5 ms·
Is it me, or does this writer, use far, far too many, commas?
by lukeholder 10y ago
Is it me, or does this writer, use far, far too many, commas?
- toyg 10y agoIt might be. Italians use commas with the frequency English-speakers use periods (dots). You might be making his point, really.
- QuercusMax 10y agoFascinating. Reminds of reading Caesar, who used so many commas and had sentences which were fairly difficult to unpack. (At least that's how it seemed when I was in high school.) Wonder if that's a cultural thing which has been inherited through all these years.
- toyg 10y agoMost educated Italians are still forced to study Latin as teenagers (although numbers have shrunk in the last decade or so). And of course, Romans invented lawyers... Seriously, once you look for it, you see it very clearly. You can usually spot Italians writing in English for their overuse of "the", their sentence length, and a higher frequency of passive verbs. If it feels like that but the number of "the"s is correct, the only explanation is that you are reading Ian McEwan.
- zakk 10y agoI am Italian and my English teacher always used to tell me that I used too many commas. Also, I didn't notice anything off while reading the post. It could definitely be influence from the Italian language.
- spdionis 10y agoI confirm that commas are much more common in Italian than in English.