From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Jul 16 2007 - 19:31:54 CDT
> This is the same kind of thing you
> see all the time in Japanese manga, for example, or informally
> in English and other alphabetic languages, to indicate
> reeeeeeeally loooooong vowels.
A propos of nothing, and mostly just because it is fun,
I checked, and Google gives you 86,700 hits for
"loooooooong" spelled with exactly 8 o's (I didn't bother
checking for variants with fewer or more o's) -- including
quite a few web pages and directory names spelled that
way.
So out in the wild, "loooooooong" has considerably more
established existence in use than many fully pedigreed,
properly spelled English words.
Cf. xylophagous, with only 36,100 hits. ;-)
One wonders what the comparable figures for nonstandard
extensions to spellings for various Indic languages might
be.
--Ken
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