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I'm no grammar Nazi but the first sentence on this website had me completely tripped up: >> Linux distribution is well-tested collection of packages carefully

by pan69 12y ago

I'm no grammar Nazi but the first sentence on this website had me completely tripped up: >> Linux distribution is well-tested collection of packages carefully organized and supported by the vendor. wat?

smira 12y ago
Sorry for my bad English. Does this sound better: "Linux distribution is a well-tested collection of packages that are carefully organized and supported by the vendor."
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- codeflo 12y ago
  The missing article at the start of the sentence makes it very hard to decipher if you're talking about Linux distributions in general or a specific one. "A Linux distrubution is ..." is probably what you intended to say, but I'm not sure.
  - smira 12y ago
    Thanks for your suggestions!
    - robinson-wall 12y ago
      Have you considered making the website / documentation source available in github? That would make it very easy for others to contribute suggestions.
      - smira 12y ago
        It is actually available: https://github.com/aptly-dev/aptly-dev.github.io/tree/trunk https://github.com/aptly-dev/aptly-dev.github.io/tree/trunk In trunk branch, the markdown under content/ folder.
        padraic7a 12y ago
        I see you've just added changes, are you looking for anyone to proof read at this stage?
- pluma 12y ago
  Grammar aside, I'd say the plural feels more natural in this case: "Linux distributions are well-tested collections of packages …" But for singular you need to qualify "Linux distribution": "A Linux distribution is a well-tested collection of packages …" And I'd probably say "by a vendor" instead of "by the vendor" as it's not clear you're talking about a specific vendor. Also, the "a" is wrong in this: "There’s a support for …" This should be: "There is support for …", in other words: "Support exists for …". Support is non-countable (like water, peace or terrorism) in English. As a rule of thumb: * if it's non-countable, just leave it bare: "I bought water", "It has support", "This is murder". * if you're referring to a specific instance of something the audience knows about or you're going to qualify, use "the": "I bought the house [I previously told you about]", "I shot the gopher that kept digging up my lawn". * otherwise use "a": "I bought a house" (this is news to you), "I ran over a cat" (if you say "the cat", the listener would instantly think "which one?"). English is "fun".
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    English has a countable "support" - it can be used to refer to several physical objects in various structural contexts (architecture being one). That is not the sense in which it's being used here, though.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    In English (en-gb) colloquialism "I ran over the cat" would be perfectly fine as "the cat" is understood to mean "our/my cat". "Your dinner's in the dog", "I locked the keys in the car", et cetera. Similarly in a sentence like "Why don't you and the family come up to the house sometime for tea.". "The house" substitutes for "our house". Now all you need to work out is whether tea is afternoon tea, a cup of tea, or an evening meal and if the offer is sincere. I gather the response is supposed to be "That would be lovely." rather than actually trying to arrange the proffered social meeting.
    - pluma 12y ago
      Sure, but presume neither the speaker nor the recipient owns a cat. Without an obvious context ("the cat"? what cats could we both know of?), it's not entirely clear. Saying "the" instead of "a" generally assumes a context that has either been established before during the conversation or outside of it. Imagine a stranger telling you they "accidentally killed the koala". You'd be confused. Not that strangers telling you about exotic animals they accidentally killed wouldn't be confusing enough.
deathanatos 12y ago
> I'm no grammar Nazi but Our author seems to consistently make the same mistake: there's a distinct lack of articles in the writing. Sprinkle some in, and things start to make sense: > [A] Linux distribution is [a] well-tested collection of packages > we would like to have [an] internal mirror of [a] package repository > some packages are missing in [the] official distribution > we would like to own [a] package repository, that is to have [a] package repository > There are many tools to create [a] mirror of [the] Debian package repositories … and so on. At any rate, this consistency suggests (to me, at least) that he's probably not a native English speaker; in fact, the writer is almost certainly Russian. There's a link to a sponsor, which has a Russian phone number, and if you click around enough, you can find his CV quite easily. Not everyone on the Internet speaks English, however, enough people do that I could easily see it being beneficial to put your content in English. Who knows?
- eLobato 12y ago
  For some reason, native speakers of Slavic languages who learn English as a second language, often omit some prepositions in English. It's 100% understandable, but I'm really curious what's the actual reason why this happens.
  - heinz 12y ago
    Don't you mean articles instead of prepositions? If so, take into consideration that most of all Slavic languages don't feature articles at all.
  - szabba 12y ago
    It probably has something to do with out languages having more grammatical cases than English (which, arguably, has two, though it's possible to only use one).
  - groovy2shoes 12y ago
    Not sure about prepositions, but the articles are often omitted because most Slavic languages don't have articles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_%28grammar%29#Variation_among_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_%28grammar%29#Variation...
pessimizer 12y ago
It's just article-dropping; get to know a few Eastern Europeans well and you might start doing it yourself. One of my old bosses was Bosnian Croat, dropped articles like crazy, and added them in the wrong places. She would run her important emails by me for article-fixing before sending them. She was still smarter than me and better at her job than I was. Turns out that mastery of the arbitrary rules of English article placement and choice isn't a very good indicator of intelligence or competence.
- ianlevesque 12y ago
  No, but still a useful skill when communicating in English.

by pan69 12y ago

smira 12y ago

Sorry for my bad English. Does this sound better: "Linux distribution is a well-tested collection of packages that are carefully organized and supported by the vendor."

