Suppose I want to say that I'm at sea seven months out of twelve. (Just an example.)
I think I can say
"I'm at sea 7 months a year"
or
"I'm at sea 7 months per year"
or
"I'm at sea 7 months out of a year"
and in all three cases I would be correct. (Again, I think, feel free to correct me!) But what's the difference? And which one would be the more appropriate?
We must stop, even if briefly.
I suppose this is equivalent to even if it is/be briefly?
But what does "it" stand for? The act of stopping? But a noun cannot be connected to the adverb "briefly" like that, right? I suppose we could assume this is a passive construction where "done" is deleted, but I don't really think that's correct.
Answer
This sentence
We must stop, even if briefly.
is a subordination by means of the subordinating conjunction 'even if'.
The subordinate clause 'even if briefly' means in this sentence 'even if [we must stop] briefly', where the part in brackets is stripped to avoid repetition and because it can be inferred.
In the non-stripped sentence you can see the verb on which the adverb acts.
We must stop, even if we must stop briefly.
I came across this sentence while reading Wikipedia and the second occurrence of "continuum" stood out to me as totally wrong since a continuum is specifically a range which can be divided into an unlimited number of possibilities.
"Some linguists consider the rough/soft continuum more accurate than the male/female continuum.
So what is the best word to use here to differentiate the very limited number of possibilities?
EDIT
I'm genuinely surprised that so many people find "continuum" a good way to describe a choice between "male" and "female". As a programmer I can best clarify with a programming analogy:
float typeenum or a bool type(apologies to the non-programmers who may be baffled by this jargon)
EDIT 2
I think I need to clarify what I was and was not asking:
Let me rephrase the sentence the way I read it:
Linguists generally hold that there is an option between male style and female style, but some linguists consider this inaccurate and instead hold that there is a free range between rough style and soft style.
Whereas it seems to me that some answerers and commenters have read it this way:
All linguists hold that there is a free range of style and while this range is generally referred to as a "male/female continuum", some linguists consider that calling it a "rough/soft" continuum is more accurate.
To me the first reading seems natural and second reading seems strange. The second reading seems to trust that the writer has flawless skills in English language expression and definitely wrote what he intended. Alternatively the second reading would make sense if there existed a technical linguistic term "the male/female continuum".
Since I can find no use of such a term used by linguists besides this Wikipedia article (but I can find it in other fields such as gender identity), I read it as a sentence from a writer who knew what he was thinking but due to poor word choice did not write what he intended.
When the phrase is used as an object, why so many native speakers are saying "you and I" instead of "you and me"? I'm not a native speaker but I thought "you and me" is correct. Not sure if this falls into the same category, but "Just between you and me" sounds more natural than "Just between you and I".
Answer
This is an example of hypercorrection, which is when native speakers make an accidental error in their zeal to avoid a different error.
In this case, the error that's being avoided is the error of writing "you and me" in subject position, as in the following sentence:
You and me are going to the store.
This is formally incorrect, although it's very common in contemporary spoken English. Because they have been taught that this is incorrect, many people hypercorrect and change "you and me" to "you and I" in all positions. That is, they incorrectly learn the rule about when to use "you and I", and so produce sentences like the following:
You and I are going to the store. [Correct]
He'll come to the store with you and I. [Incorrect]
I often see "replace with" and "replace by" used interchangeably, but this doesn't sound right to me:
I replaced that component by this one.
I would use "with" in such a sentence. "By" only seems reasonable in passive, although "with" sounds like it would there work too:
That component was replaced by this one.
That component was replaced with this one.
In my native language, the equivalent of "replace by" can only be used in passive, and even then it's a bit weird unless a person is the object replacing something – perhaps this affects my judgment?
Web searches haven't come up with anything conclusive; the results are contradictory and speculative at best.
Are "replace with" and "replace by" interchangeable in active context? What about passive? Are there stylistic reasons to prefer one over the other?
Answer
OP is right to suspect active/passive has a bearing on preferred usage. From Google Books...
1: Active voice favours with...
The company replaced workers by machines - 3 results
The company replaced workers with machines - 405 results
2: Passive voice favours by...
Workers were replaced by machines - 280 results
Workers were replaced with machines - 5 results
To be honest, I can't say I think there's anything wrong with the "less favoured" versions above, and it would be ridiculous to suggest there's any semantic difference. But note that whereas...
Tom replaced Dick by Harry
Tom replaced Dick with Harry
...are both equivalent (manager Tom took Dick off the team, and put Harry in instead), if we want to put that into the "passive" voice, we can only recast it as...
Dick was replaced by Tom with Harry
...or (more likely, imho)...
Dick was replaced with Harry by Tom
That's to say, if the "passive" form actually specifies the "agent", we have to use by for that agent. So we can only use with for the "replacement" in such (slightly contrived) constructions.
I can say "I will go", or "I'll go", and the both mean the same thing.
However, if you ask me "Can you go?", can I respond with "I'll" instead of "I will"?
I assume that the following sentences are grammatically correct:
- He resents your being more popular than he is.
- Most of the members paid their dues without my asking them.
- They objected to the youngest girl's being given the command position.
- What do you think about his buying such an expensive car?
- We were all sorry about Jane's losing her parents like that.
I'm still getting used to this possessive gerund structure. It sounded so weird to me at first.
Is the structure used in both formal and informal contexts? Are there any alternative structures that result in the same meaning and are more frequently used?
(Examples taken from http://grammartips.homestead.com/possessivewithgerund.html)
Answer
When I first heard about this usage in a grammar lesson in middle school, it sounded weird to me, too. As in the linked page in your answer, my teacher taught us that using possessive pronouns (also known as genitives) is the only grammatical way to mark subjects of gerund clauses. While that way is more traditional and formal, using object pronouns (accusatives) is also quite common.
In chapter 14, section 4.3, of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, entitled “Non-finite and verbless clauses”, the main thrust lays waste to the traditional distinction between gerund clauses and present participle clauses, by arguing they all belong to a single inflectional category; namely, gerund-participles. However, there is a paragraph explaining the use of genitives with gerunds:
There is one respect in which ‘gerund’ and ‘present participle’ clauses differ in their internal form: with ‘gerunds’ the subject may take genitive case, with plain or accusative case a less formal alternant, but with ‘present participles’ the genitive is impossible and pronouns with a nominative–accusative contrast appear in nominative case, with accusative an alternant restricted to informal style. Compare then:
[39] i. She resented his/him/*he being invited to open the debate.
ii. We appointed Max, he/him/*his being much the best qualified of the candidates.
In other words, gerunds (as in example 39i) can take either the genitive (his) or the accusative (him) as subject, with genitive being more formal and accusative less formal. The nominative (he) is not possible as the subject of a gerund.
In participial clauses with a subject (as in example 39ii), there is a similar situation: both the nominative (he) and accusative (him) are possible, again with accusative being less formal, but the genitive (his) is not possible.
The page of “grammar tips” linked in the question confuses informal style with incorrect grammar, a common problem in grammar advice. The versions of the examples with accusative instead of genitive (e.g. What do you think about him buying such an expensive car?) are perfectly grammatical and simply a less stuffy style.
