On Fri, 6 Aug 2021 at 21:11, Ralf Quint <freedos...@gmail.com> wrote:

> > Insights from native english/american  (English/American) people?
> >
> I learned this from my first English class in school, pretty much 50
> years ago... ;-)
>
>
Sadly enough, get ready that it may change at any point quickly. When I was
a kid, in Spanish we used to write the names of the days and months with
capital letter, being a "proper noun" (in my opinion, it is a proper name).
But a rule at some point (in my childhood) dictated that we should not.  I
still write "Septiembre", let the translator do that for me if it wants to
;)

For some reason, in Spanish at some point they decided that it is "bad
taste" to abuse capital letters here and there. I am not sure how it is in
English, but I seem to remember it is in capital letters (like September
and not september).

What's more, things change because of how people pronounce them. So now
"setiembre" is accepted because nobody says the "P" any more.

Another annoying stuff is when punctuation signs change too. For example,
we are taught in schools that the decimal separator (the equivalent to dot
. in English) is ' in Spanish (I've also read that the Academy of Physics
prescribes so) like in  3'14159, but *everybody* uses comma in Spain. like
in 3,14159  and even Microsoft Excel considers the separator to be ,
because everyone does. I can't remember what we do have in NLSFUNC, or if
we need to have both "stanard Spanish" and  "real used Spanish"  :)

I've noticed you Germans have your quirks with the spelling because there
was a change to standardise the ortography not long ago  (when to use ss
and eszett amongs others :)).

Last but not least, having learnt my English in the UK, I had to learn to
either change the spelling dictionary in GMail to British English or
replace "standardise" with "standardize" in my previous sentence ( :D ).
As a plus, I still don't know the preferred way to pronounce "either" (if
there is one) because I've heard many different options. At least, I know
how to pronounce "early", unless we don't know what shall we do with a
drunken sailor.

Oh well.

Aitor
_______________________________________________
Freedos-devel mailing list
Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel

Reply via email to