From: jason_hindle@yahoo.com
On 13/11/2025 21:58, Adam Sampson wrote:
>Lawrence D’Oliveiro writes:
>
>> Henry Spencer was a name I found cropping up frequently back in the
>> heyday of Usenet.
>
>He's also responsible for saving the early history of Usenet, through
>utzoo's tape archive. Searching his archive (which I keep a local copy
>of, indexed using notmuch) for "performant" finds about 30 examples from
>1985 to 1991, the first few of which are:
>
>Dec 1985 - "expert system which can be very performant", French poster
>Aug 1986 - "most price-performant products", US poster
>Nov 1986 - "[Ethernet] cards ... quite performant", French poster
>Dec 1986 - "FTAM implementations ... performant or otherwise", US poster
>Aug 1988 - "performant hardware", French poster
>Dec 1988 - "seems to be quite performant", French poster
>Mar 1989 - "performant software", US poster
>Mar 1989 - "more performant packages", US poster
>
>So there does seem to be some influence from French usage there...
>
>archive.org's full text search also produces some results. Unfortunately
>the vast majority are OCR errors for "performance" and similar words,
>but there are a few earlier examples, such as "try to make
>[planification methods] more performant" in a 1972 Belgian paper:
>https://archive.org/details/practicalapplica0000inte/page/342/mode/2up
>
>And J. B. Sykes' "Technical Translator's Manual" from 1971 discusses it
>in the context of borrowing between languages:
>
>https://archive.org/details/technicaltransla0000unse/page/100/mode/2up
>> One such example is /performance/ from an old French /perfournir/,
>> which is now well established in modern French and has
>> characteristically gone on to make an adjective /performant/ which the
>> English parent could never hope to produce.
Well that murders my Panglish assumption (or does it)?
--
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A PICKER OF UNCONSIDERED TRIFLES
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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