I’ve seen a number of posts lately like “How to get yadda yadda yadda” but when you click, the content is actually a question about the subject line, which sucks.
If you’re posting a question, please make it look like a question. It’s EASY… Just put a QUESTION MARK at the end of your subject line. It looks like this:
That’s great and all, but for those of us that do speak English and are expecting certain grammatical norms, eschewing those norms, regardless of the validity of the reason, makes it significantly harder for us to parse.
The question mark is not a rare piece of punctuation, either. It’s used in China. It’s used in Japan. It’s used in Vietnamese, every Romance language I’ve ever encountered, and every Germanic language I’ve ever encountered. I’m not saying I understand all those languages, but I can certainly recognize when someone’s asking a question in one because the question mark remains the same.
This is a piss-poor excuse and reeks of the attitude of one who’s never encountered a language that doesn’t use the Latin Alphabet even in passing. Oh yeah, by the way, it’s called the Latin Alphabet, not the English Alphabet.
While Japanese indeed uses question marks, you can get screwed if you think that every sentence without a question mark at the end is not a question. For example, this is a grammatically correct question:
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That’s great and all, but for those of us that do speak English and are expecting certain grammatical norms, eschewing those norms, regardless of the validity of the reason, makes it significantly harder for us to parse.
The question mark is not a rare piece of punctuation, either. It’s used in China. It’s used in Japan. It’s used in Vietnamese, every Romance language I’ve ever encountered, and every Germanic language I’ve ever encountered. I’m not saying I understand all those languages, but I can certainly recognize when someone’s asking a question in one because the question mark remains the same.
This is a piss-poor excuse and reeks of the attitude of one who’s never encountered a language that doesn’t use the Latin Alphabet even in passing. Oh yeah, by the way, it’s called the Latin Alphabet, not the English Alphabet.
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Not to invalidate the point made, but…
While Japanese indeed uses question marks, you can get screwed if you think that every sentence without a question mark at the end is not a question. For example, this is a grammatically correct question:
それは質問ですか。
That’s reasonable. I pulled that info from Wikipedia, and I don’t speak Japanese, so I just was going off that.
for real… the か character I would even go so far as to claim is often MORE prevalent without the question mark.