You're the second commenter, so far, to mention exclamation marks. What do they mean to you that would bother you so much to point it out, or anyone for that matter? I haven't even noticed them until I read the comments here on hn.
Not gp, but I feel similarly. For me, I can't help read it with emphasis. As in, the voice in my head gets all fancy in an annoying way. If you imagine someone in person reading it out-loud with exaggerated emphasis, that's what it feels like. Same thing with comic books for me, the sprinkled bolded words in dialog are really grating.
To me it's fairly similar to someone making excessive use of CAPS LOCK. It can be used as a stylistic choice at times, but use it TOO MUCH and it just becomes DISTRACTING.
I DON'T SEE A PROBLEM WITH THIS EITHER! BUT I EMPATHIZE! I GET COMMENTS FROM PEOPLE SAYING THAT I'M SOMEHOW YELLING AT THEM ALL THE TIME BUT I'M ACTUALLY SITTING IN SILENCE, TYPING QUIETLY ON A MEMBRANE KEYBOARD! LOL???
Oh this is nothing. One of my colleagues does that and adds random colour changes, underlines and font face changes. It's like working with a serial killer.
Ahh. I honestly miss that amount of self-expression, garish as it was. Or rather, I intensely dislike the mono-culture where every vertical video with one-word subtitles looks the same.
I have an ESL colleague (who speaks fantastic English) and she has repeatedly asked me to spellcheck important documents because she is concerned she will "mess up the articles".
After she said it, I realized the incredible subtlety in communication that can be expressed by the position/omission of key articles.
I've always been taught that "the" is for when there's a single obvious instance you're talking about. There are many policemen and women, but if I say "the police" there's only really one likely candidate which I could be talking about.
"A man" is just some guy. If I say "The man" there's a specific guy I'm talking about and I expect you to know which one.
Did you know dutch has two words for "the"? One is generally for big or important things and the other for small or unimportant things. I'm sure people trying to learn Dutch love figuring out which you use when.
Turkish, in comparison to English, is a language that is less lexically dense. So in this instance; you don't really need to specify anything; but that also means a lot of sentences _get longer due to said lack of lexical density requiring more words to be used, for clarity's sake and / or heavier reliance on context_. Which follows the cultural lines quite well - Turkish culture is a _high context culture_ whereas English culture is not (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...).
The high-context culture would seem to be an adaption to the lower lexical density, if that’s the case?
e.g. to save on space, paper, writing effort, etc…, Turkish writers have to rely on the reader reading in-between the lines to a greater extent than a similar English writer would in a similar position.
And after many generations of writers competing, it simply became the default norm.
How do you differentiate between the abstract concept of police, the concept of police forces as an organizational unit, and the specific police force that exists within a specific city?
If I understood you correctly, you just name them. The default is the concept, and most of the time people do not feel the need to separate some specific police force, because it's apparent from the context. Some specific police force aren't likely to expand their operations in the city.
On the other hand, I think I may also be failing to explain this correctly because we are already at the limits of my English :)
Thanks, but you don’t need to explain how if you’re unsure.
If you can just write one example in Turkish, of each case, so three total, most readers can probably puzzle it out with enough time using translation tools.
> Bu şehirdeki polis teşkilatı faaliyetlerini arttırdı.
Interestingly the -ki suffix here was borrowed from Persian (another Indo-European language like English), and effectively highlights a unique instance - "the one which" - in a way that Turkish otherwise doesn't specifically do.
(Note: not a Turkish speaker, but the other language without the articles)
You don't need most of the time because it's evident from the context without any ambiguity.
You also need to know what English is quite lacking in the declension and inflection departments which do the heavy lifting in the other languages and often eliminate the need for a separate article words.
Why not both? Crazy people can be smart. As for mystic delirium well that's our modern sensibilities talking. Hell there are people today who believe in Marian apparitions.
That is what the former means. It's probabilistic because we assume (or at least hope) everyone is doing as I do, rolling an n-sided die to decide if they will write -10(n-1) instead of writing 10.
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