{"id":521,"date":"2003-02-05T22:49:42","date_gmt":"2003-02-05T22:49:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunpig.com\/mt-entry-521.html"},"modified":"2006-09-23T19:30:11","modified_gmt":"2006-09-23T19:30:11","slug":"mondrian-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2003\/02\/05\/mondrian-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"Mondrian Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Mondrian Machine<\/a> (via forty.something<\/a>)<\/i> is more than just a cool web toy that allows you to create your own neoplasticist<\/a> art. It is also an interesting illustration of the capabilities of Opera 7<\/a>‘s new DHTML engine. The toy works by using JavaScript to alter the structure of the web page after it has been rendered to your screen. Opera 6 can’t handle this, but Opera 7 just breezes through it without a problem. Sweet.<\/p>\n

On a completely different note, “Mondria<\/b>n” is the English spelling of the artist’s surname (“Mondriaa<\/b>n”). When an English speaker pronounces “Mondrian” the “a” is long. If a Dutch speaker pronounces that spelling, the “a” is short, and it would sound something like “Mondree-uhn”. The long “a” sound in Dutch is represented by the digraph “aa”. To illustrate this, check Google. When you search for “Mondriaan”<\/a>, most of the top search results (18,800 pages in total) are in Dutch. If you search on “Mondrian”<\/a>, you get predominantly English pages (103,000 of them).<\/p>\n

What baffles me, though, is why his first name doesn’t seem to have undergone a similar anglicization. A typical English speaker hearing a Dutch speaker pronounce “Piet” would spell it “Pete”. So why hasn’t he become “Pete Mondrian”?<\/p>\n

Linguistic drift. Gotta love it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Mondrian Machine<\/a> (via forty.something<\/a>)<\/i> is more than just a cool web toy that allows you to create your own neoplasticist<\/a> art. It is also an interesting illustration of the capabilities of Opera 7<\/a>‘s new DHTML engine. The toy works by using JavaScript to alter the structure of the web page after it has been rendered to your screen. Opera 6 can’t handle this, but Opera 7 just breezes through it without a problem. Sweet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the_web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}