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What's new: History of Changes at the AUE Web Site
 

On this page the webmaster logs additions to the alt-usage-english.org site, and significant changes to the content. Minor changes, and changes that affect only presentation, are usually not logged.

Old versions of this site can be viewed using the Wayback Machine.

  • 30 Jun 2005

    Lawrence Paros and Dave Middleton's A Word With You site (www.wordwithyou.com) no longer exists. Entries relating to it no longer appear in the Multi-Site Search and Index.

  • 22 Jun 2005

    Addition to the Links page: a Dictionary of Famous People: Biographies for over 130,000 famous people.

  • 30 May 2005

    New picture in the gallery: Katy Jennison.

  • 16 May 2005

    Addition to the Links page: an Edinburgh accent from the Gazetteer for Scotland. Recorded as a WAV file.

  • 29 Jul 2003

    Some MP3 files in the Audio Archive were found to end prematurely. The files concerned have now been reconverted from the WAV versions. Thanks to Bob Cunningham for identifying the files concerned and for creating the new versions.

  • 11 Jul 2003

    Most of the e-mail addresses on this site are now disguised to prevent them being collected for spam (see a sample: the webmaster's e-mail address). Some addresses have been left unchanged for various reasons; most of them are in Mark Israel's FAQ, which I prefer not to change unless strictly necessary, and is in any case freely available elsewhere on the web.

  • 8 Jul 2003

    Added a report of the June 2003 Oxford Boink.

    New picture in the gallery: Christopher Johnson (removed 3 Aug 2003).

  • 20 Jun 2003

    Addition to the Links page: WordReference.com Uses Collins dictionaries to provide English definitions and translations (French, German, Italian, and Spanish).

  • 7 May 2003

    Added a report of the April 2003 Manchester Boink.

  • 25 Mar 2003

    Addition to the Links page: Bob Cunningham's AUE-related pages.

  • 17 Mar 2003

    Added a report of the February 2003 London Boink.

  • 16 Feb 2003

    Added the link at the top of this page to the Wayback Machine.

  • 9 Feb 2003

    New picture in the gallery: Larry Phillips.

  • 9 Oct 2002

    New picture in the gallery: Jacqui.

    Updated picture in the gallery: Rob Bannister.

  • 5 Sep 2002

    Added the 2002 Summer Doldrums Competition.

  • 7 Aug 2002

    Added a new section to the Newsgroup page, describing previous Summer Doldrums Competitions.

    Added a link to Tony Cooper's New letter to Sis from the Newsgroup page.

  • 16 Jul 2002

    Added a new link to the Links page: Glossarist "a searchable directory of glossaries and topical dictionaries".

    Added a report of the July 2002 London Boink.

  • 26 Jun 2002

    Added a new page to the FAQ Supplement: Humorous Rules for Writing ("Fumblerules," "Perverse Rules," etc.), by Donna Richoux.

  • 25 Jun 2002

    The "Links to Official Usenet Documents" page has been deleted and replaced with a link to a similar page at www.faqs.org.

  • 20 Jun 2002

    The "Perlfect Search" has been renamed the "Multi-Site Search". The "Concordance Search" has been replaced by the "Multi-Site Index", which looks remarkably similar to the Concordance search, but the pages are now generated on request using a CGI script. Previously the Perfect Search and the Concordance Search each used independent text analysis methods, with slightly different results. Now, the Multi-Site Search and the Multi-Site Index use a common analysis method, so the results are always the same whichever tool you choose.

    Added a link to Tony Cooper's Letter to Sis - Recap of threads from the Newsgroup page.

  • 13 Jun 2002

    Added report of the "Not a" Boink.

  • 11 Jun 2002

    Addition to the Links page: Voice of America Pronunciation Guide, with sound files. Mainly names of people in the news.

  • 4 Jun 2002

    The ASCII IPA (combined) page has been extensively revised. The "A Quick Look" section has been extracted to a separate page, ASCII IPA in a nutshell. Thanks to Bob Cunningham for his assistance.

    New picture in the gallery: Neville X. Elliven.

  • 29 May 2002

    The pictures on the "Unknowns" page were transferred to the AUE Gallery: Orne Batmagoo, Laura Spira as the Queen of Hearts, Bun Mui?. The "Unknowns" page was deleted.

  • 26 May 2002

    Added a link to Bob Cunningham's site from the Formant Analysis page.

