Has anyone seen anything about a release date for Linux Mint 14 64 Bit with KDE?

[Liam Proven]

On 8 December 2012 21:46, AV3 <arvimide at earthlink.net> wrote:
> On Dec/8/2012 12:5242 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
>>
>> On 7 December 2012 17:26, AV3<arvimide at earthlink.net>  wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> ...
>>
>>
>>> The plurals you prefer go back to the days when Latin and Greek were
>>> taught
>>> in most secondary schools, but today they seem like class distinction
>>> signals for intellectual snobs. There are no more fora in the auditoria,
>>> and
>>> there soon won't be even one datum left to support your data.
>>
>>
>> I find this a surprising attitude, but I don't doubt you. If using
>> correct plurals make me sound like an intellectual snob, I am all
>> right with that; it's a reasonably fair description, TBH.
>>
>> ...
>>
>>
>> Anyway... I don't see why it's any harder to remember "fora" than it
>> is to remember "children", or "indices" than "mice".
>>
>
>
> It is not a question of ease but of evolution. In the evolution of language,
> regular forms tend to push out "irregular" forms

This is a common belief, but it's not really so. Many irregularities
still exist in English which is one of the (many) things that make it
a complex and quite difficult language - its bizarre orthography, its
irregular verbs, its superficially-inconsistent use of apostrophes,
its contractions which even natives frequently get wrong.

The old Anglo-Saxon strong versus weak nouns are the least of our
worries, so to speak.

>, where the irregular
> plurals in English nouns go back to forgotten borrowing from Latin and
> Greek.

They don't, you know. They're from Old English, straight out of its
Germanic roots:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar

> Undoubtedly you were an exceptionally good student of what you were
> taught, but you must recognize that old irregular forms become archaic, e.
> g., today "worked" instead of "wrought," "cows" instead of "kine."

I have been known to use "wrought" and see nothing wrong with it. :¬)

And as a student my strengths were in the sciences rather than my
language skills - although I did well in English. Becoming interested
in the roots and evolution of language is something I only did as an
adult, actually.


> I did say "seems like intellectual snobbery," not "definitely is."  But
> "rhinocerotes"?

I happened to cite that as an example because I needed to look it up
recently. I listened to the word "rhinoceroses" in my head and
immediately knew that it must be wrong, and indeed it is, although
widely accepted. "Rhinos", OK, but the plural of the full
unabbreviated word follows a similar pattern to "octopus → octopodes".

> Teachers tended to promote keeping Latin and Greek plurals
> to validate the teaching of Latin and Greek. Today, all is lost, and
> evolution plunges ahead.

It does indeed. Perhaps we'll all be speaking Mandarin in a century or two. :¬)

It, and indeed Japanese too, have some beguiling and charming
simplicities that Prof Zamenhof really ought to have known about
before he designed his famous conlang. ;¬)


-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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