Re: YAC: Widse -- a conlang based on Ygyde

Tristan scripsit:

> Yes, but that doesn't explain why you have FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD
> (which are all open) compared with just Linux... It'd be perfectly
> logical if it were just BSDI and 386BSD, but it's not.
Ah, that's a different issue.  The trouble there is that the three
BSDs each claim to own the entire source code tree.  In Linux, there
is a separate layer of distro-makers who collect code from zillions of
separate trees, one for each separate program.

> A fork can only add anothers' improvements if it wants to. Linus doesn't
> want all of Gentoo's improvements when Gentoo make them, so there's
> going to be at least two forks.
I didn't know Gentoo hacked the kernel.  Changes to other programs
wouldn't matter to Linus, unlike the BSD teams, which want to approve
changes for every program.

> You yourself aren't innocent from deviations... unrounding rounded
> vowels indeed...
Only short ones.  Thus "hot" = [hAt], but "law" = [lO:], not [lA:] as many
Americans say it.

> What do you mean by the last one? If you have two characters that look
> the same and have the same historical origin, but (say) Japan says that
> there's two versions: one Chinese and the other Japanese? How can you
> distinguish between two identical charcters?
Japanese standards are only about Japanese characters, not Chinese ones.
But (e.g.) the JIS code sets include about five variants of "sword",
which are treated as distinct in Unicode because they are in JIS.
If Unicode unified away the distinction, it would be impossible to do
JIS > Unicode > JIS safely, which was considered a Bad Thing.

But a Japanese character can be unified with a Chinese one even if they
have slightly different forms due to divergent typographical traditions.
This means that to get the typographical tradition right, you have to
use Japanese-specific or Chinese-specific fonts.  (I say "typographical
tradition" rather than "language" because Japanese dictionaries that
present (old) Chinese quotations usually do so using a Japanese-style
font.)

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com
"In computer science, we stand on each other's feet."
        --Brian K. Reid