Comments on: XML haiku project, finished at last

By: Eve M.

Eve M. — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 14:02:30 +0000

Hi Mark– Thanks… Don’t forget the bad Shakespeare pun. :-)

By: Mark Dixon

Mark Dixon — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 11:31:38 +0000

Eve: The confluence of cultural ideas is amazing - cross-stitch, XML, oriental art and haiku! Great job!

Mark

By: Eve

Eve — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 13:58:16 +0000

In my one and only French course, my teacher told us that the circumflex was a little tombstone to memorialize the “s” that used to be there…

By: Robin Wilton

Robin Wilton — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 11:23:02 +0000

It’s also one of those words where the presence of a circumflex in modern French indicates the former presence of a letter “s”…

As in “Çi gist” (”Here lies…”) which has become “Çi gît’.

Other examples (for other vowels) are

Prestre : Prêtre (interestingly, in English there’s an archaic word “Prester”, as in ‘Prester John’, which has the same root, and of course ‘priest’, which still has the ’s’).

Chastel : Chasteau : Château (which has clearly morphed a few times since its Latin beginnings as castellum. Again, there’s the English word ‘castle’… in which we still have both the ’s’ and the ‘l’).

There you go… more than you could ever have wanted to know about circumflexes!

By: Hubert

Hubert — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 21:11:55 +0000

Glad you got to finish it between 2 panels :-)

Since English is not my mother tongue I had to look up the meaning of ‘gist’.
Did you know it actually comes from old French? It’s the third person singular present tense of the verb ‘gésir’ (to lie, as in laying on the floor).
I knew I liked your haiku for good reasons ;-)

Hubert

PS: If I were to do one myself (which will never happen given my skills) I’d write something like: Liberty, Equality, Centricity :-)