http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Language/History A listing of the most recently indexed works about Articles and Language and History in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Language/History http://tc.eserver.org/28152.html http://tc.eserver.org/28152.html Will the global interconnectedness of our conversations freeze the features of our languages in place? If so, farther into the future than anyone can foresee, much of the human race will be stuck with English as we now know it. http://tc.eserver.org/27212.html http://tc.eserver.org/27212.html A persistent rule of thumb in the programming trade is the 80/20 rule: '80 percent of the useful work is performed by 20 percent of the code.' As with gas mileage, your performance statistics may vary, and given the mensurational vagaries of body parts such as thumbs (unless you take the French pouce as an exact nonmetric inch), you may prefer a 90/10 partition of labor. With some of the bloated code-generating meta-frameworks floating around, cynics have suggested a 99/1 rule—if you can locate that frantic 1 percent. Whatever the ratio, the concept has proved useful in performance tuning. http://tc.eserver.org/26298.html http://tc.eserver.org/26298.html The field of machine translation (MT) was the pioneer research area in computational linguistics during the 1950s and 1960s. When it began, the assumed goal was the automatic translation of all kinds of documents at a quality equalling that of the best human translators. It became apparent very soon that this goal was impossible in the foreseeable future. http://tc.eserver.org/14779.html http://tc.eserver.org/14779.html Bush explains the history of the American Heritage Dictionary and discusses how the dictionary has evolved from its first edition, published in 1969, to its fourth, published in 2000. http://tc.eserver.org/14425.html http://tc.eserver.org/14425.html The <i>American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language</i>, Fourth Edition, 2000, is a massive, 2074-page volume with fascinating articles on the roots of the language and current usage. The First Edition appeared in 1969, only eight years after the Merriam-Webster Third New International Dictionary  aroused a storm of protest that resounds to this day. Philip Gove, Webster’s editor, had reduced the number of entries from 600,000 to 450,000, but included 100,000 new definitions, many attached to words like beatnik. He had also used sources like Art Linkletter and TWA timetables, maintaining that not all language is formal. He had decreased use of the 'slang' label and banished 'colloquial' entirely, relying instead on quotations that gave a feel for words in context. Gove was denounced as 'permissive.' He had even included ain’t in the dictionary (with a note 'disapproved by many'). A New Yorker cartoon depicted a Merriam-Webster receptionist responding, 'Dr. Gove ain’t in.'