Thread: "May", "can", "might"

"May", "can", "might"

From
Bruce Momjian
Date:
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:

    may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."

    can - ability, "I can lift that log."

    might - possibility, "It might rain today."

Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice.  Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".

I would like to clean up our documentation to consistently use these
words.  Objections?

(Who says were obsessive?)  :-)

--
  Bruce Momjian   bruce@momjian.us
  EnterpriseDB    http://www.enterprisedb.com

  + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +

Re: "May", "can", "might"

From
Gregory Stark
Date:
"Bruce Momjian" <bruce@momjian.us> writes:

> (Who says were obsessive?)  :-)

I may not fall into your clever trap...

--
  Gregory Stark
  EnterpriseDB          http://www.enterprisedb.com

Re: "May", "can", "might"

From
"Mike Rylander"
Date:
On 1/30/07, Gregory Stark <stark@enterprisedb.com> wrote:
>
> "Bruce Momjian" <bruce@momjian.us> writes:
>
> > (Who says were obsessive?)  :-)
>
> I may not fall into your clever trap...

But you certainly can!

<cymbal_crash/>

(sorry...)

>
> --
>   Gregory Stark
>   EnterpriseDB          http://www.enterprisedb.com
>
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--
Mike Rylander
mrylander@gmail.com
GPLS -- PINES Development
Database Developer
http://open-ils.org

Re: "May", "can", "might"

From
"Sean Utt"
Date:
 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bruce Momjian" <bruce@momjian.us>
-- snip --
> I would like to clean up our documentation to consistently use these
> words.  Objections?
> 
> (Who says were obsessive?)  :-)
-- more snip --Did you mean, "Who says we're obsessive?" ;-)Sean


Re: [DOCS] "May", "can", "might"

From
Guillaume Lelarge
Date:
Bruce Momjian a écrit :
> Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
>
>     may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
>
>     can - ability, "I can lift that log."
>
>     might - possibility, "It might rain today."
>
> Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
> in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
> choice.  Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
>
> I would like to clean up our documentation to consistently use these
> words.  Objections?
>

No objections at all... it can only ease translations.

> (Who says were obsessive?)  :-)
>

:)


--
Guillaume.
<!-- http://abs.traduc.org/
      http://lfs.traduc.org/
      http://docs.postgresqlfr.org/ -->

Re: "May", "can", "might"

From
Bruce Momjian
Date:
I have made these adjustments to the documentation.  Do people want the
error message strings also updated?  It will probably make the
translation easier/clearer in the future, but it does involve some error
message wording churn.  CVS HEAD only, of course.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

bruce wrote:
> Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
> 
>     may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
>     
>     can - ability, "I can lift that log."
>     
>     might - possibility, "It might rain today."
> 
> Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
> in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
> choice.  Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
> 
> I would like to clean up our documentation to consistently use these
> words.  Objections?
> 
> (Who says were obsessive?)  :-)
> 
> -- 
>   Bruce Momjian   bruce@momjian.us
>   EnterpriseDB    http://www.enterprisedb.com
> 
>   + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +

--  Bruce Momjian   bruce@momjian.us EnterpriseDB    http://www.enterprisedb.com
 + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +


Re: "May", "can", "might"

From
Peter Eisentraut
Date:
Bruce Momjian wrote:
> I have made these adjustments to the documentation.  Do people want
> the error message strings also updated?

I have no problem with that.  They seem to be in pretty good shape 
already, so the changes should be few.

-- 
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/


Re: "May", "can", "might"

From
"Zeugswetter Andreas ADI SD"
Date:
> I have made these adjustments to the documentation.  Do people want
the
> error message strings also updated?  It will probably make the
> translation easier/clearer in the future, but it does involve some
error
> message wording churn.  CVS HEAD only, of course.

I think most translations will have the intended meaning translated
correctly.
So I think we can leave the translations unchanged in most cases,
and only change the english original. Maybe this can be automated ?
But since it only seems to be very few this might not be necessary.
(e.g. I only see 1 wrong "may" in psql)

Andreas


Re: "May", "can", "might"

From
Tino Wildenhain
Date:
Bruce Momjian schrieb:
> I have made these adjustments to the documentation.  Do people want the
> error message strings also updated?  It will probably make the
> translation easier/clearer in the future, but it does involve some error
> message wording churn.  CVS HEAD only, of course.

I still think logging localized error message is a bad idea anayway.
Nothing wrong with a frontend client to respond with localized
messages but logfiles with localized errors are hard or next to
impossible to parse. (Let allone quoting it on mailing lists)

So, changes of the wording could break such applications anyway
but not unexpected :-)

Regards
Tino



Re: "May", "can", "might"

From
Bruce Momjian
Date:
Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > I have made these adjustments to the documentation.  Do people want
> > the error message strings also updated?
> 
> I have no problem with that.  They seem to be in pretty good shape 
> already, so the changes should be few.

Yea, I see only a few. I will update those.

--  Bruce Momjian   bruce@momjian.us EnterpriseDB    http://www.enterprisedb.com
 + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +


Re: "May", "can", "might"

From
Andrew Sullivan
Date:
On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 12:39:26PM -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> I would like to clean up our documentation to consistently use these
> words.  Objections?

None here, but if you're going to go to the trouble, you might want
to have a look at how others have faced this problem too.

In my line of work, we've taken to adopting the RFC 2119 words for
cases where we want to be super-clear and unambiguous.  I don't think
those formulations would be much use for user manuals, but it's nice
to see that another group of people who work by converging on
consensus can still do that by (for example) agreeing that "MAY" and
"may" are not the same word.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.    --George Orwell