Re: [RFR] wml://News/weekly/2011/15/index.wml Debian Project News frozen. Please review and translate
I missed Filipus Klutiero's posting on d-p, and I think it's a bit
late to be fiddling with the content, but just to answer a minor point
of grammar:
Filipus Klutiero wrote:
>> The <acronym lang="en" title="Open Source Initiative">OSI</acronym>
>> have invited the Debian Project to their upcoming affiliation
>> programme.
>
> I don't think OSI is plural.
You're suggesting it should be "The OSI *has* invited the Debian
Project to *its* [etc]"? This is one of the few real differences in
grammar between the en_GB and en_US standards: in American English,
"team plurals" are generally considered ungrammatical (and "programme"
is considered a typo!), while in British English they're well
accepted. Indeed, they're part of the UK civil service's official
"house style" for announcements of things that the Government have
(not "has") decided.
There's another example later on in the DPN text: "In addition the
NeuroDebian team were interviewed by FLOSS for Science" (instead of
"was interviewed").
I can't claim that there's any logical justification for these
particular sentences having plurals when so many others refer to a
team in the singular, but at any rate they didn't set off my
native-speaker syntax-error alarms.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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