Wo Not

Native Americas: Akwe:kon's Journal of Indigenous Issues is a 
current-events magazine about issues affecting the Native 
American community. The Fall 1997 issue included an article 
about the effort to preserve the use of the native languages 
among some of the small, nearly-vanished indigenous tribes of
California. Here are several odd lines from that article:

(1) "... at Yuwlumni-sponsored language immersion camps, 
everyone quickly learns if they want to take a break, its best
not to sit by Agnes at meals. She wo not lapse into English, 
to make things easier, ever."

(2)"...next year at this time, they all theoretically be 
doing much better."

(3)"Leanne and Carol can not speak Yowlumni, so after Matt's
done, Agnes translates a bit of what he is said about the 
picture..."

(4)"But it is also been much worse here."



The obvious interpretation is that the article's author was 
victimized by a faulty spell-check program which split up 
contractions into their component words. But the program 
puzzles me. Why would the programmer not set the program to 
split "won't" into "will not", rather than "wo not"? 
Presumably, anything ending in "n't" is to be split into 
the first word, followed by "not". 

But why would they program a similar rule to make "'ll" into 
"all"? (in #2) I'm not aware of a single possible English 
contraction in which "'ll" represents "all" instead of 
"will". (Although "y'all" comes close.)

Obviously, the program has been set to interpret "'s" as 
always representing "is" instead of "has". But there is one
interesting exception; the program has been told to interpret
"'s", after a proper noun, as indicating a possessive, which
should not be split into 2 words. Thus, in #3, the program
did not make "Matt's" into "Matt is", even though that's what
it stands for.

The lesson here, of course, is to be wary of software which
takes it upon itself to alter your writing.


9-21-01