On Friday 07 August 2009 15:02:05 James R. Frysinger wrote:
> Jim,
>
> John Steele gave a good answer.
>
> English tends towards simplification of writing style over time. There
> was a time that "cooperative" required (!) an "unlaut" over the second
> "o" to show that a diphthong ("oo") was not intended. I recall when one
> saw "catalogue" more often than "catalog". I still use a comma before
> "and" and "or" in a series of equal parts ("Bob, Bill, and Bubba").
Dieresis, not umlaut. They look alike, but an umlaut changes the pronunciation
of a single vowel, while a dieresis means that two vowels are pronounced
separately (except in the case of "aigüe", "contigüe", and "cigüe", where
the "e" is silent, and without the dieresis the "u" would be also).
As to Bob, Bill, and Bubba, for both rules (include the comma, and leave out
the comma) there is a phrase that makes it ambiguous.
> My impression is that the "double adjective hyphen" is slowly going
> away. The SI Brochure and NIST SP 811 demand that for metric values in
> symbolic form ("10 mm bolt"), even when used as adjectives. The world is
> still split on spelled out forms ("ten millimeter bolt" or
> "ten-millimeter bolt").
If you leave it out, does "ten millimeter bolts" mean ten bolts, each one
millimeter in size, or an unspecified number of bolts, each ten millimeters
in size? There is no such ambiguity with "10 mm bolts", since unit symbols
are not used to modify following nouns unless preceded by a number.
Pierre
