Here goes -- strictly British style pertaining to punctuation with inverted commas. Please, no recasts to reported speech. Thank you!!! 1) The sign said, 'Vehicles will be towed at owner's expense'. (I say full stop goes outside as shown because this is a non-dialogue quote.) 2) His sentence wa...

Again, strictly per British style ... 1) When he referred to her as a 'schlimazel', she cried. (Comma outside as shown?) 2) He said that he was going to 'blow the blow the whole thing out of the water'. (Full stop outside as shown, methinks.) 3) When she screamed 'Shut up!', you could hear a p...

What is correct for the following sentence? Melville's short story begins with the narrator's detailed description of the two unusual employees he hired as scriveners in his law practice WHICH involves the business of managing important legal documents. Versus Melville's short story begins w...

Sometimes I see a comma after the proper name: Hello Mr. Black, In order to give you.... But my native language is not English and I think that the comma in this phrase should be placed before the proper name: Hello, Mr. Black. In order to give you.... What is the correct p...

The forms shown above are traditional forms and are still perfectly acceptable. Modern casual and business forms are more succinct: the opening salutation and the closing valediction are brief, formulaic, and entirely independent of the sentences in the body text, each of which is complete in its...

I need to figure out the best method of ranking strings against one another so that I can tell which contain meaningful English words / sentences. This string contains English words (with no spaces or punctutation): THISISASENTENCETHATCONTAINSENGLISHWORDS This contains a jumble of random l...

I just found out, that with respect to the German language, where prefixes of verbs are separated from the verb and posed behind the object, I have no chance to find out, if a verb with a prefix is used more frequent than than the same verb without the prefix. Eg. Er schätz sie. and Er...

If given a list of languages the listener was able to understand or classify, how would you generate textual output using a standard phonetic alphabet, for example IPA, that would sound like a language if read by someone familiar in reading the textual output.

Is there a way to test to see if a string of words forms a complete sentence? For example: The dog jumped over the fence == Good The cat square seven the triangle == BAD I was thinking the type of words (verb, noun, etc.) and order of the words would help in creating a rule set to test the...

Some browser addons and web-services for website/dictionary translation sometimes offer a "automatic-language-detection" feature. This works more or less in my experience. There is probably a variety of different possible algorithms, like indexing some words of a website and compare them with di...

In the context of foreign language grammar study, "sb." and "sth." serve as substitutions for "somebody" and "something", essentially telling readers that a person or thing can be placed in that part of the sentence. Are there standard or common abbreviations in this similar usage meaning "some...