Boo, missed one while proofreading too late at night. I wonder how
many more are hiding in there.
On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 04:58:17AM +0200, Osamu Aoki wrote:
> I am Japanese who typically has no sense for tense and plurals :-)
^^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^
<cough> Those plurals don't match, and it's a syntax error to boot;
"who" is attached to "Japanese", but "Japanese" isn't a noun - so you
can add the adjective/noun distinction to your list :P
(I'm guessing this is the result of translating "Nihonjin" as
"Japanese", which is wrong; it really needs to be "Japanese person",
so you get "I am a Japanese person who...", or maybe you wanted "I am
Japanese, and we typically have...". It should probably then be
simplified to "I'm Japanese, [and|so] I typically have...", depending
on which you wanted)
> But, I do not understand ...
>
> On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 11:05:57PM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> ...
> > <li>As a last resort, if you didn't received any offers for a
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Yeah, that's just wrong (not mine, though).
> > few weeks after registering, you can send e-mail to
> > <email gpg-coord@nm.debian.org> telling them where you live
> > exactly (plus naming some big cities close to you). They
> > can then check the database for developers who are
> > near you.</li>
> > </ul>
>
> I thought
>
> <li>As a last resort, if you haven't received any offers for a
> or
>
> <li>As a last resort, if you didn't receive any offers for a
>
> are the only acceptable forms in my Japanese junior high school days.
Both of these are valid on their own, but the latter conflicts with
the tense of the rest of the paragraph - "haven't received" is recent
past, "didn't receive" is distant past.
> Hm.... but reading its context, this may be one of the funny subjunctive
> sentence which is specially designed to fool non-natives like me. I
> prefer simpler form such as:
>
> <li>As a last resort, if you don't receive any offers for a
This would be better alone, but doesn't fit with the rest of the
sentence:
"As a last resort, if you don't receive any offers for a few weeks
after registering, you can send e-mail to"
Here, "don't receive any offers for a few weeks" would imply that
after a few weeks, you *do* receive some offers.
I'd go with "haven't received". Inevitably, then the sentence doesn't
flow very well, so we shuffle it around a bit like this (and fix
another bug in the parenthesised expression at the end):
"A few weeks after registering, if you still haven't received any
offers, then you can send e-mail to <email gpg-coord@nm.debian.org>
telling them precisely where you live (give the names of some big
cities close to you)."
--
.''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
: :' : http://www.debian.org/ |
`. `' |
`- -><- |
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