The sort of nonsense up with which I will not put

[nineveh_uk]

While there may be disadvantages to the lack of any central body with responsibility for English As She Is Spoke*, there is a decided plus side, which is that no-one can come along and say "We've decided that [word] is spelt differently now" or "we've re-written all the rules about commas."** There is something to be said for the free and easy approach of owning a copy of Fowler in order to argue why you choose to ignore it against the alternative approach, which might be epitomised**** by the following extract from Wikipedia, brought to you by looking up further my German teacher's comments on whether to write du or Du:

In der Schriftsprache werden das Pronomen „Sie“ und die davon abgeleiteten Formen großgeschrieben. Bis zur Rechtschreibreform 1996 gab es auch eine Höflichkeitsform für „Du“ in der Schriftsprache, in der dieses Wort großgeschrieben wurde. Von 1996 bis 2006 wurde „du“ in neuer Rechtschreibung ausschließlich kleingeschrieben. Seit der neuesten, inzwischen vierten Revision der Rechtschreibreform kann „Du“ bei persönlicher Anrede wieder großgeschrieben werden.

Google translate does it for us. Only the culture that produced Nietzsche could produce a sentence like 'Since the latest, now the fourth revision of the spelling reform'. One can just hear the existential despair that rolls off it.

*Would that there had been a committee in 1400 or so to consider whether the Great Vowel Shift should be allowed. Also, I would vote for re-introducing "æ".

**Danish, which I see has since managed to change the comma rules that were new when I learnt*** them.

***Or should that be learned? I think I can choose.

**** The English version is epitomised by the fact that I can choose not to write epitomized. Of course, English is nothing in comparison to Norwegian, in which it would probably be entirely correct to write epyttomised as long as you came from the particular valley in which that was correct and all your other spelling matched it.

Comments

[nineveh_uk]

Danish has an official 32 page booklet on the comma rules. I have not read it. Though to be honest, from Wikipedia it sounds like they have shifted them around a bit and Danes have agreed that they honestly prefer them as decorative sprinkles. Ah! This is a surprisingly comprehensible Danish account of the whole business, though I am now worrying that I haven't a clue how I should use commas in German.

I'm almost tempted to nominate Danish comma rules for next year's Yuletide.

[antisoppist]

"The basic exception is that starting commas are optional"
"In cases where starting commas are optional, it is recommended that you don't put one".

Ah.

I think the problem for English native speakers is that our commas are mostly "put one where you would pause", apart from the defining v non-defining relative clauses ones, where they change the meaning. And then when you encounter a language that *always* puts a comma before "which" or "that" BECAUSE GRAMMAR, either we expect to pause, which doesn't make sense, e.g. "he said, that..." or we take it as a meaningful comma not a non-meaningful comma and get confused. Finnish does this as well. And teaching Finns that sometimes they needed to put a comma before "that" or "which" and sometimes they didn't, and that this was important, was rather difficult.

[nineveh_uk]

Danish commas are optional in the way that Kingscote has volunteers.

I'm beginning to feel that I don't know anything like enough about comma rules/conventions in any language at all. Clearly tonight's time-wasting on the internet needs to be about the comma in English. It feels that it ought to be easier to move from a meaningful comma system to a rigid grammar one because the latter just requires you to learn the rules, but of course that might depend on how many rules there were ("On a Monday after the full moon, a comma must be used before all conjunctions").