This Week in Google Alerts: story with Gaiman

Fernando Gouvea · 19 Feb 2011, 18:11 · from 2011-February.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: fqgouvea at colby.edu (Fernando Gouvea)
Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2011 13:11:53 -0500
Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: story with Gaiman
In-Reply-To: <4D5FEF67.5000408 at verizon.net>
References: <AANLkTim2PO7XbNhMCSNsQFD+G26dUtjo9jpXn+rZxbnj at mail.gmail.com><Pine.LNX.4.64.1102171746280.5118 at orpheus.qimr.edu.au>	<4D5FB71F.20309 at verizon.net>	<5181ED219FF74EF1BDB8C50887DD0D3C@jill>
	<4D5FEF67.5000408 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <4D6007E8.5010404 at colby.edu>

The same pun works in Portuguese, and probably in many other languages 
derived from Latin.

Fernando

On 2/19/2011 11:27 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
> ---Thea's story, to me, is proof that the language she speaks of is 
> English---although for all I know the same pun exists in other 
> Germanic/Latinate languages, and the only reason the actual word 
> "present" is used is that the book is published in English (the Star 
> Trek rule, in which all languages are presented as English). If that's 
> true, then the answer is not so clear and yet a little less important. 

-- 
=============================================================
Fernando Q. Gouvea                http://www.colby.edu/~fqgouvea
Carter Professor of Mathematics
Colby College
5836 Mayflower Hill               Editor, MAA Reviews
Waterville, ME 04901              http://www.maa.org/maareviews

HELP! MY TYPEWRITER IS BROKEN!
   -- E. E. CUMMINGS

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