in reply to Another day, another nit

Update:Actually the idea below is an argument against having a space, I got confused about what the desired spelling was.

I don't know if this is the thinking behind it or not but search engines will index "perl6" differently to "perl 6". People searching for "perl 6" without quoting it in the search query will get pages that mention "perl" and "6" and unfortunately will probably not get pages with "perl6".

That said I think they're fighting an unwinnable battle, you may as well try get those ignorant Americans to spell "colour" and "centre" correctly :-).

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OT: Re^2: Another day, another nit
by QM (Parson) on Dec 20, 2005 at 17:13 UTC
    That said I think they're fighting an unwinnable battle, you may as well try get those ignorant Americans to spell "colour" and "centre" correctly :-).
    I agree with you on the /Perl ?6/ front. But the British borrowed those awful non-phonetic spellings from the French, didn't they? Too bad for us Italy or Spain wasn't closer geographically :p

    -QM
    --
    Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

      I think nearly all English words are spelled phonetically - in the language they're borrowed from. French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, (Arabic, Indian?) all have consistent systems and we use them all!
        I think nearly all English words are spelled phonetically - in the language they're borrowed from. French, ...
        Umm, excuse me, but French can be even harder than English to learn, because it is not spelled as it's pronounced. Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, yes, almost rigidly. The others I'm less familiar with, but I'll concede those for now.

        One of the most common complaints about French is the inability to spell a word having heard it pronounced correctly. (Pronouncing a written word is considerably easier, though not foolproof.)

        -QM
        --
        Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

        The English words were spelled phonetically at the time the spellings were determined. That is to say, those silent 'e's at the end of a word were pronounced; and a word like "knight" was actually spoken with a k-sound, the gh as a guttural sound. The spoken language changed but the printed remained relatively stable, so now our words have some incredibly strange spellings. Think cough, hiccough, plough, though, tough, through. I'd hate to have to learn English as an adult...

        Update: corrected minor spelling error.