Envisioning a new language
In a new interview on SDN, Sun's Victoria Livschitz talks about her research language called Metaphors. This is 'pie in the sky', make your brain hurt, sort of stuff but there's some interesting ideas presented.
Axis, Axes, Axii?
While writing another post (it will probably follow this one) I needed to pluralize axis. None of the guesses I came up with passed the spell checker so I Googled it. The first hit I got was from a drafting company. (Interesting aside: word order matters in Google more than I realized - searching for "plural axis" didn't get the same dictionary oriented results as "axis plural") According to these folks the answer is:
Grammatical Note :
The plural of axis is axes. Some radical etymologists insist that the plural form of axis is axii, but that is only if there are three or more;
One axis, two axes, three axii.
The word axii, however, still doesn’t pass the spell checker, so perhaps getting grammar lessons from a drafting company isn’t such a great idea. More legitimate authorities simply list axes as the plural.
If you do visit the above link to drafing company, can you answer me a question, what the heck are those diagrams depicting. I...
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