Hi Aitor, On Fri, 6 Aug 2021 23:28:54 +0200 Aitor Santamaría <aitor...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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). English is a living language and subject to change as it's supposed to reflect current usage. This worries me somewhat as so many people write the possesive form of "it" incorrectly as "it's". At some point the balance will shift in favour of the misuse and it will be changed. > > What's more, things change because of how people pronounce them. So now > "setiembre" is accepted because nobody says the "P" any more. > I'm about a year into learning Spanish, so really only just getting started! I find it far easier to comprehend when written than spoken, but things like this really help. > 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. Yep as a native English speaker, I mix and match pronunciation of 'either' and I don't believe there is a correct way, at least not one I've ever been taught. > At least, I know > how to pronounce "early", unless we don't know what shall we do with a > drunken sailor. Oh yes, that really made me smile! It's probably classed as Olde English and nobody ever speaks that way today, but obviously you know that. > > Oh well. > > Aitor Regards, Andrew _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