    Added a link to Tony Cooper's Letter to Sis - Irony from the Newsgroup page.

  • 16 May 2002

    The page Markus Laker's Interlinear ASCII IPA (markusinterlinear.html) has been deleted. Its contents have been transferred to the Interlinear transliterations of ASCII IPA page.

  • 8 May 2002

    New page: Dublin Boink, 27 April 2002.

    New pictures in the gallery: Padraig Breathnach, Natti Glouchova.

  • 24 April 2002

    The home page has been rewritten in a narrative style, and has navigation links on the left rather than at the bottom. The new-style navigation links will gradually be installed in other pages (but not UCLE) as time allows.

  • 5 April 2002

    The word index of www.yaelf.com is now included in the Perlfect and Concordance searches.

  • 2 April 2002

    The word index of Michael Quinion's World Wide Words is now included in the Perlfect and Concordance searches.

  • 31 March 2002

    New picture in the gallery: Satchi.

  • 27 March 2002

    Three more new pictures in the gallery: Tony Cooper, Albert Peasemarch, and Joe Manfre.

  • 26 March 2002

    New picture in the gallery: Evan Kirshenbaum.

  • 25 March 2002

    New pictures in the gallery: Mickwick and Michael Hardy.

  • 21 March 2002

    Additions to the Links page: Etymology Online and the Internet Grammar of English.

  • 18 March 2002

    New picture in the gallery: Mike Oliver.

  • 10 March 2002

    The Perlfect and Concordance searches now provide direct links to articles on these sites:

    Previously the searches provided links to echoed index of these pages, resident on this site. The echoed index pages have been removed.

  • 5 March 2002

    The Perlfect search now provides direct links to articles on the Random House Mavens' Word of the Day site. (The Concordance search has done this for some time, but until now the Perlfect search has provided links to an echoed index page).

    The Word of the Day index page, that was previously an "echoed index", has been removed from this site - click the link in the previous paragraph to see the original version on the Random House site.

    The second-level indexes of the Concordance Search have been rearranged. Instead of one large page for "Numbers and symbols", there are now ten pages, one for each of the digits 0-9. Symbols are now disregarded, so, for instance, "-able" is included with "able" on the "a" page.

  • 1 March 2002

    The high-definition master copy (750 Kb) of the Totally Wonderful AUE logo is now available.

  • 23 February 2002

    The FAQ Supplement was extensively reorganised:

    • All articles were removed from the FAQ Supplement page, and put in new pages. The Supplement page now contains only categorised links to other pages on this site.
    • Some material was removed from the FAQ Supplement and placed on a new page, The alt.usage.english Newsgroup.
    • Other non-FAQ-type material was relocated to various parts of the site.

    The "Resources" pages was renamed Links to better reflect its content.

    Navigation facilities were added to the Intro pages.

  • 15 February 2002

    The Perlfect search now includes some pages that were previously included only in the Concordance search. These are AUE-related pages that exist on sites other than alt-usage-english.org - John Lawler's English Grammar FAQ and Bob Cunningham's AUE statistics.

    John Lawler's index page, that was previously an "echoed index", has been removed from this site - click the link in the previous paragraph to see the original version on John Lawler's site.

  • 13 February 2002

    Restored an echoed index to the site: Jack Lynch's Guide to Grammar and Style (removed 10 March 2002).

  • 28 January 2002

    New picture in the gallery: Matti Lamprhey.

  • 24 January 2002

    New article by Don Aitken: What is the UK? Is it the same as Britain, Great Britain or England?.

  • 15 January 2002

    The Perlfect search page results are now shown 20 to a page instead of 5.

  • 30 December 2001

    "Search" links from the home page, from the site links at the bottom of every page, and from some other places have been changed to go to the Perlfect search page instead of the Concordance search page.

  • 18 December 2001

    Mark Israel's list of language terms with definitions, previously available from the Language Resources page, was removed from the site because of concerns over copyright issues (possibly unfounded concerns, but I'm playing safe). It is hoped to reinstate this page soon, but this is only a hope.

  • 7 December 2001

    The "UCLE Corner" material was moved from www.ucle.org/aue/ucle to its former location at alt-usage-english.org/ucle, reversing the change made on 3 September 2001. Similarly, the AUE Audio Archive material was moved from www.ucle.org/aue/archive to its former location at alt-usage-english.org/archive, reversing the change made on 2 September 2001.

