On Sun, Dec 15, 2002, Ira Abramov wrote about "Re: Announcement: free Hebrew Spell-Checker": > Quoting Nadav Har'El, from the post of Sun, 15 Dec: > > "They where playing in the park, and than it started to reign." > > > > (note that the last error - rain/reign, is particularly hard to catch, > > I see no error there, it's a perfectly correct English sentence.
In my opinion (but I'm no English linguist...), it isn't. When the above sentence says "it started to reign", "it" does not refer to the park. It does not make sense that way (because a park cannot reign, nor can it rain). So "it started" means what "hetchil" means in Hebrew (without a pronoun). In this case, it serves as an indefinite subject pronoun, somewhat like the french "On". But "reign" cannot sensibly act passively or on an indefinite subject. Consider the following translation and Hebrew, and see how much it doesn't make sense: Hem sichaku ba-park, v-pit'om hitchil limloch. (instead of ... laredet geshem). My point is that these sentences have correct spelling, and at a very low level also correct structure, but their high level syntax and semantics are incorrect - any human copy-editor will tell you that you've got an error in such a sentence because they simple do not make sense to a human reader. But programming such a thing is easier said than done :) -- Nadav Har'El | Sunday, Dec 15 2002, 11 Tevet 5763 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Jury: Twelve people who determine which http://nadav.harel.org.il |client has the better lawyer. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