You will find many examples of gerunds with accusative subject—even in formal academic writing—so you should feel free to use whichever of the two formulations seems natural.
Now, while I think I have come to terms with 'who' and 'whom', I read an article from Oxford Dictionaries that confused me: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/usage/who-or-whom
This article states that 'the elderly woman' and 'journalists' are the subjects of these two sentences, and thus, 'who' should be used instead of 'whom':
✗ He is demanding £5,000 from the elderly woman whom has ruined his life.
✗ Mr Reynolds is highly critical of journalists, whom just use labels to describe him.
However, I believe they are actually the objects of the two sentences. If I were to replace them with pronouns, they would be in the accusative case.
'He is demanding £5,000 from her [the elderly woman].'
'Mr Reynolds is highly critical of them [journalists].'
Because the two nouns would be in the accusative case, shouldn't 'whom' actually be used instead of 'who', despite what Oxford says? I would like to know if I am missing something here.
Thanks in advance!
The treatment didn’t work, because it was being used in/on a disease
that wasn’t a disease.
A native English speaker told me on was the correct choice.
But Google Books returns 0 results for used on a disease and 6 for used in a disease. So I'm confused. What's the correct usage and why?
Answer
I suggest you say: "treatment for a disease".
Ngram: for a disease vs in/on a disease.
When a political candidate gets an endorsement from a newspaper, the sentence would be
The Los Angeles Times gave Candidate x its endorsement.
Is it appropriate to use their instead of its if we rewrite the sentence to include editorial board?
The editorial board of the Los Angeles Times gave Candidate x their
endorsement.
I have questions about the use of no more than and no less than .
The following is the item 14. phrase of the word more from COBUILD online dictionary.
You use no more than or not more than when you want to emphasize how small a number or amount is. (emphasis) ⇒ "He was a kid really, not more than eighteen or nineteen."
The following is the item 9. phrase of the word less from COBUILD online dictionary.
You use no less than before an amount to indicate that the amount is larger than you expected. (emphasis) ⇒ "No less than 35 per cent of the country is protected in the form of parks and nature sanctuaries." ⇒ "He is lined up for no less than four U.S. television interviews."
My questions are
Why doesn't "not less than" have the same idiomatic meaning (larger than you expected) as "no less than" while "not more than" has the same idiomatic meaning as "no more than"?
How did "no more than" and "no less than" get their idiomatic meanings?
When do you take the meaning of theses phrases literally, and when do you take the meaning of theses phrases idiomatically.
Every once in a while I stumble upon this phrase:
... is subject to considerable debate
Examples are easily found on the web, for instance:
In the context of suspected cognitive disorders,
the validity of memory complaints is subject to considerable debate
However, this phrase does not seem grammatically correct to me. I could expect it to be:
... is a subject for considerable debate
in which case 'subject' is a noun, or:
... is subjected to considerable debate
where 'subject' is a verb in past participle.
Still, both alternatives are much less common, judging by the number of occurrences in Google, than the original phrase. So here are the questions:
Answer
Using the comments posted to the original question, I can assume the whole answer, which is:
In the course of answering this question (which is now deleted and may be viewed only by 10K+ community members), we have evoked some dispute over whether the phrase
Am I needing to read this book?
is grammatical. I think it is correct, although not common, but others think differently. Is this a correct grammatical structure, albeit perhaps a bit odd?
EDIT: I think I should clarify further. I don’t disagree that this phrasing is unusual; in fact, that’s what I said in the other answer. What I am interested in is whether it is correct or not. I think it is because of its uncommonness that I am not certain. It might be more straightforward to ask it this way:
Is the sentence “I am needing to read this book” grammatical? If not, why not?
Answer
I am needing to read this book
is incorrect in Standard American English in all registers (formal, informal, regional etc.). If you say this to an SAmE speaker, it will sound very strange/foreign/disfluent to them. They will interpret to mean something like "I need to read this book" which is probably what was meant.
RegDwight's comment about stative verbs seems to be a good explanation ("I am going to the store" is OK, but "I am needing... is not" because 'need' is stative (it -is- the case/expresses a state rather than a continued action (an implicit verbal aspect).
On the other hand, it seems to be acceptable phrasing in Indian English and corresponds directly to "I need to read this book".
Is it okay to describe two actions, one in Present Perfect and one in the Past Simple, inside the same sentence and with the same time indicator?
For example:
During this summer she has become very sensitive and was often seen
crying.
The time indicator here is: During this summer
The first action is: has become sensitive
The second action is: was seen crying
EDIT:
or should I stick to using Present Perfect for both actions?:
During this summer she has become very sensitive and has often been seen
crying.
Answer
Yes, it is perfectly idiomatic since the perfect and the past tenses relate to different time conditions. The different time conditions is highlighted with a present simple perfect with has become.
Despite being the same summer period, it may be a different period within that summer period. For example it may be the start of the summer period where "she has become sensitive" and you might have noticed this change towards the end of "...this summer...", different periods under the same summer period.
Let's break down the sentence:
During this summer...
indicates the summer that has just past or that they are currently in,
...she has become very sensitive...
This indicates during the course of the summer she has become noticeably more sensitive, as has become is present perfect simple - which indicates that the consequences of past actions are important in the present.
...and was often seen crying.
and consequently her sensitivity has resulted to her crying often.
This sentence is in the context of dinner.
Beans is/are our only option
I'm confused as to whether "is" or "are" is necessary in this construct.
Possible Duplicates:
Gender neutral pronoun
Is it correct to use “their” instead of “his or her”?
I am writing software documentation. I have this issue: I am talking about a generic user of the software.
Should I say “his preferences”, “his/her preferences” or “its preferences”?
Answer
The links Reg supplied are good advice, but be aware that gender-neutral language used at length can start to become clunky and unnatural to the ear. One trick I have seen to avoid that problem is to assign genders to particular use cases. In your case, you might refer to a generic user using male pronouns, while an administrator gets female pronouns. Obviously this only works when you have a reasonably good mix of cases or relative importance.
Is it correct to say "I found the map" or "I have found the map"?
Is it a correct sentence:
I just wanted a friend, who I can share my feelings with.
OR should I say
I just wanted a friend, with whom I can share my feelings.
As shown above, he misses someone mysterious, whoever that is, which
confirms to us that the feeling is not happiness nor depression, it is
emptiness.
It is a sentence from an essay my friend wrote, and I think putting "it is emptiness" without any coordinating conjunction would be seriously wrong, but he was saying things like independent clause and dependent clause so I could not quite get him. The one I suggested him was this:
As shown above, he misses someone mysterious, whoever that is, which
confirms to us that the feeling not happiness nor depression is actually
emptiness.
But he said it is not very grammatical. Which one of these sentences is correct then?
In this post, I am asking for constituency tests to assist me in writing exercises about phrasal verbs for non-native speakers of English. I respectfully ask that only native speakers answer the questions in this post.
