@kotekzot I think we agree on the Russian-English translation matter
Just to be clear, I'm all for questions like "What does [obscure Russian idiom] mean?" both in Russian and English.
But the site shouldn't be completely symmetric. The question "How to express [something] in one word in Russian?" is OK, but "How to express [something] in one word in English?" isn't, even if "[something]" is written in Russian.
If that stance isn't clear from my answer, you're very welcome to edit it accordingly.
@TimN rotten luck, I can't even suggest edits on meta for some reason! But yes, I think that's a reasonable stance. If you could edit that into your answer it would be perfect. English [word-choice] questions are a perfect fit for English.SE anyway.
sounds russian to me but i mix up all my slavic languages and i've never been to russia though i'm exposed to tons of 2nd language speakers here in georgia
In the early days of English Language & Usage, people there strived to enforce the well-known convention of italicizing inlined words and phrases (not necessarily in another language). Apart from its being a generally accepted practice, it is aesthetically pleasing. Examples abound:
Myse...
Unless we want to work out our tagging guidelines first and then fix the tags and formatting in one fell swoop.
So I would prefer not to use code formatting for non-code, but, as long as it is done in a context where no real code is used, and it is clearly distinguishable from ordinary text, I don't have a real problem with it.
@Vitaly Because you included anything other than italics.
I've noticed several instances of code spans (Created with a pair of ` backticks) being used to format words or phrases in another language. Should we consider this type of formatting proper, or do we change it to double quotation marks (or something else)?
I usually use italics. Sometimes I use “double quotation marks” when referring to long phrases or whole sentences. I would stay away from bold, verbatim, or plain.
Nohat's answer doesn't exactly exclude using double quotation marks for formatting long-ish phrases and sentences.
@Cerberus And by “enforcing italics” I meant going through all the poorly formatted questions at RL&U and changing the code to italics. Eventually, people are going to pick up.
@Vitaly I'm not a big fan of using code blocks/spans for formatting, but my main concerns is that we are seeing edits that change one formatting scheme to another. that's going to pollute the main page and could lead to edit wars.
Regarding building phrases combining полтора and сутки, one should bear in mind that these words cannot be put together when the word сутки is either in именительный (latin: nominative) or in винительный (latin: accusative) grammatical case.
So, in your case it's better to say:
Это длилось...
@Vitaly If it is really a quotation, and there are no good reasons (like very weird characters or spacing required), I would strongly prefer quotation marks for quoted words.
@Vitaly I would certainly prefer italics there instead of c.f.; but I am undecided about enforcing them, mainly because that is probably not going to work, so the site will be inconsistent anyway; and secondly because some people will be whining and crying and it may not be worth the fuss.
@Vitaly It looks better with straight quotation marks.
@Cerberus This reminds me of something in the FAQ…
> If you are not comfortable with the idea of your contributions being collaboratively edited by other trusted users, this may not be the site for you.
I sort of agree that italics are always better if you're not quoting a specific instance of a word, used on a specific occasion. Otherwise, perhaps quotations marks may be better. But in either case I don't have a problem with either format I think.
i don't think we should be going out of our way to make sure every post perfectly conforms to the formatting guidelines, but it would be helpful to have them in case an edit war breaks out or something, or somebody decides that a 100 questions that don't conform to their personal preferences need to be edited asap
i've seen people changing formatting from one pattern to another for no reason already, and we only have 30 questions and 6 avid users
We're trying to figure out how to format inline quotes, which is something we're going to be doing a lot, being a language site. While using inline code spans has merits for readability, it breaks style with blockquotes and isn't styled quite as nice, not to mention being horrible semantically.
...
It is a common notational convention in linguistics to use small capitals in interlinear glossing. Using good ol' plain capitals for that is almost like not using the [code][/code] tag for code snippets. To quote Wikipedia,
Grammatical terms are commonly abbreviated and printed in SMALL CAPIT...
First, for the aim of this question I must say that I am not familiar with the Russian language, but I read a bit about it and am curious. I've never learned Russian before and just able to say a handful of sentences.
Thus the intention of this question is to get a rough understanding of what the...
> So, it's very confusing to me how a language can work with few tenses. So, what does the aspect cover? Is it (as the name suggests) the equivalent to the English perfect tenses or is it actually more?
I don't even know if I should point out that what is traditionally referred to as “Present Perfect” in English is best analyzed as the present tense combined with the perfect aspect.
How do you even answer that question without also explaining the tense–aspectual system of English?
I don't think anybody cares about this at this moment, later on we can review the tags and give them appropriate names. The key thing with tags is to make only high ranked users able to edit them.
In the early days of English Language & Usage, people there strived to enforce the well-known convention of italicizing inlined words and phrases (not necessarily in another language). Apart from its being a generally accepted practice, it is aesthetically pleasing. Examples abound:
Myse...
I usually use italics. Sometimes I use “double quotation marks” when referring to long phrases or whole sentences. I would stay away from bold, verbatim, or plain.
Regarding building phrases combining полтора and сутки, one should bear in mind that these words cannot be put together when the word сутки is either in именительный (latin: nominative) or in винительный (latin: accusative) grammatical case.
So, in your case it's better to say:
Это длилось...
I don't think anybody cares about this at this moment, later on we can review the tags and give them appropriate names. The key thing with tags is to make only high ranked users able to edit them.
