There's even more fun history, in that & is a ligature of et. (Citation: same wikipedia page)
The people who pronounce /usr as "you ess are" instead of "user" kind of drive me crazy though.
If I'm talking about a common system location, I don't even mention the slashes, e.g. "user bin", "etsy init dot dee", "var log httpd" and so on. If someone started off telling me to go to, say, "forward slash user forward slash library" I would just start transcribing /user/library, assuming it was something nonstandard. For /usr/lib, I'd expect to just hear "go to user lib".
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/usr....
In current Unices, /usr is where user-land programs and data (as opposed to 'system land' programs and data) are. The name hasn't changed, but it's meaning has narrowed and lengthened from "everything user related" to "user usable programs and data". As such, some people may now refer to this directory as meaning 'User System Resources' and not 'user' as was originally intended.
Then again, I never liked "scuzzy" for SCSI, it felt awkward in conversation even with other techies. It grew on me about the time the protocol was dying out.
Also..."gif" as in "gift" or "jif" as in the peanut butter? ;-)
GIF as in gift, and all the other root-level directories you named, I'm on the same page as you.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/04/22/website.name.origins.mf...
(Not sure if that's what you were implying, clever idea though.)
† edited to add that it's spelled out
I've never heard this. like ever.
I've never heard anyone say "ect", which would imply that they've seen the word but can't read.
Occasionally, you might encounter a Latin-speaking pedant who says "Kaizar" (this could also be a German :)) and "et ketera", but it isn't the norm in US English anyway.
It's not so much that 'U' was created as a brand-new letter as it was that they split 'V' and 'u' into separate letters.
Edit: "u" was another stylistic variation of "v" in minuscule alphabets. So the use of both of them side by side is rather an anachronism as it combines forms of two separate eras.
Edit: Regarding the long form of "s", this is also an important part of the ligature "ß". There's still an ongoing discussion, whether it is for "ſs" (ss) or "ſʒ" (sz), and, if "ß" should be split into "SS" or "SZ" in German uppercase writing. (While entity escaping suggests "szlig", some sources and old typographic forms indicate that it may have been "ſs" originally.)
Furthermore, Roman and Italic are two entirely different styles of characters. For highlighting purposes, printers started using Italic within Roman text, and eventually pairs of Roman and Italic fonts became identified with each other, so that now typefaces generally include both of them.
(We may observe that the upcoming use of white space in writing in order to structure text roughly coincides with the introduction of zero into the number system. We may also observe that the use of zero was already implied by the Roman abacus, but didn't propagate to writing numbers. This may be seen in the context of Roman writing dismissing interpunctuations originally imported from the Greek and eventually also dismissing spaces between words, as it was considered important for a reader to immerse in the text in order to reveal its meaning. This approach to writing and reading may also shed some light on the horror vacui that may be observed in medieval writing. For an opposite approach we may consider the Summa Theologiae, breaking down the text in structure and form so it provides a quick and easy orientation for where in the text we currently are. This approach brings also some new characters, like "¶" to mark the beginning of a paragraph. – Historically, there's been an ongoing discussion whether to favor legibility or rather illegibility in writing and letter forms, which is linked to the question, whether a text should reveal its meaning quickly, or rather resist a cursory reading.)
When you put those vowel sounds next to another vowel (assuming a certain Romance pronunciation similar to modern Spanish or Italian), they tend to make that consonant sound (similar to English W or the consonant version of Y).
Given the subject matter, I'd disagree slightly, but we're getting into obscure territory: 'U' and 'V' were glyphs of the same letter, but the two glyphs ended up being used to represent the vowel and consonant respectively as new letters. 'V' was traditionally the glyph used in writing and carving owing to it being the easier glyph to carve with a chisel. In Roman Rustic caps (as seen in Virgil's writings), the 'V'/'U' was halfway in-between a 'V' and a 'U' in shape.
When I say I disagree, I'm not saying you're wrong, BTW, so much that differentiating between 'U' and 'V' up until the late Middle Ages is difficult, complicated by the fact that the shift from 'UU'/'VV' to 'W' happened over a very long period of time, overlapping, IIRC, with 'U' and 'V' becoming separate letters.
You mean 'Romance': Neo-Latin refers to the revived Latin from the Renaissance era, which is now used as a source of international scientific vocabulary.
> I strongly suspect that the real origin of w is from VV, not UU.
This is why I wrote what I wrote: the timeline for that doesn't match up. The 'W' ligature came along when 'V' and 'U' were glyphs of the same letter, not separate letters themselves. In fact, 'V'/'U' was generally pronounced when spelling it out the way you would've said 'U' at the time, with the name 'V' got coming later.
In essence: it's equally right to say 'W' came from 'VV' as it is to say it came from 'UU', as they were the same thing up until surprisingly recently, to the extent that 'U' and 'V' weren't differentiated in French until the mid-1700s.
Works very well in english and other European languages.
Uuindouu... One cant help but make a w sound.
Vvindovv... Not so much.
If you want to one level deeper, the sound 'F' came to represent is the 'voiceless labiodental fricative'. This means it has a pairing in the pronunciation space with 'V', the 'voiced labiodental fricative'. So Greek 'Digamma' became Latin 'F' in form, which is paired with Latin 'V' which became English 'W' which originally was represented by Greek 'Digamma' in sound.
None of this really means anything, but it tickles my brain.
---
[1] Albeit with very different evolutionary paths; English 'w' was used, in part, to allow representation of both Germanic and Latinate words.
- William => Guillaume
- War => Guerre
- Wasp => Guêpe
- Waffle => Gauffre
All of these 'g's are pronounced as in "gas. "gu" makes the 'g' hard in front of vowels that would have made it soft.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law
Of the Grimm Brothers, the same responsible for Grimm's Fairy Tales. Jacob was a philologist in addition to a mythologist.
It's fun because the myth collection was almost a side effect of the linguistics work: it shouldn't be a surprise that when the Brothers Grimm walked into a small village and asked for the oldest documents the village could find they got a lot of interesting myths and fairy tales in return. There's a bit of dramatic irony that Grimm's Fairy Tales has had such a homogenizing force on the myths since its publication when a lot of the reason for collecting them in the first place for the Grimms was seeking all the little nuances and differences and distinctions between them (including and especially linguistically).