Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Whoever is doing DARPA’s PR and, apparently GR, since I guess federal agencies have to do that now, deserves a raise.

EP: Elon Pandering, an essential function for any agency these days.

LOL as much as I disagree with Elon's current stint in government, this is probably among the most tame projects in DARPA's portfolio.

tame as seaweed wrapped around your ankles in shallow water, i might say.

Most tame and most not-classified.

doesn't sound very efficient to me

what is GR?

Guessing government relations, similar to PR being public relations.

Yup. Lobbyists are outside your org. GR coördinates their messaging.

Unrelated, but I appreciate the proper usage of the English umlaut

The formal name for it is diaeresis [0]. The New Yorker is famous for being a high-profile publication that enforces its usage.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)

Notationally I wish the diaeresis was a single dot. It bugs me that we’re using two dots to separate two syllables, yet both dots are over the second syllable. Plus a single dot would avoid ambiguity with the umlaut (though I suppose there are very few words with both features).

A lot of glyph based idiosyncrasies like that in languages scripts are artifacts of the era of physical block types before we had shit like hot cast linotyping where the blocks were made on demand.

What probably happened is umlauts were used a lot in German and some lazy typesetter wasn’t going to waste a perfectly good block sitting around that he could reuse

A Tittle for a single dot is a lovely word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tittle

Your idea is unfortunately naïve about current usage.

Initially I thought the grandparent was just making some fun of a mistake, but I ended up learning something new. Thanks.

Two dots over a letter can be one of three types:

- umlaut

- diaeresis

- trema

A diaeresis signals you pronounce the vowel separately, a trema signals the pronunciation of the previous vowel (e.g. in the French ambiguë), an umlaut changes the sound of the vowel ( the German a sounds a bit like the English a in bat, but ä sounds like the English e in bed).

In this instance the double dot is a diaeresis.

https://thelanguagecloset.com/2023/05/27/diaresis-trema-umla...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com