defense vs defence
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I don't think it matters which one, i just had times where i was searching for the wrong one, and couldn't find stuff.
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Inconsistent spelling makes things just more difficult. Not only do you have to know which text you want, but how that text was spelled (and spelling mistakes make this ironic and painful).
I think we talked about this before, the majority of code and text are spelled with American English, that would be the choice to consolidate.
Generally to answer this kind of question, where no choice is really better or worse necessarily, you do a survey to see how much you have of one or another and choose the one you have the most of to minimize the migration effort.
In this case, with the spelling baked into XMLs, I'm afraid we're just 100% stuck with it. It could be conceivable to update the code to accept either spelling, though I'm not sure if that is actually going to be that helpful and not just more complicated.
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@LaFayette said in defense vs defence:
In this case, with the spelling baked into XMLs, I'm afraid we're just 100% stuck with it. It could be conceivable to update the code to accept either spelling, though I'm not sure if that is actually going to be that helpful and not just more complicated.
I have just looked at the pos2.xml and found 9 times "defence" and 58 times "defense" in there.
Also in global1940.xml there is one "defence" and 18 times "defense".Not sure if and how that affects anything, however...
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@LaFayette can't we just do a find and replace?
"You should never have told me horses sleep standing up, it gave me a mental block." - Mister Ed
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@LaFayette From my outdated coding experience, it doesn't seem like it should be too terribly difficult to accept either option
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@ubernaut If we do a find and replace then we break existing game engines. Second, we're likely to break save games as well doing so.
@ff03k64 accepting both options could be done. It's not a clear decision though as the code is unsustainably complex. Making that worse is not a clear win. More to the first point, if we make any updates in maps, then we're requiring game engines to be updated and possibly breaking save games, else we're creating maps that only the newest engines can play and the game engine does not do a good job of filtering that out.
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@LaFayette not a coder, just a thought, was assuming a find and replace in the engines as well would catch all instances, but yeah again what do i know.
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Beside being what it is used in the English of England, "defence", instead of "defense", also sounds correct to me for analogy with "advice" and "advise", since "advice" is a noun and "advise" is a verb, and "defence" is a noun, not a verb (the verb is "defend", of course).
According to this graphic:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=defense%2Cdefence&corpus=5&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cdefense%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cdefence%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cdefense%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cdefence%3B%2Cc0
"defence" was the prevailing spelling in American English before 1911 (that is only 109 years ago). So, one may want to investigate whether the "defence" spelling might be acceptable in American English too (whether it is a wrong or only uncommon spelling for the language). I don't know.I also want to point out that, on the other hand, we have "offence" but not "offense", on its own, because TripleA defines that as "attack".
As @Panther says, pos2.xml has 9 times "defence" and 58 times "defense", but it also has 9 times "offence" and 6 times "offense", instead.
https://github.com/triplea-maps/the_pact_of_steel/blob/master/map/games/pact_of_steel_2.xml -
@Cernel i can tell you its the first time i've ever seen it spelled that way and i tend to spell things the british way
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The benefit of consistent spelling is not correctness necessarily but so you can say "I know this property is named X", and you can then run with it. Otherwise you have to ask "is this the case where we mispelled this with the extra T?". In such a case you have to double check everything and you make more mistakes. It all goes to making parsing and making maps just way more difficult than it needs to be.
IMO this conversation kinda has run its course. Either we update the engine to accept both spellings, or not. Changing existing maps is pretty much a non-starter given we have to have both old and new engines both working.
If we do a grand re-write of map structure in YAML, such a thing should be fixed then for sure The existing XML spec is pretty much frozen. Should we support an alternative spelling going forward or wait for a grand re-write? Supporting an alternative might not be of that much value if we don't use it and have the YAML structure land anyways.
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@LaFayette Actually, "defense" and "defence" are different options (the first for unit and the second for support attachments). Maybe this is the reason why they are different?
