Re: SOS became the international maritime distress signal (3/10/1906)

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.