  • 6 December 2001

    I (Mike Barnes) took over the webmaster's role. Bob Cunningham kindly agreed to advise me during my familiarisation with the site contents and procedures.

  • 1 December 2001

    UCLE Corner "Pear-shaped"
    Added supplementary comments.

  • 17 November 2001

    I (Bob Cunningham) have announced in the newsgroup that I'm stopping my involvement with the AUE Web site effective immediately, except for some things I want to tidy up to leave things in better order.

  • 9 November 2001

    Speech examples
    Added a sound file submitted by a speaker who spent her early years in Tennessee.

  • 29 October 2001

    AUE Photo Gallery
    Added Rob Bannister.

  • 26 October 2001

    AUE Photo Gallery
    Added Zadne.

  • 24 October 2001

    Rhetoric vocabulary
    Fixed some browser problems in the the Language terms list.
    (The letter index was working okay with Opera 5 and Internet Explorer 5, but
    not with either of two Netscape browsers.)

  • 17 October 2001

    Fast FAQ.
    The FAQ-excerpt files weren't working with Netscape 4.75, although they worked fine with three other browsers. The problem had to with automatic substitution of "/" for "\" in a certain directory string. Netscape 4.75 wouldn't do it; the others, including Netscape 6.1, would. Now fixed.

  • 15 October 2001

    AUE Photo Gallery.
    Felix.

  • 11 October 2001

    AUE Photo Gallery.
    Laura Spira's picture has been copied - with her permission - from the gallery of unknowns to the gallery of photos with names.

  • 10 October 2001

    FAQ Supplement/Pronunciation/Formant Analysis plots.
    Formant analysis of Mark Barratt's "a" vowels in "Can a cat man a catamaran?".

  • 6 October 2001

    Resources.
    Color charts
    3D color charts <http://www.worldworks.com/colors/color.htm>, 216 cross-platform compatible colors.
    Dictionaries
    History of Webster's Dictionary, from Noah Webster's 1828 first edition
    through the controversy over Webster's Third New International.
    Webster's 1828 dictionary.
    Grammar and style guides
    The Apostrophe Protection Society.
    The Elements of Style, William Strunk, Jr., 1918.
    An overall index of topics in Professor Charles Darling's
    Guide to Grammar and Writing.
    Learning English
    Irregular English Verbs, Lists and tools for learning.
    Miscellaneous, not language related
    List of Virus hoaxes, by Symantec.
    Monetary exchange rates.
    Virus catalog, Symantec.
    White House web site -- Full texts of speeches and radio addresses.
    Web-design utilities.
    TABLEs on non-TABLE Browsers (2nd Ed., 1998)
    World Wide Web Consortium Web site.

  • 25 September 2001

    Search the Site.
    After the "UCLE Corner" files and the Audio Archive files were moved to www.ucle.org, the Concordance was not providing valid links to them. That situation has now been corrected. Perlfect Search will not provide links to those files, since it's inherently limited to coverage of the site where it's resident.

  • 24 September 2001

    Feedback.
    Added some comments to help Usenet beginners.

  • 19 September 2001

    Resources, Words about words.
    Yet another English Language FAQ <http://www.yaelf.com>.
    Resources, Audio references
    International Dialects of English Archive <http://www.dialectsarchive.com/>.
    Audio Archive, Other sound files <http://alt-usage-english.org/audio_archive.shtml#sundryfiles>
    International Dialects of English Archive. See previous entry.

  • 11 September 2001

    AUE FAQ Supplement, Grammar.
    New: Thou, thee & archaic grammar (A. Davies, R. Lipton, D. Richoux et al)

  • 10 September 2001

    Resources, Words about words.
    The OED Word of the Day feature is no longer free online. It's now available only to subscribers to the Online OED.

  • 5 September 2001

    Updated Posting volume history with August 2001 totals.
    I've deleted the columns that pertained to numbers shown by Dejanews. I don't know if Google will ever furnish monthly totals the way Deja did.

  • 3 September 2001

    The "UCLE Corner" material has been moved to a different location. [This change was reversed on 7 December 2001]
    If you use a bookmark for the old URL, you should get a notice of the move and a link to the new location.

  • 2 September 2001

    The AUE Audio Archive has been moved to a different location. [This change was reversed on 7 December 2001]
    If you use a bookmark for the old URL, you should get a notice of the move and a link to the new location.

