me :-)
American English has a huge number of bizarre grammatical constructs in
common use that
make grade-school English teachers either apoplectic, or, for the more
sensitive ones,
simply cause them to faint dead away. Of course, we'd never actually
TEACH these to
someone wanting to learn the language, but they are genuine artifacts of
the language as
spoken by a significant number of people.
Sometimes these days I have to concentrate to follow US films :-)
There are a particularly horrible set of programming idioms in common use,
most stemming
back to K&R and the rather primitved C compiler that was available on the
PDP-11. For
example, the tendency to put some indication of the name of the structure
in the field
names. This has not been necessary since sometime in the mid-1980s but
there are
programmers who still do it!
I'm not sure exactly what you mean but I may be one of the guilty ones (on
either of two scores).
1. I have never understood why MFC wizards write m_... for dialogue class
data members, but I still do it out of habit. It does have the advantage
that one recognises a member variable instantly. After a while I found
that to be so useful that I tend to do it with my own classes but with a
class-dependent prefix - eg
class SCORE
{
int sc_nStaveCount;
....
};
but I'm not 100% consistent between different classes. For me it makes
debugging easier.
2. I sometimes use a class name where it is not necessary. So with
class B : public A
{
};
In methods of B I will sometimes refer to
A::methodOfA()
just to remind myself where it comes from. [I use quite a lot of multiple
inheritance and sometimes many generations of inheritance and so this is a
useful aide memoire.]
Dave
--
David Webber
Author of 'Mozart the Music Processor'
http://www.mozart.co.uk
For discussion/support see
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