Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?

António Pedro Marques · 23 May 2011, 22:10 · from 2011-May.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: entonio at gmail.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Ant=F3nio_Pedro_Marques?=)
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 23:10:49 +0100
Subject: (urth) Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?
In-Reply-To: <665285.78886.qm at web114714.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
References: <B542EE90-126D-4106-9484-A3287823FC32 at gmail.com>	<594643.67958.qm at web161819.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>	<BANLkTinRLkaUs099APsHvDrTHUx9Vw7GnQ at mail.gmail.com>	<4DDA4E15.8060102 at verizon.net>
	<665285.78886.qm at web114714.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4DDADB69.4060708 at gmail.com>

Jerry Friedman wrote:
> All I really wanted was to suggest that people not use "megatherians" to
> mean the alien monsters as if there were a consensus on the subject, and
> to point out a different speculation for those who were interested.  It's
> clear there isn't.

Yeah, the mentioning of fringe, not consensual or even just not enoughly
discussed ideas as if they were canon annoys me to no end. Here as anywhere
else.

> By the way, "for the record" I had no idea the old man's "Cas" was
> Dorcas.  I probably realized that on some reread.  It's even possible
> that I needed it pointed out (maybe here).  Lee Berman's point about the
> pronunciation was part of it.

I should point out that my instictive reading of Dorcas was DAWRK-us (gave 
up on IPA), possibly not that far from the AmE pronunciation, but not being 
acquainted with the name I switfly considered door-KAZZ, seeing as there was 
a guy nearby looking for a KAZZ. My language's orthography is more 
(morpho)phonemic than phonetic, but unstressed sounds, although reduced, 
aren't neutralised as in english (so unstressed e/i may merge, as may o/u, 
but a doesn't merge with anything), so we do pay attention to the graphic 
part of it because it does line up with the pronunciation, even if the rules 
are complex (they're part of the language, anyway).

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net