Loooooooong spellings (was: RE: Generic base characters)

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Jul 16 2007 - 19:31:54 CDT

  • Next message: Cibu C J: "Re: Generic base characters"

    > This is the same kind of thing you
    > see all the time in Japanese manga, for example, or informally
    > in English and other alphabetic languages, to indicate
    > reeeeeeeally loooooong vowels.

    A propos of nothing, and mostly just because it is fun,
    I checked, and Google gives you 86,700 hits for
    "loooooooong" spelled with exactly 8 o's (I didn't bother
    checking for variants with fewer or more o's) -- including
    quite a few web pages and directory names spelled that
    way.

    So out in the wild, "loooooooong" has considerably more
    established existence in use than many fully pedigreed,
    properly spelled English words.

    Cf. xylophagous, with only 36,100 hits. ;-)

    One wonders what the comparable figures for nonstandard
    extensions to spellings for various Indic languages might
    be.

    --Ken



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Jul 16 2007 - 19:33:45 CDT