Re: installation guide [Was: Re: Change templates: CD -> installation medium - proposal #2 ]
John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Justin B Rye wrote:
>> In English, "a medium" means a *category* of information-propagating
>> mechanism (such as radio or print), not one individual USB thumbdrive
>> or whatever.
>
> Not, it doesn't:
>
>> https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/recording-medium
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium#Other_uses_in_science_and_technology
These say nothing that disagrees with me. The problem here is that
you're not taking in just what it is I'm saying.
>> I'd recommend just "Detect media:" - after all, the question is
>> whether it *ever* succeeded on *any* try, right?
>
> No, "detect medi**um**", it's one installation medium. Not multiple installation media.
"One medium", in English, means one *category* of storage/transmission
system, like radio or newsprint or optical storage, not one individual
data-storage *product*. Unless of course they come in three sizes,
and you're talking about the middle one - that's another grammatically
valid sense of "the medium"!
It's possible to talk about "making a backup using a rewritable DVD as
the medium", but that's still "medium" as an approximate synonym for
"method" - if I make a new backup the next day on a different DVD,
it's the same medium!
> The language is very concise.
I expect that language has nice regular words like "agendum" and
"spaghetto", too - but alas, it isn't the language we're trying to
write the documentation in.
>> (en/howto/installation-howto.xml:)
>> Now sit back while debian-installer detects some of your hardware, and
>> - loads the rest of itself from CD, USB, etc.
>> + loads the rest of itself from the installation medium.
>>
>> "Medium" is the wrong thing, "item of media" would be very clunky, and
>> we can't get away with plural "media" because you can't sit back if
>> you're swapping discs, so this is a tricky one. Maybe it could say:
>
> Again, could you please quote a dictionary here. Please don't assume that
> being native speaker alone is sufficient. Lots of native speakers don't
> use proper grammar. Just think of "they're, their and there".
Look at the entry in *any* dictionary, and look at how they define the
word: a "medium" is a *type* of storage or transmission mechanism.
This is easy to miss when you're looking at something like a wikipedia
article, since its lists tend to be implicitly categorising things.
But English doesn't have a neat, simple cover-term referring to a
single, individual *piece* of media; there's only "piece of media".
That's why there's no entry for it in the dictionaries: because
there's no such headword for them to define!
>> [...]
>> - If you don't have a CD set, then you will need to download the
>> + If you don't have a installation media set, then you will need to download the
>>
>> A nice easy-to-fix one here: that's *an* installation media set.
>
> It both sounds very awkward. The sentence should be rephrased.
Quite possibly; the whole document needs a huge amount of work, but
you're not going to get much help from English-speakers if they all
get this sort of welcome.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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