Andrew Douglas Pitonyak pisze:
Nguyen Vu Hung wrote:
On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 12:45 AM, Michael Stahl
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 12/12/2008 14:43, Nguyen Vu Hung wrote:
FYI,
I see a lot of "can not" in the file connectivity/source/resource.po.
As far as I can tell, it should be "cannot".
hmm, interesting question :)
It is not a question but a proposal :D
And I said, it *SHOULD* be "cannot" while
both "cannot" and "can not" are understandable.
FYI,
"cannot" on google: 514M hit.
"can not" on google 78M hit.
According to George Bernard Shaw, "The single biggest problem with
communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Most authorities consider both forms to be standard and considered
acceptable for general use. By most, I have never seen any authority
that claimed that one form was wrong. I have, however, seen slightly
different meanings assigned to the two constructs. Although there may be
differences in meaning between "can not" and "cannot", my opinion is
that the general readership will not understand the difference; and in
all likelihood, neither will the writer.
The more common usage appears to be cannot, and, as such, I typically
use cannot rather than "can not".
I think that in this case, it is not grammatical correctness or spelling
error that is the problem. The problem is that our texts lack
consistency - and for translation it means that even similar texts will
not be treated as repetitions etc. by computer-aided translation
software. Though probability that "can not" will not be understood is
low, it's generally a good idea to stick to one form- this is a basic
rule in any style guide. So we stick to "dialog" instead of "dialog
box", "dialog box window" and whatnot.
So we need to update the style guide for "can not" and normalize the
spelling for the form that is recommended.
Regards
Marcin
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