On Thursday 07 August 2003 11:53, Emile le Vivre wrote: > About the 'servent', I think it's probably not the best term in the > world, it may be a little too subtle for those with poorer spelling > skills. I forgot most of you folks are europeans (you are, right?) so > this is less of an issue. I sometimes worry about our american friends > though.
I don't think this is a problem. And I say this as an American--I was born in America, and I even went to California public high-schools (at the time they weren't the 49th best in the country, but that's not so much because they were better back then as because Texas and a few other states apparently made a concerted effort to "catch down" to us). In fact, I believe the term was invented in America. It may even have been invented right here in Southern California. I actually heard it from a suit at Sony Multimedia (who didn't know the term "p2p" and asked me, "Is that something to do with servents?") before I saw even techies from Europeans or Silicon Valley types using it. If those monkeys at Sony could understand it, I think the rest of America can handle it. As for spelling, distinguishing servent from servant is easy: servent is the one your spell-checker flags in red. Seriously, far more Americans will have problems with "queued" (since we don't use that work in any context except computers, unlike the rest of the English-speaking world). Besides, don't worry about your "American friends;" you can't possibly have any, as the government has long ago rounded up anyone who had French-speaking friends (except Louisiana cajuns--but especially French Canadians, as we all know that Canada's new gay marriage laws are a deliberate attempt to turn all of America gay so the commie pinkos can invade and Jesus won't defend us). > I recently had a buddy up from new york who pronounced foyer > such that it would rhyme with lawyer. He thought I was crazy, mais > c'est la vie. As in faw-yuh, rhyming with law-yuh? The pronunciation issue is a bit more serious than the spelling issue (if any p2p'ers ever leave their room or speak on the phone). In both American and British English, if the first syllable is accented, a short vowel in the second syllable becomes as schwa--so both "servant" and "servent" would be pronounced /ser'[EMAIL PROTECTED]/. The solution I've most often heard is to put secondary or even primary stress on the second syllable of "servent," so it's either /ser'-vent"/ or /sr-vent'/. Either way, that makes the two words clearly distinguishable, even to those who've never heard of "servents." > Maybe they drink too much 'Lite' beer. You know very well that our 'Lite' beer is every bit as strong as our regular beer (which is at least half as strong as Canadian beer). > ps. Raphael: You may know this already but: In case you ever venture > into gtk2, glade-2 is nearly identical interface-wise to glade. glade-2 > can't handle gtk1 files though (they changed the glade file XML format) > but glade and glade-2 can coexist nicely on the same system. There used to be a glade-1 to glade-2 converter, but it seems to have disappeared quite some time ago. That would be a useful project for someone to start up again. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email sponsored by: Free pre-built ASP.NET sites including Data Reports, E-commerce, Portals, and Forums are available now. Download today and enter to win an XBOX or Visual Studio .NET. http://aspnet.click-url.com/go/psa00100003ave/direct;at.aspnet_072303_01/01 _______________________________________________ Gtk-gnutella-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gtk-gnutella-devel
