Reasons You Know You're Me, #345098

[lwood]

Upon seeing the word þjónusta in a paper from the Proceedings of the Twelfth International Saga Conference, you immediately know it means "Service"...

...because the last time you saw it, it was in a more familiar and immediate context.

-- Lorrie (Icelandic for iPod is still iPod)

Comments

[dr-beowulf.livejournal.com]

Writing all those definitions and etymologies for the Bataan Death Book has made me a better comparative linguist. . . I saw the word and after a few moments of thought was able to parse it as a cognate of modern German Dienst.

Why, yes, I am a nerd; why do you ask?

[lwood.livejournal.com]

After all this, I had to ask?

I will note that your definition of the Nerd-Niebelungen made it quite intact into OT 2: Heathen Boogaloo.

-- Lorrie

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I didn't read your last line, just went to the page, and wondered why someone was talking about iPods in Old Norse. Then looked at the domain and realised it was Icelandic. Close enough (especially when transliterated by links(1) into pure ASCII)...

[lwood.livejournal.com]

*grin* In the opinion of the Icelanders, they still speak Old Norse, a point on which the Faroese (and, certes, others) would like to debate.

But yeah--I was used to going Apple Iceland's support when, in days of yore, this was the only way to coax certain characters out of a Mac in a way that other computers could understand.

(nobody wants to hear me go on about character set interoperability between MacRoman, ISO-8859-x, and IBM Code Page 852...so, uh, I won't.)

Yeah, I noticed that when I looked at it in lynx--straight ASCII, not even ISO-8859-1, which was what I'd expected. Indeed, I can look at it fine on a CLI if I download it and open it with less or summat. It's not even a matter of typing it in versus using the proper HTML element...because my entry also fails in lynx. Hunh.

-- Lorrie

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I remember the Code Page wars. At least one mailing list I'm on still gets the occasional MacRoman post (with no header saying the character set!)...

[krellan.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's cool. I didn't know Apple fully supported the Icelandic language across all of their products and websites.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Well, now they have Unicode and as of OS X their default character set went from MacRoman to ISO-8859-15.

Before OS X, it required custom fonts and keymaps to coax eths, thorns, and the acute-accented y into documents. After several fonts had grown up in the wild to deal with this in System 7 and were greedily acquired by Anglo-Saxon scholars, there was half-assed support for such localization in OS 9...if you were willing to go to Apple's Icelandic website and find the Þjónusta section, anyhow. Still, if you did it the half-assed-but-supported way, the Icelandic Trio would appear properly on web pages with little preference-noodling, which was better than you could say for the wild-raised fonts.

But I, I still remember when it was flat ASCII everywhere, and a Finn, to cuss in his native and beloved Suomi, emitted a flurry of {'s everywhere he went--which, had his Finnish keyboard generated what it should, would have given him the äaut; he had wanted in the first place.

-- Lorrie

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Oh, I remember the various ASCII 'national' character sets, receiving mail from most non-English countries was 'interesting'. Trying to guess what the character was supposed to be (because there were several variants). The good old days (well, it was pre-September and we could still use Usenet without being flooded by trolls)...