Are you talking about what I think? This is a quirk of English that took me till I was in my mid-20s to learn. Commas have a very different meaning in sentences (e.g., the comma splice is a grammatical error) than in Greek or French or Spanish.
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I was mocked by people for a few years, mainly my Ph.D. supervisor, until my dad explained it to me. He said: "In Greek the comma is where you pause if you were reading aloud — in English it's specific to very very certain cases only."
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I don't think I fully understand the rule of commas... but I've also come to think people who criticize others (esp those whose first lang isn't English) for the misuse of commas (whatever that means) are mainly assholes so I don't spend that much time worrying about my comma.
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I agree 100%. I think it's hard to say with the comma splice as I believe it is a genuine grammatical error in the same way in Greek having the wrong ending for a noun declension is a genuine grammatical error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice …
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A genuine grammatical error is not some kind of moral mistake and definitely should not be policed in a rude way. At the end of the day making mistakes is totally fine and those who enjoy correcting others have deeper issues than a person who makes grammatical mistake...
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I would rather say "that's not a mistake" (even if I thought it was) to a little language fascist who tries to correct others, than to go around correcting others though! Context matters! And of course all these rules are up for discussion and change whether we want it or not.
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Not helpful at all! Mocking is always easier than explaining, particularly if you do not know yourself the reasons clearly. And when these criticisms come from people who can only speak a languge (often barely), "asshole" sounds right to me.
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It's almost always monolinguals! You are so right!
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Also I love how they think everybody knows that the comma splice is wrong (from birth? how?) when no other language has this BS feature. "Why do you think a Spanish-speaker (for example) knows about your assclown secret punctuation ritual, you Englishino? Grow up."
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Replying to @o_guest @LinguaCelta and
I’m a monolingual English speaker and I use commas incorrectly a fair amount of the time too. Any time I write anything I have to go back and pull a bunch of extra ones out. That professor was being ridiculous.
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I agree but to assume I had had any English language training before university is wrong here. I had seriously very bare bones English writing skills compared to everybody else pretty much. And of course I'm disadvantaged severely because of it.
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Replying to @o_guest @LinguaCelta and
Understood. I’m sorry you were treated that way.
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Replying to @rstoneham77 @LinguaCelta and
It's OK my parents are quite eccentric and were amused I taught myself to read English. So after I did that around 5 years of age they kind of left me to my own devices. Great since I read voraciously but not perfect because I didn't write in any formal setting.
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End of conversation
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