Scrounging - was Floating point routines for the 6809

Paul Koning paulkoning at comcast.net
Wed Mar 29 13:32:05 CDT 2017


> On Mar 29, 2017, at 2:18 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
>>> It's amazing how isolated pockets of our cultures can be from each
>>> other! "Multiple peoples divided by a common language"
> 
> On Wed, 29 Mar 2017, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> ...
>> Or the time an English co-worker related the story surrounding her
>> initial job interval in the US.  She described the stunned look on the
>> face of the desk clerk at the local Holiday Inn when she asked to be
>> knocked up at 7:30 the next morning.
> 
> British V American/"Colonial"? idioms are not surprising.
> What's more surprising are the mutually exclusive variations within a country.

Not at all.  Linguists have a term for this: dialects.  Actually, that applies anywhere, country borders are not relevant; it simply means two variations of a language that are "mutually intellegible".  That may be a bit of a judgment call.  As a not-native speaker of English I tend to have trouble with, say, the Welsh dialect of English.

If dialects diverge to the point that they aren't mutually intellegible, a linguist calls that two languages.  So China has lots of languages, not just many dialects.  Conversely, some argue that Norway and Sweden use two dialects of a single language.

	paul




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