Re: Help to improve new package (djmount)
Justin B Rye <jbr@edlug.org.uk> wrote:
> MJ Ray wrote:
> [...]
> > Was the original standardisation's justification of following
> > a 1997 FOLDOC entry solid enough? That lists both as alternatives.
>
> Do we know for sure that the one-word variant is getting commoner?
Anyone got good historic word-frequency tables?
My naive search engine interrogations puts the one-word variant at
around 80% of the frequency of the two-word phrase.
[...]
> > It's not a rule. It's a preference because it's easier to understand
> > a phrase if you see the verb before the adverb that modifies it.
>
> Why would you expect that to be true of verbs and adverbs when it's
> obviously untrue of nouns and adjectives? If things were this
> simple, we'd all speak verb-initial languages.
It's not that simple: surely we can't just take some result for nouns
and adjectives and apply it to verbs and adverbs?
Actually, I'd expect it to be different with nouns and adjectives:
there, adjective before noun is like a general description before the
specifics, while noun before adjective would mean we'd make all sorts
of assumptions about the noun's properties before the adjective
potentially corrects one of the assumptions. I suggest one difference
may be that we can cope with making fewer assumptions about verbs
than about nouns.
There's a lot of work about the effect of word order on ease of
comprehension, which I'm probably not at all up-to-date on. However,
my hypothesis that it's easier to understand verb-before-adverb
phrases isn't exactly being firmly disproved or contradicted here!
If there's no data, let's conclude that verb-before-adverb ease of
comprehension is a matter of opinion for now and drop this aspect.
Regards,
--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
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