  • 1 September 2001

    "Exception proves the rule"
    In the Fast FAQ file <http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxtheexc.html>,
    added a link to <http://alt-usage-english.org/exception_proves.html>,
    which discusses Cicero's use of this phrase in 56 BC.

  • 31 August 2001

    Removed the full version of Mark Israel's FAQ from the AUE Web site. Changed links to the FAQ file at his site http://www.english-usage.com/faq.html

  • 28 August 2001

    File <http://alt-usage-english.org/ascii_ipa_choice.html>
    Added links to Evan Kirshenbaum's ASCII IPA specification files.
    UCLE Corner, Rivers in London.
    Noted a differing opinion.

  • 27 August 2001

    Resources, Rhetoric vocabulary and Glossaries.
    A list of definitions of the terms in Mark Israel's list of language terms.

  • 25 August 2001

    Resources, Fun with words
    Lots of different word topics: <http://rinkworks.com/words/>.

  • 13 August 2001

    Resources, Rhetoric Vocabulary
    Added links for frameless displays at the BYU "Silva Rhetoricae" site.

  • 12 August 2001

    Resources, Dictionaries
    The Century Dictionary
    An encyclopedic dictionary of English considered by many to be the finest ever produced in the US.

  • 9 August 2001

    FAQ Supplement, Miscellany
    Posting volume history updated for July.

  • 01 August 2001

    Resources Collections of Web links
    New URL for Brian Kelk's phonetic alphabets and lists of word lists
    Resources, Encyclopedias
    _Encyclopedia Britannica_ is no longer free online.

  • 27 July 2001

    FAQ Supplement, Spelling
    Absurdities of English spelling by Henry Sweet (1845-1904)
    Spellng Reform, "clearing away 13 bad arguments against" it

  • 26 July 2001

    Resources, Measurement conversion
    National Institute of Standards and Technology General Tables of Units of Measurement
    How long is a yard? <"http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Metrics/ftmtr2.htm> Two different standard yards.

  • 25 July 2001

    Resources, Color charts
    Replaced defunct 140-color chart with one that works, <http://members.tripod.com/~Graphics4Webbers/EasyColorChart.html>. At this sitting, the background change works with Netscape 4.75 and Internet Explorer, but not with Netscape 6 or Opera.

  • 21 July 2001

    Mark Israel's updated version of his FAQ
    In the version of Mark Israel's FAQ at the UCLE/AUE Web site, a note has been added telling about Mark Israel's updated version of his FAQ and providing a link to it. His update mainly consists of providing current URLs to replace ones that had become obsolete. He has also removed notes that have been added that don't pertain to updating URLs.

  • 16 July 2001

    Concordance Interface
    Expanded the note that discusses the reasons for choosing between Perlfect Search and the Concordance.

  • 15 July 2001

    Totally Official

    Added pictures for Big Apple Boink 2001
    Added pictures for London Mini Boink

  • 05 July 2001

    Posting-volume history

         Added totals for May and June 2001
    In the past two months there has been a great increase in crossposting between AUE and AEU.

  • 01 July 2001

    Intro B

         New version dated 2001-07-01.
    Principal difference is the addition of a link to XREFER. (See below, under 22 June 2001.)

  • 22 June 2001

    Resources: Online reference books

         xrefer - "the web's reference engine"
    "Free access to over 50 reference titles containing more than 500,000 entries", including Burchfield's _The New Fowler's Modern English Usage_, _The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations_, and _The Oxford Companion to the English Language_.

  • 22 June 2001

    Resources: Audio References

    Added links to sound files:
    Canadian Speech - Illustrations of "Canadian raising".
    DARE - "Arthur the Rat" by a variety of American English speakers in tandem.
    Eamonn McManus - His pronunciations of "hock" and "hawk".
    Jamaican patois - Selected phrases illustrated by poor-quality recordings.

  • 20 June 2001

    Concordance Interface

    I have enlarged the scope of the Concordance at the AUE Web site to cover the full contents -- not just the index -- of all of the AUE FAQ files at John Lawler's Web site. Items in the Concordance that are preceded by "Lawler <name>:", where "<name>" is the name of a file, will link directly to that file at his site.

