3 ms·
A comma separates clauses that make grammatical sense on their own, or at least where one of them does. So "In Greece, we have a similar phrase" is fine, becaus
by twic 7y ago
A comma separates clauses that make grammatical sense on their own, or at least where one of them does. So "In Greece, we have a similar phrase" is fine, because "we have a similar phrase" is complete in itself. Whereas "Readable code, is a piece of code" is not correct, because "is a piece of code" is not complete - it's missing a subject. Likewise, "In Germany, they say" and "In 16th century, in the Habsburgermonarchy" are fine, but "but let me, tell you a secret" is not.
As a native speaker, i can understand those sentences well enough, but they look wrong, and i wouldn't expect a fluent native writer to write them.
I have a Greek friend who is similarly scattershot with commas (eg "Hey send me, the photo of your office!"). I wonder if this comes from mapping some feature of Greek sentence structure onto English?
- dalai 7y agoI am Greek and we don't use that many commas. Definitely not in this way. I think the Greek language is also not as flexible with comma placement as perhaps English is. What I've noticed is that some people never learned how to use them. They just write a sentence (or a whole essay) and generously sprinkle some commas afterwards, normally wherever they would make a short pause. I've seen this with colleagues from Germany, Greece, Russia and the US.
- dredmorbius 7y agoRussia and the US AP style, or Oxford and a subtle political commentary? ;-)
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y agoI'm Greek also. I was taught at school that you place commas where you would naturally have a pause when speaking a sentence aloud. You can hear that rule very clearly in operation in the way school kids read when asked to read a text aloud (e.g. in national holidays etc). They always very deliberately pause after each and every comma. Anyway, other than the last two examples, the examples above don't look wrong to me.