Some background --- I am from the U.S. I am currently working as a private English tutor in Brazil. A common request from my students is an explanation of phrasal verbs. I have looked at a variety of materials on the subject, and have been thoroughly dissatisfied with all of them. The materials are either extremely superficial (read: dodging the issue) or so verbose that my students would be terrified. None of them state how they decided what is a phrasal verb and what is not with any clarity. One book by a respected publisher actually listed verbs that take both a direct and an indirect object as phrasal verbs.
I turned to the academic literature on phrasal verbs. There is plenty of discussion and controversy, but for the purposes of my exercises I chose to follow the strategy outlined in Clayton Darwin and Loretta Gray's article "Going after the Phrasal Verb: An Alternative Approach to Classification" (TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 1).
Following Darwin and Gray's strategy has proved helpful for nearly all of the verbs that I want to cover. However, there are a few that I am uncertain about. Below I have written some sentences based on their strategy, with the name of the test after each item. Please indicate your judgment of the sentence. Thank you in advance for your help.
A. I figured on $1000 for my vacation and on $500 for my cell phone. (particle repetition test)
B. On how much was he figuring? (fronting test)
C. What was the amount of money on which she was figuring? (relative clause test)
D. Mary figured and bet on a good turnout for the event. (verb insertion test)
E. A thief broke into my car and into my house. (particle repetition test)
F. Into what building did the thief break? (fronting test)
G. A thief broke silently into our building. (adverb insertion)
I want to use in-text citation about a sentence I'm borrowing from a journal article. But I'm confused on how to properly use it because the journal article also uses in-text citations on the same sentence I want to use in my paper. How solve this issue?
Related question: Did English ever have a formal version of "you"?
In Portuguese (and probably other languages as well), similar to what happens with the second-person, there are two words for "we": "nós" (formal) and "a gente" (informal, only used in colloquial speech). Both pronouns have the same meaning: they refer to the person who is talking and can include the hearer and/or other people.
Did English ever have this feature?
Answer
I don't believe English has ever systematically encoded formality in the 1st person plural. There are of course constructions like "us lot", but thes paraphrases aren't grammaticalising formality as such and their use is always completely optional.
What you might look at is the dual forms of pronouns that English used to have (so there was once a difference between "wit" = "you and me, we the two of us", and "we" = "we all as a group"). By pure statistics, it's conceivable (but I've no idea if this was actually the case or what data is available) that the dual forms occurred more often in "intimate" settings and so were 'de facto' informal forms in some sense.
Also consider the practice of using "one" as an honorific alternative to "I" or "we".
The reason I stopped smoking was that all my friends had already stopped smoking.
The reason I stopped smoking is that all my friends had already stopped smoking.
-
I wonder if the verb "was" is replaced for "is", which reflects the present time. I think it's not possible because the time I stopped smoking was the past, and the cause inspiring the determination to stop smoking was also the past thing.
Is it right?
It's common to say "a gentle wind", but is it OK to say "a wind"?
I just noticed that there's a novel named "A Wind in the Door", in which case I guess "A" could be used here due to the modifying "in the Door".
So in general, can the article "a" be used to modify "wind"? In which case yes? In which case no?
Answer
Yes, the article a can be used to precede the noun wind. However, this is a special case. For nearly all constructions, you should prefer the wind. As in, "The wind was blowing when I went to the store," or, "The wind carried my hat away."
As you stated, using the article a before wind generally occurs when you are modifying the word wind. A gentle wind, a strong wind, and a warm wind are common. You could use a wind by itself, such as, "Boy, there's a wind blowing through here tonight!" This uncommon phrasing brings emphasis to the wind, and makes the sentence stand out more than if you were to say, "The wind is blowing tonight."
In most cases, however, you should use the wind.
I think there's a difference in the ways in which sports announcers from the U.S. and U.K. refer to the teams. If my memory serves me correctly, I think announcers in FIFA from the U.K. will use forms of verbs corresponding to a singular noun; in the U.S., I believe it's the reverse. Please, correct me if I'm wrong about the two different styles across countries, but I think my question's clear enough.
He's a friend of mine.
That's a car of his.
Why do we use the possessive when the meaning would be the same while not using it (e.g. a friend of me and a car of him)? I thought maybe it is short for That's a car of his [cars], but I have no way of making sure; it sounds a little odd that way to me.
Answer
They're examples of the double genitive/possessive, which is perfectly valid and has been around in English for centuries. The of already denotes "possession", but we do this again when we use mine/his instead of me/him.
The fact that we don't say John is a friend of me/him is really just idiomatic for those particular forms. But that "idiomatic principle" isn't universally observed - people often say, for example, He's a friend of John. Though they also say a friend of John's - both forms are valid there.
Here's an NGram showing how friend of her has gradually given way to friend of hers over the past couple of centuries, as the "reach" of the idiomatic mine/his has been extended.
Why do we say The Amazon river and not The Mt.Fuji?
For example,
I climbed Mt.Fuji.
I swam in the Amazon river.
I hiked along the Silk road.
What is the proper possessive form for a surname that ends with “z”? Is it z’ or z’s?
I’m watching a law- and court-related TV show, and the following terms are being used. What are the differences between them? I’m interested in the differences in connotation if there are any. Or are they more or less interchangeable?
I’ve looked the terms up in a dictionary but since I am not a native speaker of English, I don't understand the nuances in meaning.
Definitions according to Oxford Dictionary:
Answer
In U.S. practice, the terms are used as follows:
Litigator - an attorney whose practice is focused on litigation, that is lawsuits. This is mostly used to refer to people who specialize in civil suits (suits brought by someone other than a criminal prosecution agency) seeking an award of money or an injunction (a judicial order) requiring someone to do something or stop doing something.
She was a litigator specializing in intellectual property trial work.
Counsel - This is a general term for lawyer, also known as counselor. It is frequently used to refer to a lawyer who works exclusively for one company or one agency.
He was general counsel to the NBA.
After the outburst, the Judge said "Counselor, control your client."
Attorney - this is a general term for a lawyer in both the federal and state court systems in the U.S. In general, attorneys in the U.S. are permitted all types of practice (with a few minor exception) unlike the solicitor/barrister systems elsewhere.
The attorneys who graduated from that law school went on to various jobs as litigators, criminal lawyers, corporate lawers, and in-house counsel.
Microsoft word seems to think it should be "Why are x good and y bad?" and I don't agree because that doesn't sound right. And yet I can't really think of why either should be better because "y bad" is not a complete sentence in its own right. Meanwhile, writing "Why is x good and why is y bad?" seems redundant. And if I treat "x good" and "y bad" as subjects in subject verb agreement then it leads to the really awkward sounding sentence "Why are x good and y bad?".
Possible Duplicates:
How should I phrase a question that must be answered with an ordinal number (e.g., the third prime)?
How to ask a question to get an ordinal number answer
In my native tongue, Malayalam, there is a question word - "ethraamathe" - which we use to get an ordinal number as answer. In other Indian languages, and also in many foreign languages like Dutch and German, such a question word does exist. But in English there is no one word for such a question.
