On Tuesday 22 March 2011 12:41:29 Tim wrote: > On Tue, 2011-03-22 at 10:34 +0000, Marko Vojinovic wrote: > > "That begs the question. I'll try again. Why do they think it has a > > basis?" > > > > is correct usage, while > > > > "That begs the question, why do they think it has a basis?" > > > > is incorrect. If I assume that the "I'll try again." sentence in the > > middle is irrelevant in this context, the only difference I see is > > comma vs. period. > > > > So, all in all, are you actually complaining about punctuation usage? > > Ignoring anything do with what "begs the question" means, or doesn't > mean. The first sample quotation has two statements, and a separate > question. The second one has what should be a separate phase lumped in > with a question, when they shouldn't be combined. > > i.e. The bit that it starts off with "That begs the question" isn't a > question, nor any part of a question, so it shouldn't be in a sentence > that's a question. > > On the other hand, it could have been correctly written as: > > "That begs the question, 'Way do they think it has a basis?'" > > (Someone said "That begs the question," and then stated what the > question was.) > > It's a bit like bracketing in maths. Ok, so essentially it is a punctuation issue --- incorrectly ommiting the quotes around the question that is being begged for. Thanks for the clarification! :-) > Grammar's a fun thing, especially with the English language. For > instance, in this sentence: > > "We went to school, we wrote in our books, we had lunch." > > Did we go to school, and write in our books, and have lunch? Or did we > go to school, and write "we had lunch" into our books? > > If that had been written as three separate sentences, we'd know for > sure. I agree, it is indeed a lot of fun. ;-) As a non-native English speaker, I can say that the source of such ambiguities lies in the simplicity of English grammar. In languages with more complex grammar rules, such a sentence would be either unambiguous, or illegal. And one would not need punctuation to differentiate between the two meanings. The point of punctuation (as I understand it) is to substitute for things that cannot be easily written down, when expressed in vocal communication. Things like voice pitch, accenting, face and body gestures. In your example sentence above, one can pronounce it in (at least) two different ways, and then the meaning would be quite unambiguous. However, that meaning would rely heavily on voice intonation, pausing between words, etc., which cannot be written down easily. Consequently, the meaning of the written sentence depends heavily on the punctuation that is used to supplement for the missing information. In languages with more complex grammar, punctuation serves the same purpose, but is not so essential, due to complexity of the grammatical structure itself. Therefore, non-native English speakers do not pay so much attention to complex punctuation, simply because in their language it is not so complicated. It's a tradeoff between simple grammar and simple punctuation. That said, I agree that one should never be sloppy with punctuation, grammar or otherwise. :-) It's just that when someone objects to punctuation issue in an e-mail, non-native English readers will easily get confused, as I did. ;-) Best, :-) Marko -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
