XFree KWin: Ridding KDE's Wayland Compositor Of X11 Dependencies

[shmerl]

Once the desktop environments are free of needing X, maybe we'll start seeing all of the new Linux games being made for Wayland-only environments, too.

Normal games don't need to rely on X. If they use some libraries for handling input that can work with both X and Wayland (like SDL and the like), they are abstracted well already. And for graphics they use Vulkan / OpenGL.

[andrei_me]

Née Gräßlin?
Née is female. Should be Né.
And that means it changed surname after marriage?!?

English is not my native language, I'm confused by the use of french words for relationship ( fiancé etc).

So when the translator said that "nee" is for female, I got confused because I know Martin is a male name, and not a both gender name, like Karol or Zeni.

[microcode]

Née Gräßlin?
Née is female. Should be Né.
And that means it changed surname after marriage?!?

I think the feminine version is used frequently for men in English since a) women tend to adopt their spouse's name more often and b) English does not have grammatical gender so it is weird to even think that a verb would pick up a gender when used as an adjective.

[microcode]

English is not my native language, I'm confused by the use of french words for relationship ( fiancé etc).

So when the translator said that "nee" is for female, I got confused because I know Martin is a male name, and not a both gender name, like Karol or Zeni.

Yeah, it probably should be lowercase, since this is not the beginning of a sentence, but a parenthetical.

[rabcor]

Coolbeans, maybe KDE will become usable when it's done.

[slalomsk8er]

Née Gräßlin?
Née is female. Should be Né.
And that means it changed surname after marriage?!?

Yes born Gräßlin would be easier on the readers as I don't think he is french but Germann because of the ß in the Name.

[Mystro256]

I think the feminine version is used frequently for men in English since a) women tend to adopt their spouse's name more often and b) English does not have grammatical gender so it is weird to even think that a verb would pick up a gender when used as an adjective.

Indeed, this is the case... Née means either maiden name or former name in English, because apparently the English liked to take words as they pleased from other languages and have their way with it.

[unixfan2001]

Yes born Gräßlin would be easier on the readers as I don't think he is french but Germann because of the ß in the Name.

It has nothing to do with his nationality. Née applies to all nationalities and either gender. It's just a fancy way we say "former name/given name".

[timofonic]

Coolbeans, maybe KDE will become usable when it's done.

That would be an amazing and heroically effort challenge to achieve. KDE is filled with bloat and crap, most of the crap comes from KWin.

[ssokolow]

Indeed, this is the case... Née means either maiden name or former name in English, because apparently the English liked to take words as they pleased from other languages and have their way with it.

Actually, it began with the Norman conquest of 1066, when the conquering Normans insisted that their language (a cousin to Old French) would be the language of government. The end result being that modern English descends from Old English grammar with a mixture of Old English and Old Norman words. (That's one reason English is such an outlier. We still have a grammar of germanic descent, but all the words not frequently used by peasants have been replaced by a romance lexicon.)

If it's a long English word, it's likely a loanword, either because, like words ending with -ment (eg. equipment, parliament, etc.), it came from Old Norman, or because academics had a hard-on for latin for a while. (Check out the New Anglish wiki if you want to see what English might have looked like without that effect.)

The peasants didn't learn the Old Norman grammar, so they tended to take conjugated forms of Old Norman words and then treat them as infinitives.

As for "née" vs "né", that's actually an example of a consistent rule English has developed for borrowing Norman/French words: Take the female form because it's more compatible with English pronunciation intuitiion once diacritics have been removed (eg. "active" rather than "actif", "matinee" rather than "matine", etc.), and throw out the male form because, as a language, English has a history of jettisoning noun engenderment unless it can be repurposed to produce two distinct words. (eg. "mistress" took on its own distinct meaning, leaving either a gender-neutral "master" or things like "lady of the house" to serve the original purpose.)

In the case of words ending in "ee" like "matinee", "nee", etc., the feminine form ends up winning out because, once the accent on the é is discarded by English-speaking people, the "ee" becomes the pronunciation cue. ("fiancée" is in the middle of this transition, with both "fiance" and "fiancee" being listed as valid in the dictionary, but English-speakers preferring the latter because the former looks like it should rhyme with "finance".)

A few other related bits of trivia:

1. This Norman Conquest mess is the reason English is almost unique in having separate words for living and cooked livestock. The peasants cared for them and called them "cow", "calf", "pig", etc. The lords ate them and called them "bœuf", "veau", "porc", etc.
2. Messrs. is the plural of Mr. because "Mister", though a corruption of "Master", originally comes from the French "Monsieur" (literally an archaic form of "My Sir"). Since posessives agree in number with the words they relate to in French, the plural of that is "Messieurs". ("Miss", "Mrs.", and "Ms." all descend from "Mistress".)
3. "Fuck" is the victim of the grandfather of modern smear campaigns, with the Norman lords actively trying to replace the peasants' word of choice at the time with the ancestors to modern words like "fornicate" and "copulate".
4. One of the reasons English pronunciation is so strange is that the printing press was introduced during the Great vowel shift, helping to cement spellings that were in the process of falling out of sync with spoken English.
5. Rules like "Don't split the infinitive" and "Never end a sentence with a preposition" originate in the 19th century with academics who had such a hard-on for latin that they were convinced that forcing its rules onto English would make the language better. (Spoiler: It doesn't, because English's germanic grammar managed to remain consistent and powerful throughout the centuries and mixing in latin rules runs counter ot how it's still being refined by retiring needless complexity like "use whom, not who... when its status as an indirect object is already clear from the sentence structure".)
6. The Norman conquest isn't the only thing which muddled up English, with the British isles also seeing earlier settlement by speakers of North Germanic languages. This is part of why English is technically a West Germanic language, yet we have North Germanic features, like the voiced ("this") and unvoiced ("thick") "th" consonants.

...can you tell I find this stuff fascinating. :P