I have once read in a Phantom strip cartoon book from US a sentence that uses what number. Using this expression it is easy to ask "What number president of America was Abraham Lincoln?" to which one would answer "16th". A professor from Oxford University has said in one of his letters to me that what number can be used in informal speech. In his opinion, "Where in the numerical order did Abraham Lincoln come as President of America?" can be used in writing.
I would like to know whether American and British people use ‘what number’ in their speech.
Some Indians also use how manieth as an ordinal number question.
Why do we say an historical but a history? This question was originally posed by @shanselman on Twitter.
The sentence is : 'We do not need a corrupt IMF.'
Why is there 'a' before the proper noun, IMF?
What's the difference between these two questions?
Speaker A: Your car looks very clean.
- Have you washed it?
- Did you wash it?
Answer
There is no significant difference between the two questions.
One could point out that the simple past tense used in "Did you wash it?" is prevalently used in American English, while "Have you washed it?" is more common in British English. The speaker who asks:
Did you wash it?
is referring to a action completed sometime in the past.
Another might explain that the first statement
Your car looks very clean.
is uttered by a speaker who notices that the car looks clean today. The Present Perfect tense is often used to express an action that happened in the past but whose results are felt in the present: Somebody washed the car (a completed action in the past), so the car is clean now (result in the present). However, the speaker does not know when the car was cleaned; it could have been yesterday, last night, or even just ten minutes ago.
Have you washed it?
If the speaker adds a time reference then the Simple Past tense should be used. (NB. The verb clean can also be used.)
Did you wash it yesterday?
If the speaker suspects the action happened recently, he might ask
Have you just washed it?
Present Perfect vs. Simple past questions are continuously asked on EL&U but it is very hard to find the perfect duplicate answer because there can be all sorts of reasons why one form is preferred over another.
Here is a short list of the Present Perfect vs. Simple Past questions
I have the following problem. I need to say
Among other information, [the message] will contain information about the following...
I don't like the repetition of "information" here. I thought of
Among other stuff, [the message] will contain information about the following...
I don't like the non-technical "stuff" here.
I also tried
Among everything else, [the message] will contain information about the following...
Among other things, [the message] will contain information about the following...
I don't like these either, perhaps because the message contains only information, so other things or everything else actually means other information, but using that leads to repetition (see first example).
There is a noun in Russian - прочее - which means other things, other stuff. So in Russian, I would be able to say Среди прочего [ = among other, ...]. Unfortunately, in English I can't say
Among other, [the message] will contain information about the following...
When I think about it, it seems that part of the problem is that information is uncountable. If there was a countable noun instead, I'd write, for example,
Among others, the following animals are kept in our zoo.
meaning
Among other animals...
But with information it doesn't work this well. So can you help me express what I want to express (which I hopefully made clear)?.
Answer
The phrase inter alia (“among other things”), which has the handy abbreviation i.a., sometimes is useful. For example: “The message will detail troop strengths and deployments, i.a.”. However, inter alia seems to me to be less applicable to living things.
Everybody learns in school that in conventional spoken English one uses "objective" forms of personal pronouns (me, us, him, her, them) for "predicate nominatives" where some conventional formal rules call of the "subjective" forms (I, we, he, she, they). Thus "It's me." rather than "It is I." But I only just noticed that there is another context in which even writers who are fastidious about formal rules use the objective forms where the rules seem to suggest the subjective should be used. Thus (quoting from a novel):
"What would you have done, sir?"
"Me? How can I answer that?"
One wouldn't say "Me would have done thus-and-so." but "I would have done thus-and-so." Yet one says "me" rather than "I" in sentences like that quoted above. So what do grammar books say about this and how does one explain it to foreigners learning English?
PS: It is being objected that this is like another question where someone asks why "Not me." rather than "Not I." is used in reply to "Who wants ice cream?". However, I think there are syntactic differences here.
Capstans are not the only product(s) we manufacture.
Should 'product' be singular or plural in this sentence?
Context: This particular company makes capstans in various shapes and sizes. I guess it all depends on whether we consider 'capstans' to be a product group?
Answer
Either is fine because product can serve as a count noun or mass noun, and the subject complement construction allows for either form.
The structure we're dealing with is:
A are not the only B ...
A is a plural noun. B is a noun that denotes what kind of thing A is. This is a recurring structure in English, with 842 results in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to work with. So my answer to this question may also explain some portion of the sample that use singular B with plural A. (A quick count suggests that out of the first 100 entries, 38 have singular B and 62 have plural B, so B is singular at least sometimes.)
Why, then, would product (or a similar noun) be valid in singular or plural form?
In this structure, B is a subject complement to A as connected by a linking verb, modified by an adjective (only, which customarily takes an article the, a possessive pronoun, or a possessive noun in this usage according to the Oxford English Dictionary), which is in turn modified by a negating adverb (not).
In simple examples of the subject complement found in grammar guides, when it is a noun, the number of the subject complement corresponds to the number of the subject:
Brandon is a gifted athlete. (Singular -> Singular)
He became a famous writer. (Singular -> Singular)
Both the brothers became doctors. (Plural -> Plural)
That's often true when we're dealing with count nouns, or nouns which describe a countable quantity of something. However, some nouns act as noncount nouns or mass nouns, which cannot be counted. A mass noun does not take a plural form, so when it serves as the subject complement of a plural subject, it remains unchanged:
Bananas and apples are fruit
Puppies are happiness. (Seen in the wild in this product description.)
Some mass nouns are always mass nouns. Other mass nouns are sometimes mass nouns and sometimes count nouns, or they can be converted into a count noun through usage (will you order me coffee? -> I'll have two coffees). If you read fruit and thought that making it plural would be acceptable as well, you're right, because fruit also sometimes works as a count noun to describe pieces of fruit or kinds of fruit:
Bananas and apples are fruits.
Mass nouns also sometimes convert to count nouns. In the article "The Lexical Semantics of English Count and Mass Nouns" (1999) author Brendan S. Gillon states four denotations (meanings) when mass nouns are converted to count noun:
In mass form, this is often their purpose anyway, but as count nouns they can now indicate a countable kind of/instance of/unit of/source of something. So when I say "Puppies are happiness," I'm saying puppies are an instance or source of happiness. When I say "Bananas and apples are fruit," I'm saying that bananas and apples are kinds of fruit. When fruit is converted to a count noun, "Bananas and apples are fruits" suggests that they are kinds of fruits and also that they are countable instances of this. The subject complement allows for this kind of flexibility between count and mass nouns.
So, back to product and products, either one is acceptable because product can operate as both a mass noun and a count noun in a similar way to fruit. As a mass noun, product describes the kind of thing capstans are: they are a kind of product, and "we" produce other kinds of product. As a count noun, products corresponds with capstans because (in mass noun form) capstans are a kind of product, and (now in count noun form) capstans are (countable) products. The end result is a lot of nuance between two example sentences understood in similar ways by fluent readers:
Capstans are not the only product we manufacture.
Capstans are not the only products we manufacture.
A lot of people nowadays use the phrase "photo creds" eg:
Here's an awesome photo of me! Photo creds to John!
