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Postings from December 2003
On Thu, 2003-11-27 at 13:21, Tom Christiansen wrote: > [...] > In summary, because to translate is to paraphrase, and because the tr/// > operator does no such thing, transliterate is the correct term to describe > its operation of mere character-set (that is, alphabet) transcription. > > Or did you want it to be "transcription"? :-) > > --tom but tr(1) does neither translation or transliteration in the linguistic sense. It creates a "translation table" and looks up characters in it and creates a new string by mapping each character in the input to the character listed in the table under the input character. This operation was termed "translation" by some whimsical software engineer deep in the mists of long-ago, due to the functional similarity between the operation of tr(1) and the activity of translating language by looking up words in a bilinugal dictionary. -- david nicol "I'll be working, working; but if you come visit I'll put down what I'm doing: my friends are important" -- David ByrneThread Previous | Thread Next