artful at rogers.com
artful at rogers.com
Sat Dec 16 21:39:58 CST 2006
Wow. Shamil, you are an expert parser of the English language. The correct phrasing would have been, unambiguously: "I regret that I did not save you some units of currency." I wish, I hope, I regret, I promise, I pray, I hope... they are all equally foolish prefixes to sentences, and they all mean nothing more than "um", which is another meaningless expression commonly used as the first word of a sentence in English. Another example is "like" as in "So I was like sooooo interested in like the subject of this like email." Such words function either as marks of idiocy or as punctuation marks, similar to the diamond in a baseball park. Some other English idiosyncrasies: If it were up to me, there would be five diamonds in a baseball park. Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. (I fear t hat I have given the resolution away with my capitalization, but if not, then the foregoing sentence is both syntactically and semantically correct, and is a legitimate sentence in English. I cannot promise the same in Russian, but it might be fun to run it through one of those translation algorithms.) Always a pleasure to play with language! My Dutch is very shaky, but I can pronounce two of the most difficult words vacuum cleaner and the name of a small town on the coast that the Dutch used to detect German spies in WW2. I had to practice both words hundreds of times to get them right. The name of the town took way longer than the name of the vacuum ckeaner! Arthur ----- Original Message ---- From: Shamil Salakhetdinov <shamil at users.mns.ru> To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving <accessd at databaseadvisors.com> Sent: Saturday, December 16, 2006 8:09:37 PM Subject: Re: [AccessD] PGP automation Hi John, Thank you for the English lesson - may I argue? :) "I wish I saved you some bucks." means here in Russia nearly the same as "I hope I saved you some bucks" but "I wish" is more expressive than formal and weak "I hope" IMO. "I wish I had saved you some bucks." - that would mean here something, which can't happen in reality because it happened already - usage of past perfect tense shows that; when past tense is used as in "I wish I saved..." then an event can happen in the future and the one who uses "I wish" expresses strong desire for this event to happen ... Well, maybe this is a special Russian dialect of English, which I used :) Maybe this is even just my interpretation. To be certain this time: "I do hope that the sample I referred will save you a lot of bucks" :) Thanks. -- Shamil -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of JWColby Sent: Sunday, December 17, 2006 12:08 AM To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving' Subject: Re: [AccessD] PGP automation Thanks Shamil. I "hope" I saved you some bucks. A wish is generally something you desire but don't really expect to happen. I wish I had a Mercedes, I wish my mom would call, I wish I could afford a vacation, I wish America would stop provoking hatred in the Muslim world. Hope is something you desire as well, but might actually expect to see. I hope I helped you, I hope your daughter can go to school in America, I hope the republicans lose the election, I hope my son like his new bike. Kind of a small but important different in usage. And then you have lyrics like "We wish you a merry Christmas". Hmmmmmm....... Languages can be tough to pin down sometimes. Anyway, thanks for the pointer. John W. Colby Colby Consulting www.ColbyConsulting.com <<< tail skipped >>> -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com