Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

"Thou shall" is bad grammar #34

Open
ssokolow opened this issue Sep 30, 2016 · 3 comments
Open

"Thou shall" is bad grammar #34

ssokolow opened this issue Sep 30, 2016 · 3 comments

Comments

@ssokolow
Copy link

Currently, thor's output contains "Thou shall", which is like writing "he hate" instead of "he hates".

The proper conjugation is "Thou shalt". (Wikipedia's Thou page does a good job of explaining this in simple terms. Shall is one of the five irregular verbs where you don't just add whichever of -st or -est sounds better.)

@avishekgurung
Copy link

avishekgurung commented Oct 27, 2016

Your topic of the issue also has a bad grammar. Its "Thou shall" is bad grammar but it should be "Thou shall" is a bad grammar. You forgot 'a'.

@ssokolow
Copy link
Author

ssokolow commented Oct 27, 2016

No, "grammar" is not a countable noun, so it does not directly take an article. (What you're suggesting is equivalent to "a bread".)

The only situation where "a grammar" is a valid use is the same case where "a bread" is a correct use... when you're referring to one abstract class among many. (eg. "I'm trying to choose a bread to represent France." "Well, everyone knows the baguette, so use that.")

(In actual use, the phrase "a grammar" is generally only heard when discussing syntactic analysis (A.K.A. parsing), where they'd refer to the language definition a parser is generated from as a grammar.)

@fikrikarim
Copy link

Good grief..

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

3 participants