Re: Per-page statistics

On Wed, 2003-12-24 at 14:43, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

> b) Sometimes a single German word contains information equivalent to
> three English words. Putting them next to each other will suggest people
> to compare them, which is just idiotic.

In the case of Tamil this is a very good analogy except joining words
are governed by some grammatical rules which seems to be getting
extinct.

The concept of full stop itself was introduced only around mid 19th
century by the person who helped to translate the Bible for a
missionary. He apparently saw some reason for ushering in reform to
prose from the verse based language Tamil was, presenting his case to
the central lingustic authority of that time, who in turn seem to have
found their influence greatly reduced by the effects of colonisation.
So implementation of the reforms as to be predicted ran astray.

Things definitely have taken a  non scientific turn from this point
onwards with many trying to mimick English.

On the other hand joining words by grammatical rules seems to have
become one sign of learned writing skills.

Like  German, Tamil does use space to distinguish between words.

So sometimes the word count for the same article after an edit in the
wiki might differ but not the substance.

Regards,

Ramanan