Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang,soc.culture.french
Subject: Re: SOS became the international maritime distress signal (3/10/1906)
Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2024 22:29:32 +1300
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Lines: 56
Message-ID: <vdoci4$62d5$1@dont-email.me>
References: <vdls1j$3msuf$2@dont-email.me> <87frpd5dn0.fsf@parhasard.net>
 <921b5a171622611bb5fe538424ce50bf@www.novabbs.com>
Reply-To: r.clark@auckland.ac.nz
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Injection-Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2024 11:29:41 +0200 (CEST)
Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="5a947daecff45ab21e84157027580b8a";
	logging-data="199077"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org";	posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/xcCNe/3FKKyfp2Aw85AerhqQbKiO8UjA="
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/52.9.1
Cancel-Lock: sha1:w0erWGgoWf1c8yuDM+FYAq5NtoE=
In-Reply-To: <921b5a171622611bb5fe538424ce50bf@www.novabbs.com>
Content-Language: en-GB
Bytes: 3194

On 4/10/2024 8:14 p.m., HenHanna wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Oct 2024 16:56:19 +0000, Aidan Kehoe wrote:
>>
>>  Ar an triú lá de mí Deireadh Fómhair, scríobh Ross Clark:
>>
>>  > ...---...
>>  > At the First International Radiotelegraph Convention, in Berlin. The
>> Germans
>>  > had already begun using this signal.
>>
>> “In both the 1 April 1905 German law and the 1906 international
>> regulations,
>> the distress signal is specified as a continuous Morse code sequence of
>> three
>> dots / three dashes / three dots, with no mention of any alphabetic
>> equivalents.”
>>
>> So the specification of the dots and dashes came first, and given there
>> were
>> two common alphanumeric encodings for Morse code at the time, the
>> alphanumeric
>> meaning was not then specified.
>>
>>  > "neither so short as to be ambiguous nor so long as to be unwieldy"
>>  > (Crystal worded this with "too", which seems wrong.)
> 
> 
>                What was the sentence with "TOO" ?

"neither too short to be ambiguous nor too long to be unwieldy"

which doesn't make sense when you think about it.
Book needed an editor.

>>  >
>>  > It's technically a _prosign_ (procedural sign) -- a single unit, not
>> a letter
>>  > sequence.
>>  >
>>  > it's an _ambigram_ -- reads the same when flipped over (useful if
>> you've
>>  > written it on the ground and people are searching for you from
>> different
>>  > directions...)
> 
> 
> WHen i  started studying French (around age 20),  several
> mysteries got solved....
> 
> One of them was
>                 "SOS" (signal)  has nothing to do with   "May Day"

Yes, but the French source usually given ("m'aidez") is ungrammatical 
according to the Standard French we were taught. Should be "aidez-moi".
I suppose it could be understood as from "[venez] m'aider" (come and 
help me). I don't know if that's the standard explanation.