Bug#648387: [copyright-format] English proofreading.
Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> Charles Plessy wrote:
>> - "Another kind of list value has one value per line". Not straightforward...
>
> Doesn't seem so bad. How would you propose rewording it?
Shouldn't it be "Another type of list has one value per line"? The
values don't have one value per line - they only have one line each.
>> - "the Copyright field for a paragraph covering both file A and file B need
>> contain only:". Isn't it "needs to contain only" ?
>
> "Need contain only" sounds much better than "needs to contain only" to
> my ear, but I was not sure why. So I ran a quick web search for "he
> need not" and found this:
>
> http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080620152350AAbvQW1
Yes, "need" as a modal is a strange thing. My own native-speaker
intuitions would never allow "he need go", but they *do* allow "he
needn't go" or "he need only go", so clearly it's all a bit broken...
> I certainly wouldn't mind rewording this to make life easier for
> translators. Maybe "if file A has ... then the Copyright field ...
> only needs to contain" or "... need not contain more than"?
"(It) need not contain more than" would probably still confuse
translators unfamiliar with this construction, but I can see how "only
needs to contain" might be kinder.
>> - "priority of ors and ands. and has the priority over or." Looks like an
>> exercise for speech and language therapy ?
>
> Some quotation marks around "or" and "and" might help. Since starting
> a sentence with a lowercase letter is typographically awkward, it
> might also be worth adding a few filler words, as in 'The conjunction
> "and" has priority over "or".'
As well as adding quotes I'd recommend using conventional
sentence-initial capitalisation, and dropping the article ("has
priority", not "has the priority"). I think the way most styleguides
recommend you should combine quotes and pluralisation in cases like
this is:
priority of "or"s and "and"s. "And" has priority over "or".
...but this looks a bit awkward and fussy. You could eliminate the
pluralisation issue by making it:
priority of the conjunctions "or" and "and". "And" has priority over "or".
Another option that might be more familiar to I.T. specialists is
writing them as AND and OR (which is what I always prefer if I'm going
to have to talk about ANDing or ORing). It's probably not appropriate
here, though.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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