Tag: Rules

一句话，一个主动词

中文里逗号和句号的区别主要在于语义。教育部《标点符号用法》里多次使用类似“意义上有密切关系”、“表达相对完整意义”、“前后有较大停顿”等语句描述标点用法，地二觉得实际使用也确实如此。参看以下例句：

(1) 夏夜很静谧，只有月光经过树梢来到大地的脚步声。（钱钟书《夏夜》）
(2) 那年冬天，祖母死了，父亲的差使也交卸了，正是祸不单行的日子。（朱自清《背影》）

因为“夏夜”和“那年冬天”是贯穿全句的主题，所以一直使用逗号直到主题结束，一个句号结句。这样的用法在英文中是行不通的，因为英文对“句”的概念有一个严格的语法要求：一句话，一个主动词。

什么是主动词

主动词（意为“核心动词”，不是“主动的词”）就是一句话中随人称、时态会发生改变的那个动词。例如：

(3) I saw him walk into the supermarket.
(4) He wants me to talk to him.

以上两句中，加粗部分是主动词，斜体部分不是。注意加粗部分会随着人称、时态发生改变：

(3a) I have seen him walk into the supermarket.
(3b) She sees him walk into the supermarket.
(4a) They want me to talk to him.
(4b) She wanted me to talk to him.

而斜体部分不会：

(3c) I saw her walk into the supermarket.
(3d) I saw them walk into the supermarket.
(4c) He wants her to talk to them.
(4d) He wants them to talk to me.

“主动词”是地二这里自己创造的一个名称（语法上正式名称叫“谓语动词”）。一个动词是不是主动词，看它在一句话里怎么用，不是说字典里可以查到，这个词是主动词，那个词不是。

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More frustrating conversations with Google Home

Hey Google, start a 100-second timer.

1 minute and 40 seconds. And we're starting... now.

(about a minute later)
Hey Google, stop the timer.

All right, I cancelled it.

Hey Google, how much time was left on the timer?

It looks like you don't have any timer set at the moment.

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Frustrating conversations with Google Home

Hey Google, set a timer for 60 minutes.

Sure. 16 minutes. Starting now.

Hey Google. Not 16 minutes. 60 minutes.

Second timer, 1 hour. starting now.

Hey Google. Cancel the first timer.

You have two timers. A 16-minute one and a 1-hour one.
Which one do you want to cancel?

The 16-minute one.

Sure. The 16-minute timer. With 15 minutes and 27 seconds left.
Cancelled.

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Working With Chinese Text

Note: This post is not about Unicode.

Loosely speaking, most languages have some kind of an alphabet. The written word, roughly or precisely, spells out how the spoken word sounds. Some languages use a ~consonant-only script (e.g. Arabic); some languages use a script that spells out whole syllables at a time (e.g. Cherokee). They may not be “alphabets”, strictly speaking, but they all have a small set of symbols that make up the entire written language.

Designing a keyboard, then, is easy: make a key for each possible symbol. Maybe add a few dead keys (combination keys) for åcćeñtş. Voila.

That’s simply impossible for Chinese text. A high school graduate in China knows about 4,000 to 5,000 Chinese characters, and there are no easy ways to further break down a character. Clearly we can’t have a keyboard with 4,000 keys on it?

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PEMDAS is incomplete

Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. Order of operations. 4th grade math.

Elsewhere in the world, parentheses are called brackets, and exponents could be called orders or indices. So depending on where you went to school, you might have learned BEDMAS, BODMAS, BIDMAS, or something similar.

Hang on — is it PEMDAS or BODMAS? Is it MD or DM?

Equal Precedence

My first bone to pick with PEMDAS (and the like) is that on the first glance, it’s six things, when it should only be four.

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