Hello Seth,
On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 09:47:10PM -0800, Seth David Schoen wrote:
> Helge Kreutzmann writes:
>
> > Sigh, learning more and more the finer details of English.
> >
> > I just wonder, since these are technical documents, if this is
> > supporting understanding or reducing it? Personllay I prefer one word
> > for one concept.
>
> There's a commonly-suggested rule in style guides that "open" compound
> nouns (those still written as multiple distinct words) should be
> hyphenated when used to modify another noun, but not when an open
> compound noun occurs as a noun by itself.
>
> So for example, we might have "Richard Stallman wrote several
> free-software licenses", but "Richard Stallman originated the modern
> concept of free software".
Thanks for this extensive explanation. I simply guess there are
several englishes and it evolves (as stated by the article you cited).
When I was in school (this includes American high school in early
90's) I think I learned that hyphens are quite uncommon in english.
Recently I also got the explanation, that "email" is correct (as well
as e-mail is).
> We might sort of analogize it to the German rule for the case where a
> proper name is used as a part of the proper name of something else
> (like a street, school, or prize). There German expects to hyphenate
> the entire resulting phrase, like
>
> Heinrich-Böll-Preis
…
> even though the original proper names (Heinrich Böll, Kaiser Wilhelm,
> Karl Marx, etc.) aren't hyphenated when used in their original sense to
> refer to _people_. While this English rule isn't exactly the same,
> it also shows a propensity for using a hyphen when a noun is used in
> one context, but not when the same noun is used in a different context.
As a German native speaker, this sort of reminded me on this one.
(Just to note, that this rule is a little bit more complicated and
also evolving).
Probably this is a similar trend like with commas. As I never mastered
them correctly in English in school, I asked a PhD student for English
(in a German university) about the rules and she basically said: if in
doubt, don't use a comma. And gave me a few cheat sheets when commas
are used. This was ~ 15 years ago.
Now I see many commas, like we do in German. Including large commits
adding them.
I just wonder if reporting "errors" like these in man-pages makes
sense. Looking at this conversion you are very well aware of all the
details of English, so my 5 cents are probably more distracting /
confusing than helpful? (Though I learn a lot form them).
Greetings
Helge
--
Dr. Helge Kreutzmann debian@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dipl.-Phys. http://www.helgefjell.de/debian.php
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