Comments: UNILANG WIKI.

If interested in a site about languages I would suggest http://www.rosettaproject.org
It is open to anyone who is willing to document rare (and not so rare) languages...

Posted by Laurent at January 20, 2005 08:48 PM

Bless you for the remark about loggingin. I think it's a lost battle though - I'm absolutely the only person I know who distinguishes between 'I go on line' and 'this is an online service', even the professors of communication with whom I work write 'I go online'!

Posted by Jean at January 21, 2005 09:06 AM

At the dawn of onlineness it was always written as two words, be it noun, verb or adjective. Some of the earliest online folk were librarians, who used online services for searching. In library literature the move from "on line searching" to "online searching" was a conscious and deliberately propagated one, to make the word a unique searchable term.

You can't defeat librarians (especially not at Trivial Pursuit) but even without that force of agglomeration it's hard to stop two words always used together becoming one. I remember when "highschool" was a bizarre abomination.

Posted by Qov at January 21, 2005 11:38 AM

I have no problem with "online"; the same transition has happened with "baseball" and a zillion other words. Verbs are different; they don't get jammed together like substantives. You can write "logon function" if you like, and it won't bother me, but if you write "Please logon" I don't like it one bit.

Posted by language hat at January 21, 2005 11:46 AM

I'm both a pedant and a pedant-hater. This time I must side with LH until phrases like "he logins", "I loginned yesterday", "I have always logined", or "I don't like loginning" also become commonplace (-:

Posted by Andrew Dunbar at January 22, 2005 07:29 PM

Oops, it has been corrected to "log in" now. Actually it was a default entry that came with the software.

Unfortunately we had to disable anonymous editing because Chinese spammers were getting too annoying, but UniLang membership is completely free and getting an account on the Wiki doesn't take 10 seconds. Also the Wiki is just one part of UniLang, you can see more at http://www.unilang.org

About logging on: I was recently asked about the difference between "to log on" and "to log in", any ideas?

geoff


Posted by geoff at January 27, 2005 08:55 PM

Bah! Language evolves, sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in anoying ways. No living language is static, especially not English.

Leif

Posted by Leif at May 31, 2005 05:41 PM