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That sentence does sound weird, it's not just you, and using of contain rather than contains doesn't help either. If it was referring to the Naica Mine it shoul

That sentence does sound weird, it's not just you, and using of contain rather than contains doesn't help either. If it was referring to the Naica Mine it should have been "which contains caves ...".

Turing_Machine 9y ago
It would also be clearer if "looking for extremophiles" were moved to an earlier position in the sentence. Here's how I would word it: Penelope Boston, the director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and her team have spent years looking for extremophiles in the Naica Mine. The mine, located in Chihuahua, Mexico, contains caves as large as cathedrals.
- klibertp 9y ago
  This is tangential at best, but a) I've been thinking about it for some time and b) someone reading this thread may actually know: why are there differences in punctuation rules between languages? Comma placement before certain words in a particular situation, hyphen-related rules, quoting, and so on - there may be differences even within a single language, and differences between languages are even bigger. How come? The punctuation - or more specifically, the commas, their placement or absence in certain places - is the last thorn my brain hurts over when reading and writing English. I read a sentence, and I feel like I'd trip each time I see a comma where there shouldn't be any. Like walking a rocky road or something.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    Most punctuation was developed before any standardization efforts, so every language has rules that reflect whatever the most influential writers believed to be natural Quotation marks differ because the transition from handwriting to printed letters solidified different shapes like ", «, „ or “, depending on how the strokes were jotted down in handwritten text.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    I think of it as similar to HTML vs CSS: words are the content, punctuation marks are an attempt to mark up a suggestion of how to present them. (Where I'm including whitespace in punctuation)
  - Turing_Machine 9y ago
    In theory comma placement has something to do with the natural cadence of speech, and that varies quite a lot between different people (even within the same language, much less different languages). There's a popular meme about it: http://imgur.com/gallery/ljjibpM http://imgur.com/gallery/ljjibpM

That sentence does sound weird, it's not just you, and using of contain rather than contains doesn't help either. If it was referring to the Naica Mine it should have been "which contains caves ...".

Turing_Machine 9y ago

It would also be clearer if "looking for extremophiles" were moved to an earlier position in the sentence. Here's how I would word it: Penelope Boston, the director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and her team have spent years looking for extremophiles in the Naica Mine. The mine, located in Chihuahua, Mexico, contains caves as large as cathedrals.

klibertp 9y ago
This is tangential at best, but a) I've been thinking about it for some time and b) someone reading this thread may actually know: why are there differences in punctuation rules between languages? Comma placement before certain words in a particular situation, hyphen-related rules, quoting, and so on - there may be differences even within a single language, and differences between languages are even bigger. How come? The punctuation - or more specifically, the commas, their placement or absence in certain places - is the last thorn my brain hurts over when reading and writing English. I read a sentence, and I feel like I'd trip each time I see a comma where there shouldn't be any. Like walking a rocky road or something.
- yorwba 9y ago
  Most punctuation was developed before any standardization efforts, so every language has rules that reflect whatever the most influential writers believed to be natural Quotation marks differ because the transition from handwriting to printed letters solidified different shapes like ", «, „ or “, depending on how the strokes were jotted down in handwritten text.
- ethbro 9y ago
  I think of it as similar to HTML vs CSS: words are the content, punctuation marks are an attempt to mark up a suggestion of how to present them. (Where I'm including whitespace in punctuation)
- Turing_Machine 9y ago
  In theory comma placement has something to do with the natural cadence of speech, and that varies quite a lot between different people (even within the same language, much less different languages). There's a popular meme about it: http://imgur.com/gallery/ljjibpM http://imgur.com/gallery/ljjibpM