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Test your grammar
harpy:
--- Quote from: shabutie on May 09, 2010, 08:59:47 PM ---..
And yes, harpy, formal titles are capitalized. (Like: Doctor Brown, Mr. Park, President Oasis). I think it's go something to do with it becoming part of their defining name, which is always capitalized.
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oh I see...we don't do things like that here. We use things with capital letters only if it is a title of something but not a person. We would write doctor Brown, because there are loads of doctors, the name is the important part not profession or age or what ever else. As for organizations its the same the capital letter is not used in the title if the words can be attached to any kind of other place that is the same, for example Riga Music school or Jāzepa Mediņa Music school, there are loads of schools as well, but you have to write the capital letter for the kind of establishment it is, like you can not write Ministry of Education with regular letters. Makes more sense like this...well for me at least
--- Quote from: Path on May 09, 2010, 09:16:45 PM ---
--- Quote from: harpy on May 09, 2010, 08:52:00 PM ---well I get that, but this "test" shows that you have to capitalize words like Mom and Dad as well. And grammar fixing thing in Firefox and in MS Word also try to make "english language" into "English language" and so on as mentioned above. Also I do not get why all the words in titles starts with capital letter ( well not words like of and and so on) and why "I" is written as capital not "i"....
I do not get that part.....
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You misunderstand the rule; here, mom and dad are taking the place—substituting—of proper nouns. In "I'm visiting Mom and Dad over the weekend," mom and dad replace proper nouns, i.e., the actual names of your parents. If you were to say "I'm visiting my mom over the weekend," you wouldn't capitalize.
Any word derived from a proper noun is to be capitalized. English is derived from England and is therefore capitalized.
I is capitalized because, well, it is. No one truly knows why, but the dominant theory among linguists is that the solitary i simply didn't work very well, especially not with the methods of writing available at the time. It wasn't always capitalized; it was only after the pronoun was shortened to I that the practice began.
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we don't do any of these things :D
If one speaks of mother its obvious that its his/her mother not someones else, if it would be someones else mother one would say who's mother it is. Like:
"I'm visiting mom and dad over the weekend" (my parents - that's obvious)
"I'm visiting Billy's mom and dad over the weekend" ( not mine...obviously)
I bet capital letters have to do something with the history after all. I mean the English version. As it was quite normal for children not to call their parents just mom and dad, but respectfully Mother and Father, Doctor, President and so on. I mean if we put a capital letter in non proper noun it means respect or "The" not "a" something, it's emphases the meaning.
My native language is rather young (the written one) and was never used in all big historical mess. It's language used by peasant not noble. Noble formed language (written one) according to their cultural traditions and long lost social norms.
Thou mine is still considered to be one of the hardest languages to learn...not quite sure why, because its rather poor language, nothing even close to Russian, I just love Russian language, it's so rich....well we do have quite a messy grammar and quite a lot case ending (used for almost all words in both genders) and so on and we actually have both gender words, and quite a few declination and conjugation...and it wins over English because you can just change the case ending and you do not need to use all these messy little words :D so we can say the same thing a lot faster and it sounds really nice. It's supposed to be phonetic language and there are only 2 living language in this class :D The I love my language, you can actually play around with it, well I bet all non native English speakers love their native languages
[edit]
for some strange reason I felt like this belongs here
Path:
--- Quote from: shabutie on May 09, 2010, 09:20:44 PM ---(For example: Where is my brother? / Where is Brother?*)
*Sounds like a line outta FFVI: Advent Children >.>
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There's a reason why this construction is avoided ;)
St. Peter hears a knocking at the Gates of Heaven and calls out, "Who's there?"
"It is I," a voice responds.
"Oh no, not another English teacher," sighs St. Peter.
No one likes the grammar police :'(
fohfoh:
Wow... I just ate shit and got 6. :P I guess my mind just works on a different wave length not to mention I'm tired. Mainly issues like I would have the correct answer, but for the incorrect reason and vice versa.
Stuff like, "Were it up to me"
I personally would revise it to "If it were up to me"
or stuff like that.
Idk, when I get confused at grammar, I revise sentence structure to make it easier to figure out whether or not it's "correct".
I've also gotten used to stuff like revising "their" with "his or her".
kureshii:
Re-did this one again just to double-check myself, and missed 2 and 3 on a quick look-through. I should avoid doing any editing right after dinner.
A pet peeve of mine:
He is the kind of person that ensures things get done
(click to show/hide)Ungrammatical. The who possessive is used in reference to individual persons. That and which are used with reference to non-human objects. That is used to introduce essential clauses (clauses which uniquely identify the object). Which is used to introduce non-essential clauses (clauses which add on to the description of an identified object). Which may also be used to introduce further clauses if that has already been used earlier in the sentence.
Hence,
1) He is the kind of person who ensures things get done.
2) He is the kind of person who ensures things which that are important get done. (What things? Important things.)
3) He will ensure that today's tasks, which include fixing the roof, are completed. (Today's tasks, by the way, include fixing the roof.)
Not differentiating between who/that will not affect the logic of the sentence, since that also encompasses the range of usage seen by who. However, if you decide not to follow this, you might as well use it to refer to people, and skip the personal possessives altogether.
Path:
--- Quote from: kureshii on May 12, 2010, 11:26:18 AM ---...
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This is where we discuss the differences between American and British English just to confuse the poor souls ;)
Come to think of it, the vocative O is also capitalized. Then again, it's not something you're likely to come across very often.
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