  • 18 June 2001

    AUE FAQ Supplement

         Grammar:
    Damian Conway's plural-formation paper

  • 15 June 2001

    AUE FAQ Supplement

         Echoed remote indexes:
    Random Houses Maven's Word of the Day (removed 5 March 2002)
    Concordance hits on this site, like those on Michael Quinion's
    World Wide Words, will go directly to the Random House Web Site
    rather than through an intermediate index.

  • 11 June 2001

    Concordance search engine

         Fixed a shortcoming in the concordance generator's handling of multiword entries in the Quinion index. The individual words in a multiword index entry were not being recognized and assigned to concordance entries. For example "cut the mustard" was given a concordance entry, but "mustard" was not".

  • 18 May 2001

    Comments about Daniel McGrath

  • 8 May 2001

    Concordance search engine

         The organization of the Concordance interface file has been modified to use smaller individual concordance files. As stated in the notes to the interface file, the original rule was that no concordance file should exceed 50 kilobytes in size. Most of the files had grown to exceed that limit by a factor of two or more. The entries in the concordance selection table have been increased in number and have been proportioned to get concordance files that are about 40 kilobytes maximum. The reason for doing this is to avoid a longer download time each time you click on a link in the selection list.

  • 8 May 2001

    Concordance search engine

         Enhanced concordance generator now gives direct links to World Wide Words.

  • 2 May 2001

    AUE FAQ Supplement

         Echoed remote indexes:
    Jack Lynch's Guide to Grammar and Style (removed 10 March 2002)

  • 1 May 2001

    AUE FAQ Supplement

         Echoed remote indexes:
    Garbl's Editorial Style Manual (removed 10 March 2002)

  • 25 April 2001

    AUE FAQ Supplement

         Echoed remote indexes:
    Paul Brians' Common Errors in English (removed December 2001)

  • 20 April 2001

    AUE FAQ Supplement

         Echoed remote indexes:
    Evan Morris's Word Detective (removed 10 March 2002)

  • 18 April 2001

    AUE FAQ Supplement

         Echoed remote indexes:
    John Lawler's AUE FAQ index (removed 15 February 2002)

  • 13 April 2001

    AUE FAQ Supplement

         Echoed remote indexes:
    A Word With You index (removed 10 March 2002)

  • 11 April 2001

    AUE FAQ Supplement

         Echoed remote indexes: (new heading)
    Quinion's World Wide Words index
    Wilton's Etymology Page index (removed 10 March 2002)

  • 3 April 2001

    Resources

         Collections of Web links:
    E. L. Easton's English online
    A wealth of links to resources on many aspects of English.
    Dictionaries:
    Cambridge International Dictionary of English
    This may be the only available source for American pronunciations using the International Phonetic Alphabet.
    Humor:
    Comedy Central
    Miscellaneous, language related:
    French vowel chart
    Positions of French vowels in the vowel quadrilateral.

  • 22 March 2001

    UCLE Corner

    "Home" links in UCLE files were asking for "index.shtml". There was no file by that name in the UCLE directory. Changed the name of "index.html" to "index.shtml" and changed the link in the AUE home directory. (Please let the webmaster know if any "404"s show up because something is looking for an "index.html" in UCLE.)

  • 21 March 2001

    Search the Site

             Updated Concordance index files and Perlfect Search index file.

  • 20 March 2001

    Word Origins

             Updated links to Dave Wilton's etymology page.

  • 16 March 2001

    Online dictionaries

             Noted in the FAQ that a reference to a UNIX OED is no longer valid.

    Words about words

             Added "Vocabula" to Resources.

  • 2 March 2001

    Formant analysis

             Added formant analysis of Bob Cunningham's pronunciations of "hing", "hean", "hin", and "hit".

  • 28 February 2001

    Gallery of Desconocidos (transferred to the Gallery on 29 May 02)

    Added a picture of a happy lady.

    AUE Photo Gallery

    Added more pictures of Tootsie.

    Resources

    Audio references:
    Added "Animal sounds"
    Added "Russian alphabet, sounds"
    Collections of Web links:
    Added "Dogpile"
    Lexicons:
    Added "Financial Terms"
    Humor (Added):
    Added "Bushisms"
    Miscellaneous, language related:
    Added "Accents in the UK"
    Added "Scouse, comments from the Guardian about Liverpool accents"
    Miscellaneous, not language related:
    Added "e-mail safety rules"
    Added "Mapquest"
    Words about words:
    Updated Phrontistery URL

 

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