Excellent question. Put the 'o' in 'comp'. It's there. Given some of the folks involved, I suspect sick joke. De

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 10:44, Chuck Guzis<cclist at sydex.com> wrote: Up here in Canada, the Reform party briefly renamed itself the "Conservative Reform Alliance" Party: CRAP That lasted all of two days, IIRC. -- Joachim Thiemann :: http://www.tsp.ece.mcgill.ca/~jthiem

Oy, not Latin, but possibly a *psychiatric* illness. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- "I don't think so," said Descartes, and he vanished. -----------------------

Yes, tripas is tripe in Spanish. A good corporate name for one fast food company, for example. Sergio 2009/6/29 Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com>

On Mon, 2009-06-29 at 13:27 -1000, Warren Wolfe wrote: There's a word for that, where you deliberately mis-spell something for effect, like "kat kare" or "cheez". Years ago my mum (a retired English teacher) told me what it was, but I can't remember and neither can she. I mean, she's got an excuse, being a little over twice my age... Anyone here know it? Gordon

?????? The use of the word "scat" to mean "ordure, dung" goes back several centuries. It is a learned borrowing, from the ancient Greek _skOr_, _skatos_,[1] of the same meaning (with and without the overtones of the related Germanic words). Scholars needing to refer to the subject simply borrowed the stem of the Greek word, at a time when English-speaking scholars regularly learned both Latin and Greek to a comfortable reading level by their early teens. [1] The "O" represents the Greek letter _o mega_. Traditionally, Greek words are cited in the nominative and genitive singular (the latter to show the stem, which may be obscured in the former). I've left off the accents for simplicity. Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Server Engineer Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com (206) 342-2239 (206) 465-2916 cell http://www.pdpplanet.org/

On 29 Jun 2009 at 14:13, Ethan Dicks wrote: On the other hand, "skat" (spelled phonetically) in Russian means "slope" or "incline". I don't get the point. ??? --Chuck

OK, we've wandered way, WAY off-topic here, but I can't allow this to stand.[0] In Greek, <kappa> and <khi> are generally unrelated.[1] Each reflects a separately reconstructible sound all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, usually written as *k and *gh in ASCII, although in the handbooks the <k> and <g> will frequently have <prime> accents to indicate that they are palatals rather than velars, and the <h> will be superscripted.[2] Because Spanish does not have an aspirate class (nor did Latin, where the borrowing first took place), <kappa> and <khi> are both represented by <c>, here pronounced [k], and a distinction is lost that was present in Greek. Further, in the history of Spanish, initial clusters of s+{p,t,k} developed an epenthetic vowel e-, so that original Greek _eskhato-_ and _skato-_ fall together in Spanish as _eskato-_.[3] Note that the Greek word _eskhatos_ means "last", and eschatology is that part of religious doctrine that deals with death, judgment, and destiny. Now I'll shut up on this topic. [0] Before I became a full-time computer programmer and later system manager, I spent more than a decade studying Indo-European linguistics, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student. I see too much nonsense passing for linguistics in the newspapers and on-line, and I do what I can to correct it. [1] There is a conditional relationship called Grassman's Law (better "Rule"), in which underlying aspirates can appear as nonaspirates. In addition, an aspirate before final -s deaspirates. The canonical example in classical Greek is the word _thriks_, _trikhos_ "hair", in which the final -s keeps Grassman's from operating in the nominative. [2] In linguistics fora, I write that kind of thing in TeX notation, but I'll forego that here. [3] For example, Greek _skhola_ yields Spanish _escuela_ "school", Latin _stare_ "stand" gives Spanish _estar_ "to be" (of transient states), etc. Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Server Engineer Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com (206) 342-2239 (206) 465-2916 cell http://www.pdpplanet.org/