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Comment by boxfire | Hacker News Reader

Having dæmon instead of daemon in the article makes my blood boil a little, but I managed to push through. The ligature has no place in writing about computer daemons. It might apply if we were having a talk about medieval literature regarding demons.

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>Until the early twentieth century, the œ and æ ligatures had been commonly used to indicate an etymological connection with Latin or Greek.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_that_may_be_spel...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/daemon

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/d%C3%A6mon

Can you provide a solid source so I can fix all of this apparently-wrong information?

The word for computer "daemon" has an etymological connection to the daemon you are linking to here, it does not mean that it is the same word.

When you take an existing word and add a trade-specific meaning, you are not creating a new word.

If that were the true, Etymology itself would be meaningless, because words coming from other words would be considered "the same".

Yes, but the spellings valid in the trade context may differ from the spellings valid for the other meanings of the word. Consider "dialog" vs. "dialogue", or "disc" vs. "disk" (which have different connotations for the two spellings).

yep

> According to Fernando J. Corbato who worked on Project MAC in 1963, his team was the first to use the term daemon, inspired by Maxwell's demon, an imaginary agent in physics and thermodynamics that helped to sort molecules.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)#Etymology

I'd appreciate the cool factor if computing stuck with the ligature, but I wouldn't appreciate looking up how to type it every time.

I'd appreciate the cool factor if computing stuck with the ligature, but I wouldn't appreciate looking up how to type it every time.

Just for the curious, in Vim (possibly other Vi derivatives?) you can press Ctrl-K, A, E in sequence: æ (copy/pasted from my terminal).

Yeah, it's an attempt at being overly correct where it is, in fact, not correct.

It's a little bit comparable to taking a german name like "Oehler" and writing it "Öhler", because you realize that "Oe" is a digraph for "Ö" (and the name's pronunciation matches that), when in fact the name "Oehler" is written as "Oehler".

For exactly the same reason you might be tempted to write daemon as "dämon" because, again, digraph and pronunciation match, and the german word Dämon is actually correct, yet it still wouldn't be right to do that for what is known as a "daemon" in operating systems.

It's like "virii" or "octopi" or other hypercorrect mistakes.

EDIT: "viruses" and "octopuses", please. Maybe possibly potentially "octopodes."

It's a historical spelling, not misapplying a grammatical rule outside of its scope. I don't see the resemblance.

It's a mistake from hypercorrection. It's not a historical spelling, it's a misspelling.

>It's not a historical spelling

If you don't accept online evidence, will you accept a picture of a dictionary from 1933 listing it as a valid spelling?

It's a new coinage, after the ae ligature had fallen into disuse. Would you expect that "browser" should be spelled "browƒer"?

Uh, that's a font choice, so yes you can do that.

It is not just a font choice, it is a different set of characters that share some connection.

The same way as you can't just spell any german word that contains digraphs for Umlauts with the actual Umlauts. I made the "Oehler"/"Öhler" example above. People who are named Oehler would probably be pretty annoyed at your insistence to spell their name wrong, just like people here are annoyed at your spelling of daemon.

I assume you do not come from a country which has an extended latin alphabet? In Germany for example, it is pretty common to clarify how to spell such names on the phone, like saying "Mueller with U-E". If that would be a font choice, this would not be an issue.

Long s is the same character as short s. OE and Ö are not the same character.

æ is a ligature in some contexts, and its own letter in others.

None of which matters to the original question.

ſ and s is not the same character – in some languages at some times, it was used to mark a sharper s.

Combined with the z, from ſz came ß later.

Conceded. I still think the ae ligature in "Unix daemon" is a misspelling or usage failure.

There were no operating system daemons in 1933. You are proving the wrong thing, namely that the ligature is a valid way to spell a mythological daemon.

The videogame Natural Selection introduced fictional alien monsters, among them the "Onos", which resembles an elephant with the head of a rhinoceros. There were many debates about how to pluralize this - both "Onoses" and "Onii" feel improper.

> The ligature has no place in writing about computer daemons.

Surely we only write the simplified 'daemon' because for several decades mass-market typesetting was too limited to handle the ligature? Under the covers, if you will, it has always had æ in it but the UI was unable to render it.

Pedantically we should still all write encyclopædia but it fell out of custom in casual use because of the awkwardness of typing it.

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