Creds usually means credit or credits. But then you get the sentences:
Photo credits to John
Photo credit to John
Which of these is correct? If it's the latter, then it should be "photo cred to John" abbreiviated, right?
Answer
Cred is recognized as an informal slang abbreviation of credibility, not credit:
noun,
Slang.
- the quality of being believable or worthy of respect, especially within a particular social, professional, or other group:
If you wear this t-shirt, you’ll be earning geek cred.
Both chefs have plenty of Southern cred.
According to the Urban Dictionary, creds is the informal slang for credentials or credit:
Credentials earned in life by experience.
Credit given.
He talked about being in prison like it gave him creds.
Photo credit to John, is the idiomatic expression to give John credit for his creative initiative. The expression credits to is 7 times less common than credit to in searchable written media, and is predominantly used for financial credit transactions. All these expressions are linguistically related in their etymological root: credo:
late 12c., from Latin, literally "I believe," first word of the
Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, first person singular present indicative
of credere "to believe,"
perhaps from PIE compound **kerd-dhe*- "to believe," literally "to put
one's heart"
(cognates: Old Irish cretim, Irish creidim, Welsh credu "I believe,"
Sanskrit śrad-dhā- "faith"). The nativized form is creed.
General sense of "formula or statement of belief" is from 1580s.
The cutting edge of word evolution is a double-edged sword: you can make words mean anything you want, but then you never can be sure exactly what they mean.
Being a non-native English speaker I recently discovered that for some words you don't use English pronunciation. For instance you seem to be omitting the l's when saying tortilla.
Yet this isn't always the case considering that with a comparable word karaoke you don't use the Japanese pronunciation. Are there more commonly used words that are pronounced in their native tongue that I should be aware of?
Answer
I don't think there are hard-and-fast rules when it comes to words that have been recently assimilated into English. The pronunciation that usually sticks is a halfway house between the original foreign pronunciation and what is easy for Anglophones to actually say.
To take your two examples:
A word like tortilla can just be pronounced as if it were an English word, tortia, without any Spanish accent. But you will still find English speakers who pronounce the double l, just like the do with paella and Marbella, and also the j of fajita and jalapeno as [dʒ], since they are unaware of the Spanish pronunciation.
The sounds in the Japanese word karaoke are a bit more foreign. The r in there is a very different liquid to the English r, English speakers aren't used to gliding from [a] to [o], and English words seldom end with with an [e]. Hence the slightly mangled /ˌkæriːˈoʊkiː/
I need to construct a sentence, in which I'm referring to a feature of each of the animals in a given species. I don't quite know what the possessive of species should be, both in singular and plural.
Example:
(Talking about a single species with fuzzy ears.)
The species' ears are notably fuzzy.
Is the above correct? What if I had to mention multiple species all having fuzzy ears?
I'd like to know the reason for the punctuation of the noun "brush-off" and the verb "to brush off": they have related meanings, but "brush-off" is the result of "to brush off", essentially. But one cannot write "to brush-off" as that just looks weird, as it is used for the noun version.
So the question, is the hyphen often used like this in English to differentiate a derived noun from a verb?
Answer
The punctuation mark you're talking about is a hyphen, not a dash, but either would be out of place in phrasal verbs like brush off, where in some meanings, the phrase will divide:
Sarah can't stand Mark, so she brushed him off at the party.
The noun derived from this verb is written with a hyphen: brush-off, but often a word may become so entrenched in the language that the hyphen disappears and the two elements are joined into one compound word. Callback, for instance, is rapidly overtaking the hyphenated form call-back.
Possible Duplicates:
How to phrase an asking sentence that must be answered with an ordinal number?
Framing a question whose answer is an ordinal number
Given that I want to know Barack Obama is the 44th President of U.S.A, how can I frame a question like:
The how manyeth president is Barack Obama?
Answer
I'd go with the following structure:
Q: Where does Obama fall in the sequence of US presidents?
A: [He's the] 44th [president].
This reflects similar usage when discussing, for instance, rankings:
Q: Where did Harvard fall on the U.S. News & World Report list this
year?
A: 2nd.
I have to translate the title of my college work and I can't decide whether it is correct to say "Colleagues rating system" or "Colleagues' rating system", because I have often seen examples where genitive/possessive is used without apostrophe or character 's' appended to the noun. Unfortunately I have failed to find any resources for this so as a non-native speaker I must ask for your help!
How it really is? Is it possible to omit apostrophe or s in genitive?
So if I wrote:
You and I have a lot of places to go
is this wrong?
I was chatting to a friend on social media and he kept correcting me. 'You should' and 'I should' sound correct however 'me should' sounds wrong but no matter how hard I tried to explain from my side we got nowhere .
There are more Google matches for the first sentence, but the last one sounds better to me. Which one is correct?
Answer
Don't use no double negatives, as a general case. While the use of "not bad, either" is a bit on the informal side, in order to maintain proper logical sense, if you wish to use "neither", you must not use "not."
Hence:
The food was good. The drink was also good.
Becomes:
The food was good; the drink was not bad, either.
Or:
Neither the food nor the drink was bad.
Good pm, I would like to be further clarified if the following sentences are correct or incorrect, but I believe both are correct.
There is a cat and a dog.
There are a dog and a cat.
My point is, are these sentences correct? Yes or no? And why?
I'm confused with the following sentence:
In this section, we look at how the shuffle works, as a basic understanding would be helpful, should you need to optimize a Map-Reduce program.
How do I understand the grammar and the meaning of this sentence?
Answer
If you could rephrase the "should you..." part, it would become "in case...". So it would be like in the rephrased example below.
It basically means "in the event of/that...":
In this section, we look at how the shuffle works, as a basic understanding would be helpful, in case you needed to optimize a Map-Reduce program.
See also this example taken from the NOAD:
Should anyone arrive late, admission is likely to be refused.
[In case/in the event that someone arrives late, admission is likely to be refused.]
I wonder if 'in view of' or 'in the view of' have different meanings. For example, when I want to mention someone's opinion, e.g.
'In the view of Peter, doing X is a bad idea.' OR
'In view of Peter, doing X is a bad idea.'
Which one is correct? And can the other one still be used in other contexts?
Thanks for any input!
Which is correct?
You may be impressed how often the technique is being used in
industry.
You may be impressed by how often the technique is being used in
industry.
The first one is what I get used to saying in daily life. It may turn out I've been wrong for ages. I immediately noticed there might be something grammatically wrong when I wrote it. I couldn't help but add the preposition by to make the sentence correct. Is it just a matter of style?
Answer
No, by shouldn't be omitted after impressed.
In writing, people generally use by, with, or that after impressed
I'm impressed by his skill
"President Obama Is Not Impressed With Your Right To Modify His Photos"
I'm impressed that it's selling so well this soon.
A sentence like "I'm impressed how tall he is" doesn't sound like idiomatic native-speaker English to my ear, but I'm sure that people say and write it. A good copy editor will change it to "impressed by how tall" or, perhaps, "impressed with how tall", or "impressed that he's so tall".
