RMS, Free software and the Ubuntu CDs

[Alan McKinnon]

On Sun, 2006-07-02 at 11:33 +0200, Alexander Skwar wrote:
> > Americans often like to spell it "guh-new" to make clear it's
> pronounced
> > with an audible G. A word spelled gnu would otherwise be pronounced
> like
> > "new" by many 
> 
> Ah. Now I understand. That's not the way it's pronunced in German.
> It's rather a "gnuh". I don't know how to explain it. In German,
> it's also not "new" but just "nu". Can't explain it.

Imagine a language that combined random features of C, PL1, Basic (any
variant you like), COBOL, Pascal, Assembler, Intercal and brainfuck.
It's a mess right? Now that's the current state of English. It doesn't
make sense and it's not supposed to :-)

The animal is a guh-noo, we eat with a nife, the guy wearing armour and
rising a horse is a night and the company that makes soup is kuh-norr.
German is complex, but also consistent in it's complexity. It was built,
as opposed to English which was sort of smashed together in a completely
arbitrary 1000 year process

alan