Subject: [[email-masked]: RE: [_Hella_-OT] Language Fight!! [was Re: Suggestion for New Lis t Rules]]

From: Robin Lee Powell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 11:47:12 -0700

Thought you all might like this little language story.

-Robin

----- Forwarded message from "Decker, Joe" <[email-masked]> -----

Worked for a company that made handheld gadgets with bilingual
dictionaries in them. Wanted to have complete databases in
them of all the verb/noun/adj inflections (e.g., conjugations).
Most of the work was done by brute force and grad students, with
a lot of processing to automatically detect possible errors, etc.

Then questionable items were raised, etc. By the time we ran
out of smart French-speaking folk, we had all but 3 of the slots
filled in in the half-million-or-so spellings we were looking for.
So we wrote the Acadamie. :)

Their answer was in French of course, but IIRC, the form of it
was sort of like this.

Dear Sirs:

Thank you blah blah blah we appreciate your respect blah blah.

In the matter of the verb blah, the blah form is blah.

In the matter of the verb blah, the blah form is blah.

[at this point you hear them pause, even though you're reading
a letter]

The case of blah is more interesting. We have no record of
that verb ever having been used in that tense, etc. Moreover,
while it appears to follow the model of the verb blah, which 
would make the answer blah, it also appears to follow the model
of blah, which would make the answer blahblah.

We choose that the correct answer is blah.

Sincerely,

Blah blah blah...

--Joe

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ BTW, I'm male, honest.
le datni cu djica le nu zifre .iku'i .oi le so'e datni cu to'e te pilno
je xlali -- RLP http://www.lojban.org/