Google Ngrams shows that
1 impressed by
and
2 impressed with
are most frequently found in books,
3 impressed that
is rarely found in books, and
4 impressed how
is never found in books. This doesn't mean that people don't say it, however: people will say anything, regardless of whether it's right or wrong.
Perhaps choosing between by and with is merely a matter of style. You'll have to decide based on context and the specific sentence whether one is better than the other. Give us some choices and we'll see what everyone else thinks -- maybe.
The more thought I give about the order of adjuncts and adjectives before a noun, the less sense it all makes. Not a native speaker, but using English on a daily basis.
For instance, in "Relational database management system", does Relational determine the system, the database or the database management?
Similarly, in "Monthly progress report", is the progress report monthly, or just the progress?
Finally, if we take "plastic food container" vs "organic food container", it is easy to identify what determines what, but in some highly technical texts, I can not always figure out the sequence.
Any rules that would apply?
Thanx,
Gj
Someone has asked for answer to these topics. However, I still want someone to provide me with simple and universal answers. I recently read a sentence from the English-speaking person. It is in an article. It is, ' The available options for mitigating pad cratering are not universally effective (see link below), but they may be helpful on a case by case basis until more crack resistant laminates are developed and become available. '
If I am to write this, I will use 'a case-by-case basis until more crack-resistant laminates'
Can anyone tell me when to use a hyphen to coin a new word?
Answer
There's a lot to hyphenation rules. There's even more to hyphenation styles, because there's some leeway in the rules but you want to be reasonably consistent in how you handle that lee-way. For this reason, I'm going to just take the case of a coinage for a modifier, as both case-by-case and crack-resistant are examples of that case, and compound nouns, as they're a similar enough case. There are other cases where hyphens are used that I won't tackle.
The main rule, is that you want to make it clear that the modifier is a unit. Imagine someone's eye scans back from "laminates" to see what sort of laminate it is, they'll see "resistant". That means they can pick out the unit "resistant laminates", which is wrong.
It's particularly important in cases where you could mislead. "man-eating tiger" is a tiger that eats people, while "man eating tiger" is a man who is currently eating a tiger.
So you want to make "crack-resistant" a unit, and you use a hyphen for that purpose. It is now a single modifier, essentially an adjective made out of a noun and an adjective.
Likewise, "case-by-case" is essentially an adjective, made out of two nouns (one noun repeated) and a preposition.
Now for the exceptions.
You don't do this if separate adjectives are "piled upon" each other. "A big red ball", or "A big, red ball", but never "A big-red ball". The bigness and the redness are separate, after all.
You don't do this if the two-or-more-word modifier is of the form "[adverb] [adjective]". Here the adverb is modifying the adjective rather than part of it. Again, thinking backwards from the noun can help.
Consider, "amazingly fast car". Thinking backwards we start with "car" which is correct, we are talking about a car. Then we have "fast car" which is still correct, we are talking about a car that is fast. Then we have "amazingly fast car", again correct. While at each point we have added detail, at no point do we have nonsense or something that is incorrect.*
When a noun is used as an adverb (a noun adjunct), then you may or may not hyphenate. E.g. "lightning-fast car" vs "lightning fast car". If the no-hyphen form seems ambiguous to you, then do hyphenate. Note that if you are writing to a style guide, it may have rules on this that you have to follow.
We don't hyphenate proper nouns or proper adjectives. "North American writers" doesn't need to be hyphenated to "North-American writers". While this breaks the working-backwards technique of spotting where hyphens are needed, people do after all read forward, and the capitalisation of proper nouns and adjectives makes them stand out clearly. Also, as a rule we modify proper nouns and adjectives as little as possible (consider that proper nouns include people's names, and that it's polite to call people as they like to be called, so we don't mess with their names).
We may choose simply not to hyphenate some compound adjectives simply because they are very familiar. Hence we might decide to have "high school sports" rather than "high-school sports" because "high school" is a common phrase and the familiarity helps remove ambiguity.
We use an en dash instead of a hyphen if part of the compound is already hyphenated, or has a space. "Turner Prize–winning art", "pro-privatisation–anti-privatisation debate". (In the old days, most people just wrote a hyphen and if what they wrote went to press then a typesetter worried about using an en dash instead of a hyphen, these days we produce our own final results, so it's worth paying attention to these things, though it's small-potatoes compared to the rest of this).
Compound nouns are a lot harder to decide upon. "Egg beater", "egg-beater" and "eggbeater" are all found. In the first, egg is used as a noun-adjunct to tell us what sort of beater the beater is. In the second, a hyphen turns the two nouns into a single unit. In the third they've become a new word. Generally, common pairings start out as one of the first two, and become merged into a new word after heavy usage and familiarity. I recommend hyphenating on first draft, then on second draft seeing if it's common to use it as a single word, use it if it is, remove the hyphen if it's not ambiguous, and leave the hyphen otherwise. In particular, pay attention to whether the hyphen changes the relationship; a terrorist-surveillance operation is an operation that carries out surveillance on terrorists, while a terrorist surveillance operation is a surveillance operation carried out by terrorists.
*Note, "amazingly-fast car" would have been a form used in the 1800s, though obviously not about cars. This is now rare, since the form without a hyphen is unambiguous. Just don't get confused if you see the adverb-adjective compound hyphenated in an older text.
Where did English get all its plural forms? Why are there so many nouns that are outside the rules?
Most nouns get an "s" when pluralized:
Pass me a cup. The store has a sale on cups!
Some nouns don't change when pluralized:
Check out that deer! Look at that herd of deer!
Some nouns have their own special plural forms:
Let's eat a goose! I was chased away by a gaggle of geese!
Then you get some Latin plural forms thrown in for good measure...
What gives?
Answer
This is all down to the fact that English is a language of acutely mongrel lineage. It has substantive roots in Celtic, Romance and Germanic languages (to name a few) and a grammar that lends itself well to the adoption of "loan words" (non-native words adopted into the native tongue.)
The "standard" means of pluralising a noun is to append -s, with some conventional variations (eg -f becomes -ves, -y becomes -ies) for convenience in spelling and pronunciation.
However latin-based words tend to pluralise in the latin fashion, so for example bacterium becomes bacteria, and cactus becomes cacti. Similarly greek-based words will adopt the equivalent pluralisation appropriate for the original root.
Still other words of Saxon or earlier origin have lovely, earthy plurals that defy the "conventions" due to their traditional forms being maintained. Geese, Mice and Children owe their unusual conjugations to their ancient roots, and to the fact that they are common words whose everyday repetition keeps them from slipping into bland conformity.
In my experience, words which do not pluralise are those which relate to herding, hunting and the counting of animals. These words tend to be saxon (germanic) or celtic in origin owing to the presence of farming and hunting in Britain long before the Norman invasion. This can be inferred by the fact that sheep, cattle and game do not pluralise, while whales, sparrows and elephants (seldom hunted or farmed in Britain!) definitely do.
I suspect these tend to be a contraction of the traditional counting forms for such cases ("head" of cattle, "brace" of partridge, "shoal" of fish) but this doesn't really answer the question of why such plurals take the same form as the singular. It could be that when counted in such a way, the animals being counted were considered an uncountable, continuous quantity (similar to water or money) that could only be "counted" when quantified with their associated counter, so cattle would be rendered an uncountable noun by its quantifying counter head. It's interesting however to note that bird pluralises to birds, while aircraft does not pluralise.