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
codeflo 12y ago
The missing article at the start of the sentence makes it very hard to decipher if you're talking about Linux distributions in general or a specific one. "A Linux distrubution is ..." is probably what you intended to say, but I'm not sure.
- smira 12y ago
  Thanks for your suggestions!
  - robinson-wall 12y ago
    Have you considered making the website / documentation source available in github? That would make it very easy for others to contribute suggestions.
    - smira 12y ago
      It is actually available: https://github.com/aptly-dev/aptly-dev.github.io/tree/trunk https://github.com/aptly-dev/aptly-dev.github.io/tree/trunk In trunk branch, the markdown under content/ folder.
      - padraic7a 12y ago
        I see you've just added changes, are you looking for anyone to proof read at this stage?
pluma 12y ago
Grammar aside, I'd say the plural feels more natural in this case: "Linux distributions are well-tested collections of packages …" But for singular you need to qualify "Linux distribution": "A Linux distribution is a well-tested collection of packages …" And I'd probably say "by a vendor" instead of "by the vendor" as it's not clear you're talking about a specific vendor. Also, the "a" is wrong in this: "There’s a support for …" This should be: "There is support for …", in other words: "Support exists for …". Support is non-countable (like water, peace or terrorism) in English. As a rule of thumb: * if it's non-countable, just leave it bare: "I bought water", "It has support", "This is murder". * if you're referring to a specific instance of something the audience knows about or you're going to qualify, use "the": "I bought the house [I previously told you about]", "I shot the gopher that kept digging up my lawn". * otherwise use "a": "I bought a house" (this is news to you), "I ran over a cat" (if you say "the cat", the listener would instantly think "which one?"). English is "fun".
- dllthomas 12y ago
  English has a countable "support" - it can be used to refer to several physical objects in various structural contexts (architecture being one). That is not the sense in which it's being used here, though.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  In English (en-gb) colloquialism "I ran over the cat" would be perfectly fine as "the cat" is understood to mean "our/my cat". "Your dinner's in the dog", "I locked the keys in the car", et cetera. Similarly in a sentence like "Why don't you and the family come up to the house sometime for tea.". "The house" substitutes for "our house". Now all you need to work out is whether tea is afternoon tea, a cup of tea, or an evening meal and if the offer is sincere. I gather the response is supposed to be "That would be lovely." rather than actually trying to arrange the proffered social meeting.
  - pluma 12y ago
    Sure, but presume neither the speaker nor the recipient owns a cat. Without an obvious context ("the cat"? what cats could we both know of?), it's not entirely clear. Saying "the" instead of "a" generally assumes a context that has either been established before during the conversation or outside of it. Imagine a stranger telling you they "accidentally killed the koala". You'd be confused. Not that strangers telling you about exotic animals they accidentally killed wouldn't be confusing enough.

deathanatos 12y ago

> I'm no grammar Nazi but Our author seems to consistently make the same mistake: there's a distinct lack of articles in the writing. Sprinkle some in, and things start to make sense: > [A] Linux distribution is [a] well-tested collection of packages > we would like to have [an] internal mirror of [a] package repository > some packages are missing in [the] official distribution > we would like to own [a] package repository, that is to have [a] package repository > There are many tools to create [a] mirror of [the] Debian package repositories … and so on. At any rate, this consistency suggests (to me, at least) that he's probably not a native English speaker; in fact, the writer is almost certainly Russian. There's a link to a sponsor, which has a Russian phone number, and if you click around enough, you can find his CV quite easily. Not everyone on the Internet speaks English, however, enough people do that I could easily see it being beneficial to put your content in English. Who knows?

eLobato 12y ago
For some reason, native speakers of Slavic languages who learn English as a second language, often omit some prepositions in English. It's 100% understandable, but I'm really curious what's the actual reason why this happens.
- heinz 12y ago
  Don't you mean articles instead of prepositions? If so, take into consideration that most of all Slavic languages don't feature articles at all.
- szabba 12y ago
  It probably has something to do with out languages having more grammatical cases than English (which, arguably, has two, though it's possible to only use one).
- groovy2shoes 12y ago
  Not sure about prepositions, but the articles are often omitted because most Slavic languages don't have articles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_%28grammar%29#Variation_among_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_%28grammar%29#Variation...

pessimizer 12y ago

It's just article-dropping; get to know a few Eastern Europeans well and you might start doing it yourself. One of my old bosses was Bosnian Croat, dropped articles like crazy, and added them in the wrong places. She would run her important emails by me for article-fixing before sending them. She was still smarter than me and better at her job than I was. Turns out that mastery of the arbitrary rules of English article placement and choice isn't a very good indicator of intelligence or competence.

ianlevesque 12y ago
No, but still a useful skill when communicating in English.