As far as 'ance' versus 'ence', this is a holdover from Latin. These words are gerunds (nouns derived from verbs). The ending are different depending on which conjugation class the original verb is in. Of course modern English has no such (obvious) distinction. English spelling has long been known to be a messy hodge-podge. Victor On Thu, Dec 26, 2013 at 2:03 PM, Joerg Arndt <arndt@jjj.de> wrote:
* Warren D Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com> [Dec 26. 2013 19:55]:
This page by Brian Skinner gives an interesting statistical analysis which concludes the fastest achievable mile time is 3min 39.6sec.
http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/the-fastest-possible-mile/
He then redid it for marathon finding 2hr 02min 43sec:
http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/the-fastest-possible-marath...
In the comments he says he thinks this estimate has an error bar of +-15 seconds, i.e. making the bold prediction that 2hr 2min will never happen.
if these true, the best athletes so far were already quite near to best possible performances.
Modulo chemistry and acceptance of a short life span.
OT: Is there a rule for words ending as *ance or *ence how to pick 'a' versus 'e'? (Without spell-checker I'd be doing it more often wrong than right by now; "Just do it the other way round" is not considered a valid answer).
Best, jj
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