From: John Cowan (cowan@mercury.ccil.org)
Date: Wed May 28 2003 - 08:02:13 EDT
Marco Cimarosti scripsit:
> My English-Italian dictionary has two "savvy" entries: an adjective (labeled
> "fam. amer." = "US English, informal") and a noun (labeled "antiq. / fam." =
> "archaic or informal"). However, all the translations have to do with
> "common sense", and none of them seems to explain the intuitive meaning of
> "Unicode savvy", which I guess is supposed to be: "Unicode enabled",
> "Unicode supported", "encoded in Unicode", etc.
In case your dictionary does not explain this, its etymology is the
Portuguese verb "saber" < Lat. SAPERE, which was used in the original
Lingua Franca and from there spread into almost all the pidgins and
creoles of the Earth. As you can well imagine, a pidgin needs a verb
for "understand/comprehend" as one of its very basic words! So it
can be verb ("understand"), adjective ("being able to understand"),
or noun ("comprehension"). The last is the least informal, at least in
English; the adjective is evidently meant here, and in more normative
orthography "Unicode-savvy" would be used.
But I agree that it's bad wording and a bad design. Please try again,
O Unicode Consortium!
Wan pisi ting dat mi av got,
Maski dat ting mi no can du,
Yu taki yu no savi wat?
Bambu.
--Lewis Carroll (modern orthography)
(Note the third line, meaning "You say you don't understand what [I mean]?")
-- The man that wanders far jcowan@reutershealth.com from the walking tree http://www.reutershealth.com --first line of a non-existent poem by: John Cowan
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