On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 07:02:02PM +0100, Justin B Rye wrote: > The next step is to get your comments together as something I can > conveniently point at in a post to debian-l10n-english.
Oops, missed that you waited for my input. > Criticisms: > 1) basically, it's not clear that verb phrases are the main thing > we're deprecating; > 2) in particular, the "noun phrase/verb phrase" part can be read as > an incidental description of the given example; > 3) more examples (both "should" and "should not") would be good; > 4) "a good heuristic" also makes it sound as if fitting the template > is optional. (Yes, the underlying definition is a matter of > syntax, but since developers don't usually think in terms of > noun phrases or verb phrases, the "heuristic" is the only > practical validation mechanism.) Yep, this is a good summary. > You also mention the issue of translations. I don't know if we'd > want to even try to apply "the same rule" in languages that use > suffixed articles, or no articles at all! And Verb-Subject-Object > languages like Welsh would make things even trickier... Right, forget about translations. Even in English one cannot construct a sentence from the synopsis as the article (a, an, ...) has to be determined manually ... Jens -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
