WTF is that with the newly educated teachers hating commas trend?

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I see that I missed your meaning completely then. Still, it is an interesting contrast that some foreign people have very deep knowlegde of english grammar and a good english vocabulary, whereas some native english speaking people can speak english perfectly, but have no real grasp of proper grammar.

I'll trust your judgement here, as I don't have a degree in english. I'm curious, however, as to these traditional rules, as I find that if I try to say that sentence, the comma seems awkward.

[ October 20, 2006, 01:02: Message edited by: henkie ]

 

Hmm... I think it's true of most languages, but I can't vouch for every single one. German, English or French are probably easier to master than Polish or Arabic or something really exotic.

Well, it's true that some of the traditional commas sound weird in speech. But there are so many places where people don't put commas anymore but I "hear" them.

 

It depends on your origins and background. Actually Arabic (I don't know anything about Polish) is written the way it is pronounced, though there are many differences in the ending (the last vowel) according to a word's function in a sentence.
In French and in English it can be quite hard to actually read a word you've never heard because you won't know how it is going to be pronounced. This is not the case with many other languages. Once you get to know the letters you can read Arabic (of course the phonemes can be a problem for some persons).
For instance the word "scandal" in English and "scandale" in French are pronounced [sk] whereas the word "sceptic" in English is pronounced [sk] and "sceptique" in French is pronounced [se] (sorry I can't use the IPA symbols in the post).
Or think about words like "Apartheid" or "ideogram" in English and the way they are pronounced... It can be confusing.
English grammar does exist and it's a pity some people think it doesn't because it is very subtle and hard to master (and this applies to punctuation as well).

 

As a native french speaker I know exactly what you mean, each time I thought of that the word «taureau» (i.e a bull) come to mind, to anyone unfamilliar with french it must look unpronouncable. Actualy it's quite easy just /toro/

I thought that scandale was /skãdal/

anyway, it's a little beside the point...

As for punctuation I don't think it's only in English, quite often I see people with horrible french skill in my college, not just puncatuation. Alas I think it's an universal problem.

 

"An universal" just sounds wrong since the 'u' sounds like a 'you' and 'y' isn't a vowel.

English is a godsbedamned confusing language and I wish somebody, possibly a government, would just establish some hard-set rules about the language.

 

Well, it's not too late to resurrect Esperanto, you know.

And as to the issue of not using commas to seperate appositive phrases, I think I can hear some of my passed-on English teachers spinning in their graves!

But let's look at it like this - written language is a 'script' for what you would speak, right? So if you have to take a deep breath to utter everything on that script before the next pause, you're going to need a comma in a suitable place to improve the flow!

Chev? TELL me you took issue with this instructor, as well as loaned the person a decent grammar textbook of yours.

 

Is this actually an observable pattern in your area or for your brother's teacher(s)?

If we're talking about one sheet of homework, well, missing a grammatical mistake no doubt happens even at a good school. In any case, I have never seen a case with commas where I go to college, but then again, I don't take classes on learning Englihs grammar and language.