Sadly for the non-native speaker, this makes learning the "rules" of English an arbitrary and frustrating affair. However, spare a thought for the Japanese, who do not have plurals for any but a few unique nouns, and must instead learn a separate counting-suffix and corresponding character (kanji) for almost every class of noun imagineable. There are in fact entire volumes of the things, and it would be nigh-on impossible for any person to learn them all. Wikipedia lists a choice selection.
In technical documentation (I am mainly referring to the documentation for the source code of a computer program), this pattern seems quite common:
function MakeNFrobbers(int n):
Construct a list of 10 Frobbers.
However, someone recently claimed that this was not proper English and changed "Construct a list..." to "Creates a list...". The reasoning they gave was as follows:
With "this guy" being unwritten in the typical clipped style of technical documentation.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the former is correct while the latter is not; both sound correct to my ear. However, I can't explain why using "construct" is grammatically correct in this context. The only counterpoint I could offer was:
Is the former version using the bare infinitive ungrammatical and the second option the correct way, or are both correct? If both are correct, what is the rule that covers this particular case in regards to using a bare infinitive?
Answer
I'd take the bare infinitive form as short for:
What function MakeNFrobbers(int n) does is construct a list of 10 Frobbers.
This is a pseudo-cleft sentence, and it does take a bare infinitive after the "is".
I was writting a post on Facebook and I didn't know how to write this properly:
-This is the link to a subtitled version
or
-This is the link for a subtitled version
A few months ago a modern languages professor told me that "for" was for nouns and "to" for verbs, so I think that the first sentence is good, but also the second one seems ok, would you help me please?
Which of the following is correct?
- John and Becky's knowledge
- John's and Becky's knowledge
I'm not sure whether to use the past tense or the conditional in this construction below.
I found the answers to the exam, but I didn't look at them because I
would have felt that I was (or were?) cheating.
Is it 'were' because it's an unreal conditional? Or is it not an unreal conditional?
Suppose I wrote someone an email and told him something. After a few days, it occurred to me that I forgot to tell him about other things. What is correct in this situation:
or
Answer
I think both the sentences are correct.
The adverb Just is used both in the
simple past and present perfect and in the past perfect tense too. Just means
recently when referring to time. The distinction between American and the British English is being slowly lost. Even in informal or in formal context, there is no difference.
1.I just remembered that I forgot to tell you about other things.
I have just remembered that I forgot to tell you about other thingsBoth the sentences mean the same thing and are grammatically correct.
What is the difference between the following:
- Sorry, mate. I wouldn't be able to come for dinner.
- Sorry, mate. I won't be able to come for dinner.
Answer
In most cases, (2) would be used to say that the speaker was unable to accept the dinner invitation. (1) is unlikely to be found on its own. It needs some kind of explanatory setting, such as ‘Yeh, it would be great if we could get together some time. I wouldn't be able to come for dinner, though, because we have a problem getting a baby-sitter.'
The NOAD lists the pronunciation of Xavier as (ig)ˈzāvēər. In my own experience the parenthetical pronunciation is very common. I, however, do not know of any other x-initial words that are vowel-initiated when spoken.
Why is Xavier often pronounced (ig)ˈzāvēər?
I have two guesses, but they are merely guesses.
While Xavier is pronounced xaˈβjer in its native Spanish, it is pronounced ɡzavje in French (Wikipedia). Does English pronunciation follow French pronunciation, but with the initial g growing into a vowel?
According to Wikipedia the name Xavier comes from the Basque "etxe berri", for 'new house'. Did English somehow maintain the vowel from etxe?
What is the real reason Xavier is sometimes pronounced vowel-initial? Has this alternate pronunciation always existed? Are any other English x-initial words spoken with an initial vowel?
For example, if I want to say
I am grateful to have been offered a place on the program and I am very happy to accept the offer.
Is it better or not to omit the second 'I'?
I am grateful to have been offered a place on the program and am very happy to accept the offer.
Omitting the second 'I' looks a bit strange for me..
Given the sentence
The use of apples instead of pears is unexpected in the dish.
I don't think we can use apple instead of apples. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) But then, how come we can say the following?
- I need a change of hotel.
- A change of situation will give another result.
In the above two cases, both hotel and situation are countable nouns. Why is the indefinite article omitted before them?
Prompted by comments against this question, I'd like some help figuring out why some people (myself included) prefer yours over the apparently more logical/grammatically consistent your in this kind of sentence...
Yours and my native languages have co-existed for hundreds of years.
Google Books has Your:Yours ratios for languages:2:2, parents:9:10, houses:4:2. That's a very small sample size, admittedly - but even without anything like that, I know my own usage. So I'm not really interested in being told which is correct, except insofar as this has a bearing on my question itself - why do some people, (including some "careful speakers", which I don't necessarily claim to be) use the apparently incorrect form?
EDIT: It may be important to note (as @Gnawme guessed without it being explicitly stated in the first version of this question) that I personally would use singular language in the above. It was just too difficult to search Google Books for that particular distinction, so I said nothing about it.
Answer
The OED’s definition 3 of yours is ‘Used instead of your before another possessive, etc. qualifying the same noun. Now rare or obsolete.’ An illustrative citation is Joseph Addison’s from 1710, ‘I suppose you know, that I obeyed your's, and the Bishop of Clogher's commands.’ (Note the apostrophe, incidentally.)
As you have said, the written record tells us nothing about what occurs in speech. 'Yours and my . . .’ may occur as frequently as you suggest, but I think we're at least as likely to hear
‘my . . . and yours’ or ‘your . . . and mine’ or ‘our . . .' Or 'your and my . . .' or 'my or your . . .'
How do you read numbers like these?
0.12 "oh point twelve", "zero point one two", "zero and twelve hundreds"
And these ones?
0.345, 12.45
Answer
"point twelve" is not acceptable for a decimal, as it leads to confusion as to whether "point one" means .1 or .01. After the decimal point you read each digit individually, though with times you can adjust as there may be an implicit minutes for the later digits.
You can use oh for nought or zero if you think there will be no confusion between O and 0 and o; there might be with say a password.
There seems to be some inconsistency on whether people capitalize the words internet and web (as in World Wide Web) as proper nouns. What is the official ruling on when or if these words should be capitalized?
Obviously, I am not asking about when they are the first word in a sentence or in the title of a book or other publication.
Example:
"The web is the most commonly known
feature of the Internet."
Answer
My reasoning is that there is really only one network named Internet - therefore it's the Internet, while "web" is a more generic term, meaning any network (but probably referring to YouTube anyway ;).
What is the possessive of boss; ie, how do you describe the son of the boss?
I want to say "A better way to analyse the .. is to understand its underlying structure". What are the alternatives to saying a better way?
How do I tell that I got some information from a third person - is it correct to say
"I learnt from team ABC project live date is 10th August" or "I know from team ABC that project live date is 10th August"?
