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Re: Spelling and Grammar in our e-mails



Bob Sciamanda <trebor@VELOCITY.NET>
Sent by: Forum for Physics Educators <PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu>
03/10/2003 09:36 AM
Please respond to Forum for Physics Educators


To: PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu
cc:
Subject: Re: Spelling and Grammar in our e-mails
The example presented below can be justified as an illogical though
conventional construction which preserves certain words from a subsidiary
phrase, uttering them in the place of an adjective. The preserved words
should be linked by hyphens, as in "seven-foot person". The corresponding
fully-developed phrase would be "person who is seven feet tall". After
certain words are preserved and moved, plurals become singular and all
times become present. This construction is impossible in Romance languages
like Spanish and Portuguese, which only admit the fully-developed phrases.
This is a challenge for technical translators, which encounter many
hyphenated adjectives in English text. I restore the full phrase before
translation from English to Romance. I test the logic of the full phrase
by using Kellogg-Reed sentence diagrams. See the following URLs for more
info:
<http://nweb.pct.edu/homepage/staff/evavra/indexGR.htm>
<http://www.polysyllabic.com/olddiagrams.html>



George Hellman
Hughes Network Systems
San Diego CA







What this basketball team needs is a "seven foot center". Who among us
would
replace "foot" with "feet"?

A large part of the difficulty is that the presently accepted English
language
is far from rational in spelling, pronunciation and grammar. But I agree
that
the we might make a better effort at preserving what rationality there is.

Bob Sciamanda (W3NLV)
Physics, Edinboro Univ of PA (em)
trebor@velocity.net
http://www.velocity.net/~trebor


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