25 years ago I got a lesson in algorithmic cruelty when I wrote the tech support system for the accounting system I was helping to support.
I automatically assigned user IDs for everyone in the office - consisting of the first three letter of the user’s first name, and the first three letters of their last.
Cathy Poole was not impressed.
Yeah but it’s half francophilia and half xenophobia, taking into account the recent mass migration of war refugees.
Languages change. I love the subject so I can go on and on about it for hours.
When I read Spanish it looks and feels like wrong Portuguese, words full of orthography mistakes, drives me crazy. The whole language is ladden with false cognates.
French is another kind of Roman language and I can feel more or less the time passed since it branched, because there’s a lot of words that look and feel like Portuguese from 200 years ago, words that my great grandmother would use. One example that can be translated into English: “fornicate” meaning have sex. This is a very unusual and old verb to us. If someone said “I want to fornicate with you” I would probably roll away on the floor laughing myself to tears. But the French have a slang derived from it. “Niquer”. Means basically to nail someone.
Now off to work I go!
Not All Anything.
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