bug#28790: [PATCH] Replaced "which see" with "q.v.".

[John Williams]

To replace "which see" with something more conventional, I think you'd
have to re-word the whole sentence in most cases. So like, "See also
cromulate-frobnicator, which is called by snarf-spavicle in GUI
environments", as opposed to something like "In GUI environments,
snarf-spavicle calls cromulate-frobnicator, which see." At the moment
I can't think of any any natural-sounding way to introduce a cross
reference in English prose that isn't some type of imperative verb
phrase.

Tangent: "which see" fails to parse for me because it sounds like
"cromulate-frobnicator" is supposed to be the subject of "see" rather
than the object. The only time I'd expect to see "which see" would be
as a modifier to a noun phrase like "the cameras, which see everything
that happens". I suspect you could get away with something like "quod
vide" because Latin is a lot more flexible about word order, and
English-speaking authors just blindly copied the Latin phrase without
accounting for the rather large grammatical differences between
English and Latin. It wouldn't be the first time English-speaking
academics tried to apply Latin rules to English grammar in a totally
silly way, like when they invented the concept of a split infinitive,
or when they started insisting you can't end a sentence with a
preposition.

I still maintain that "which see" is an anachronism that the vast
majority of English speakers will find meaningless at best, and
confusing at worst, but since RMS already said he disagrees, I don't
see much point in pressing the issue further without collecting some
hard data on English usage, and that seems like it would be an
excessively quixotic pursuit.

On Sat, Oct 14, 2017 at 5:19 PM, João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com> wrote:
> Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>
>>> The absolute majority of your proposed changes are in the doc strings,
>>> where we already have a direct link to the documentation of a symbol
>>> whose name precedes "which see".  So whether the reader understands
>>> that or doesn't, the link is already there to click on, and no harm is
>>> done by a relatively rare use of this phrase.
>>
>> IMO there is no benefit either, as you explain above. "which see" is an
>> anachronism in the age of hyperlinks.
>
> For me, it has the benefit that it allows me emphasize that the
> hyperlink preceding is more important than usual, almost a pre-requisite
> for understanding the current one.  I use "which see" because it's terse
> and a conventional phrase. Until this discussion I thought it was a
> widely accepted convention, even outside Emacs, I now understand that it
> is not, but if you "forbid it" I have to start writing things like "(the
> documentation of which is required/suggested to fully understand this
> item)" which says the same but is a bit long-winded.
>
> João