Re: What does "Ma" mean, from "Ma Gnus"?

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

Byung-Hee HWANG "(황병희)" wrote:

>> I am in subway, Seoul. This is evening time.
>> While reading the Gnus history at Internet,
>> i have some question. What does "Ma" mean,
>> from "Ma Gnus"? Also is that Japanese word
>> or English word or Norwegian word? My head
>> is swimming with this question. Still there
>> is no answer in my dictionary, in my
>> google search.
>
> At wikitionary, i saw Magnus' meaning, it is
> "Great". So "Ma Gnus" is "The Great
> Gnus!"?!?!
>
> Wonderful world!!!

Magnus is "great" (or "big") as well as a very
common name. I always thought of it as
Scandinavian in origin as it is very common
here, but even as I kid I read the Transformers
comic, and there is an "Ultra Magnus" character
there so perhaps it is international as
well (or "by now").

But, "Ma Gnus" may be an unintentional pun as
the "Ma" is actually the Unicode 0x771F char,
which is the Han char for "real, actual, true,
genuine" and the Japanese "Ma" (or "MAKOTO
MAKOTONI MA", whatever that means). [1]
    
How it works in terms of technology is
described here [2]

    Development is done using "named versions",
    whose first letters run backwards in the
    alphabet; "No Gnus" v0.19 was released in
    early 2012, and development transitioned to
    "Ma Gnus". No named version ever reaches
    1.0, instead when it is considered stable
    enough for general release, it sheds its
    name and gets packaged with as simply "Gnus
    <version number>".

Here is a chart of the Japanese alphabet

    http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eHJ73pG03uE/T0D2xd0Q1iI/AAAAAAAAAkM/9zU_SPcUe0U/s1600/Katakana_image.jpg

So now it should be a quick fix to figure out
what the next version name should be :)

[1] http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/771f/index.htm

[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Ma-Gnus.html
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnus

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