Answer
used for saying where information or ideas have come from
So you'd say "According to team ABC, the project live date will be 10th August" (presuming it's in the future). As long as they did tell you this, it puts the blame squarely on ABC if it doesn't happen. :)
I know that expect is used this way:
I expect you to do that.
But I have also seen examples like with verb in its "ing" form:
What to expect working at...
I will expect you doing (does not sound right to me)
I would be grateful for explanation.
In the sentence, 'NCA offers a tool to measure a country's or region's natural capital', are one or both of country and region possessive (country's or region's vs. country or region's)? Ownership is a bit ambiguous because of the inclusive 'or'.
- Which is your most favourite subject in school ?
- What is your most favourite subject in school ?
Which one is acceptable? If both are acceptable, do they have any difference in meaning?
Answer
In short, when the interrogative pronoun which is used, it is asking about something among a group of things.
Note: which can also be used as a determiner.
I am wondering about the "double possessive" I have been reading about.
I have a couple of sentences as an example:
He’s a new client of Jane and Kevin’s and a close childhood friend of Steven O’Neill’s.
I thought that the above sentence was correct, because it sounds natural to use the apostrophe S to me, in the same way that we say "he's a friend of mine."
However, I have heard people criticize sentences such as that one above as having a "double possessive" because of the OF as well as the apostrophe S.
Is the above sentence correct or should it be:
He’s a new client of Jane and Kevin and a close childhood friend of Steven O’Neill.
Thank you - any help would be greatly appreciated.
I came across the word sha'n't when reading Winnie the Pooh the other day and it cast me into a Thoughtful Mood concerning the Appropriate Spelling of this word.
This word is a contraction of "shall not", with the ll and the o removed. Where, then, do the apostrophes belong?
Here are the three options that I see:
shan't: this is consistent with other -n't words and seems to be what is typically used. But what about the ll?
sha'n't: clearly, the Best Literature uses this form. This would seem a logical form to have it in, for are there not two places where letters have been omitted?
sha'nt: based upon the prevailing wisdom of my primary school†, the first position in which letters are omitted is where the apostrophe, of which there should be only one, should go. However, it doesn't feel right in this case. Also concerning the matter of having only one apostrophe, perhaps that was intended as one per word. Or perhaps it's just nonsense, additionally considering such words as fo'c'sle.
One article I found on this matter was the Wiktionary article on sha'n't:
This came briefly into use at the end of the eighteenth century. It is not an older form of the contraction, though, as shan't predates it in print by about a century. (Source: World Wide Words [1])
It then proceeds to call sha'n't a "nonstandard spelling of shan't". The Wiktionary article I consider myself quite at liberty to discard, for A. A. Milne was using sha'n't in the 1920s, a decade which I would not generally consider to be at the end of the eighteenth century. In fact, it seems to me they're blatantly misquoting the article cited, which speaks of it occurring in the nineteenth century plus a few years either side of it.
So then: which are appropriate? What are the general rules concerning where the apostrophes should go in contractions? Why isn't English consistent? Why isn't Winnie the Pooh mandatory reading for all English speakers? (Discard the last two questions if you wish.)
† I am not generally inclined to give all that they say credence, naturally, for they are the same schools that teach the Victorian cursive letter forms and that two spaces should exist between sentences; that aught else is a travesty on the English language and that you probably won't get your pen license if you don't do it these ways—not that I ever did get mine.
Answer
An apostrophe generally indicates an omission, but in this case I would favour shan't over sha'n't for readability and consistency.
Sha'nt looks wrong, and I've never heard that their should only be a single apostrophe at the first omission.
Looking for a "general rule", an article called That Cute Li'l Ol' Apostrophe that claims:
We never use more than one apostrophe to a word.
While the general rule is to use the apostrophe in place of the last missing letter, such as in "shall not -> shan't", if we need to choose between missing letters that we'd normally pronounce and those that are silent, use the apostrophe to denote the missing sounds.
Another claims the following:
Well. at first glance, it appears to me that our way of ‘making’ contractions is to 1) lop off the last half of the first word and 2) smash it together with the “not”, contracting the “o” with an apostrophe. See for yourself…
shan’t= shall (minus the “-ll”) + not (minus the “o”) = sha n’t
Which is then moved together (sha->n’t) to spell: shan’t. Personally, I believe that this contraction (judging by the way we use the word, and say it) is an ‘evolved creature’ from the two contractions “shouldn’t” and “can’t”; as opposed to its parentage being shall and not. It just makes more sense. [Shouldn’t + can’t= shan’t]
The OED lists both shan't and sha'n't as colloquial contractions of shall not, but not sha'nt. Shan't appears in 139 quotations, sha'n't appears in 25, and sha'nt is in only five.
Project Gutenberg's out-of-copyright books are usually older and don't necessarily reflect contemporary use, but searching their August 2003 CD of 600 ebooks: there are 589 results in 103 books for for shan't, 122 results in 29 books for sha'n't, and only three results in two books for sha'nt.
Another common contraction, won't, comes from woll not (an archaic version of will not). It also has two chunks of letters omitted. Should this be wo'n't or wo'nt? Motivated Grammar writes:
Did the contractions won’t and shan’t spring into English fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s noggin? No, interestingly. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (printed in 1855), has wo’n't, as do some (modern) editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and The Ohio Educational Monthly in an article from 1868. Likewise, sha’n't was commonplace in the old days, plastered across the pages of the dreadful Victorian novels that I had to read in AP English as a lesson as to what happens to those who show an interest in reading. Books like Evelina; or, The history of a young lady’s entrance into the world (why did every single book in those days have to have a subtitle?)
Now the interesting thing is that won’t and shan’t live side-by-side with wo’n't and sha’n't in these old books. Some quick results on Google Books between 1600 and 1800: 777 won’ts, 57 wo’n'ts; 216 shan’ts, 73 sha’n'ts. Between 1600 and 1700: 48 won’ts, no wo’n'ts; 1 each of shan’t and sha’n't. So it seems it was never the case that the multiple-apostrophe form was more common. For some reason or another, English writers have always preferred a single apostrophe over strict application of “put apostrophes wherever a letter’s missing”. (Michael Quinion guesses that the double-apostrophe form was a later edition, suggested by logic-minded grammarians, that died out because it was a pain to write and looked weird.)
Quinion pointed out shan't is actually older than sha'n't and summarised:
The abbreviation, as you say, strictly demands the extra apostrophe, and it was probably the influence of logically minded eighteenth-century grammarians who persuaded many people to put the extra one in to start with — but whenever did logic ultimately matter in language?
So: the rules aren't really clear, but shan't is the most common, sha'n't is somewhat old fashioned, and sha'nt is extremely rare.
Why isn't English consistent?
Because it's evolved from a big mish-mash of several other languages over some 1,500 years.
Why isn't Winnie the Pooh mandatory reading for all English speakers?
Because nothing is mandatory reading for all English speakers. If Winnie the Pooh is mandatory reading, what else should be mandatory? Where do you stop? The only mandatory reading for English speakers should be the English language.