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@ubernaut said in defense vs defence:
@Cernel i can tell you its the first time i've ever seen it spelled that way and i tend to spell things the british way
This would be the matter since 1789, that is since the Constitution of the United States of America has been active (turning an alliance of rebellious colonial states into a single country, with an official language, possibly different from the language of other countries):
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=defense%2Cdefence&corpus=5&year_start=1789&year_end=2000&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cdefense%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cdefence%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cdefense%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cdefence%3B%2Cc0
At least until 1840, the "defense" spelling was next to inexistent in usage, looks like. So I assume this is a case of a misspelling eventually becoming dominant. I don't know if this dominance actually implies that the "defence" spelling is currently no longer a word in American English, though. Maybe they are both acceptable?
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@Cernel cool chart but yeah until this conv i had never seen it spelled that way.
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@ubernaut said in defense vs defence:
@Cernel cool chart but yeah until this conv i had never seen it spelled that way.
I'm not surprised, and the fact that the "defense" spelling is most likely the "current" spelling is also hinted by the graph, as you can see the word "defense" has a huge increase in usage during World War 1 and World War 2, peaking in 1918 and 1943, respectively. On the other hand, the word "defence" is unaffected or even negatively affected, during the same periods. So, most likely "defense" is what was mostly used in new productions.
The word "defense" has never been so common since 1943, even though the 1987 peak almost reached the same levels, maybe mostly because of the Iran-Iraq war and the anti-nuclear treaty between USA and USSR.
The word "defence", instead, peaked back in 1794, a high mark during the French Revolutionary Wars, that is also the peak of guillotine executions in Paris and the last year of the Terror, with the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, during the French Revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fleurus_(1794)I think also the Napoleonic Empires game of TripleA starts in 1794, since that is the year when modern-day Belgium is taken by the French from the Austrians, and kept until 1814, after having crushed the anti-revolutionaries within France itself.
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@Cernel we need to play more Napoleon ffa!
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@Cernel The english language is weird ^^
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@RoiEX said in defense vs defence:
@Cernel The english language is weird ^^
I blame it on the English :grinning_squinting_face:
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It is. I kinda wonder if the variation over time is more related to when the first dictionaries came out. There was no standard english until not too long ago.
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@Cernel The United States does not have an official language, although some individual states do. No official body decides the spelling of words, but in practice leading newspapers and Microsoft. There is also no official spelling for Canadian English.
As is usual when there is spelling variation, the US spelling is closer to Latin. Giving that defense (or slight variations using an 's') is normal in the US, France, Italy and was the original Latin form, I would suggest standardizing on 'defense'.
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@RogerCooper said in defense vs defence:
@Cernel The United States does not have an official language, although some individual states do. No official body decides the spelling of words, but in practice leading newspapers and Microsoft. There is also no official spelling for Canadian English.
As is usual when there is spelling variation, the US spelling is closer to Latin. Giving that defense (or slight variations using an 's') is normal in the US, France, Italy and was the original Latin form, I would suggest standardizing on 'defense'.
In general, whatever language is used by a state in its constitution and laws is the official language of the country, practically if not formally. It can be more than one, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_StoneI've no idea of what that is, but I just assume it is what you usually get as "American English" in dictionaries, of which I understand "defense" is a word.
I'm not seeing how Latin matters. It is a fact that Latin, as well as Italian, is a language with a lot less phonetic variations than English, and with (at least for Italian, since we don't know how Latin sounded) a much different pronunciation even for most similar sounds, so that the Latin alphabet can only fail at capturing the English language, for the simple fact that it is a tool made for a very different language, thus not apt to the job by a long shot.
A better comparison, in my opinion, is other words that use the "se" and "ce" group of letters. For example:
"ice" is pronounced "ʌɪs".
"advice" is pronounced "ədˈvʌɪs".
"advise" is pronounced "ədˈvʌɪz".
Since "defence" and "defense" are both pronounced as "dɪˈfɛns" or "di-ˈfen(t)s" (not as "dɪˈfɛnz" or "di-ˈfen(t)z"), it looks to me that the British spelling is the most consistent one, unless the Americans actually pronounce "defense" differently from the British "defence", in the same way as "advise" is pronounced differently from "advice" (I don't know, but I understand that the Americans pronounce it exactly like the English "defence", but write it as "defense").
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