Re: naming schemes (was Re: Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 released)
On Sun, Jul 21, 2002 at 04:58:45PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
> Also, "Greece" is _only_ the _name_ given by the Anglos. I'd
> bet a nickle that those-that-Anglos-call-Greece don't spell or
> pronounce it the same as Anglos. So, I bet that Greece, NY
> actually did get there first...
You're only partly right on the first count, and I'd say still wrong on
the second. :) The word "Greece" existed in various forms in Old English
and other earlier Germanic languages, so considerably predates your
Founding Fathers; if you want its modern form, I'm pretty sure
Shakespeare used the word, and he lived quite a long time before anyone
even called New York New Amsterdam, let alone New York.
Also, while it's true that the modern Greeks call their country
something like "Hellas" (?), my dictionary tells me that Aristotle
mentioned "Graikoi" as the prehistoric name for the people of that
region.
As a means of mentioning Debian in some peripheral way here: while I
haven't quite got myself to the point of sending UTF-8 mail, so I can't
spell the Greek name for Greece correctly, I'm quite impressed by how
far Unicode support in Debian has come. Markus Kuhn's UTF-8 examples at
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/ render quite nicely in a
uxterm, which is available as standard in woody's xterm package as long
as you configure the appropriate UTF-8 character set in /etc/locale.gen.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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