Re: 3rd person singular neutral X 3rd person plural ?
Hello,
After reading the cited [0] and [1], and still confused, I "guess" the
best hint could be the wikipedia phrase :
"The rule of thumb is that a group acting as a unit is considered
singular and a group of "individuals acting separately" is considered
plural."
supported by the given example (is it the most clear one?)
"The Debian Project is 15 years old and they have just issued a major
security advisory."
and we should reword the DT guidelines [2], at the section regarding PRs
to
The text should be primarly written in third person, singular, neutral:
"it, the Debian Project".
(appending the above rule of thumb and example)
Rembember that at PRs we always state "Debian Project" for our community
and "Debian GNU / Linux | GNU / Hurd | GNU / kFreeBSD | GNU / NetBSD" to
our OSes.
Could we settle at a guidelines [2] paragraph redaction regarding this
subject?
Does the MHRA [3] state something about it?
Regards
Andre Felipe Machado
(And I thought that Portuguese was difficult, with all their country
variations, not even counting dialects)
[0]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_differences#Formal_and_notional_agreement
[1]
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2007/07/collective-noun-agreement.html
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity/DebianTimesTeam/Guidelines
[3] http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Books/StyleGuide/download.shtml
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