Re: Arabo-Romance (was Re: Arabic transliteration)

Christophe Grandsire scripsit:

> Well, 'azucar' is one of those nouns that can be indifferently masculine or
> feminine in Spanish. 'El azucar blanco'/'la azucar blanca' are both equally
> possible.
But in consecutive sentences???!?

Anyhow, I find just about as many hits for "el azucar blanco" as "el
azucar blanca", with "la azucar blanca" rarer.  However, "la azucar
blanco" seems to be unknown, thank Mung.

> Suspiciously Dutch (or Frisian?) name (actually, I know a few Dijkstra at the
> laboratory ;) ). Who was this person?
One of the great computer scientists of the 20th century.  He is probably
best known for "Dijkstra's algorithm", a method of finding the shortest
path between every pair of points in a graph with arbitrary costs attached
to each edge of the graph.  The name is Frisian but E.D. seemingly was
thoroughly Dutchified.  I have two other .sig quotes from him, see below.

> By the way, if I did only what only I can do, I would have rather empty
> days :))) .
The original context was advice to a student in search of a thesis.

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com
"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own
skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among
other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague."  --Edsger Dijkstra

--
De plichten van een docent zijn divers,         John Cowan
die van het gehoor ook.                         jcowan@reutershealth.com
      --Edsger Dijkstra                         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan