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By PEH - Monday, January 16, 2006
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I was horrified to discover that the beta GenoPro (unlike the 1.99b version) removes the final s in possessives for names that end is s. (Like: Les' family with Anne, Dennis' father was James.) This is not good UK English usage at all: it is far more usual to include the final s after the apostrophe for all names, even those already ending in s. I know that US usage is divided on this topic, but both Strunk and White's "Elements of Style" and the "Chicago Manual of Style" prefer this usage, as do Fowler's "Modern English Usage" and the Oxford University Press in the UK.
For endless discussion on this topic, see:
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=29285
http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk.html#1
http://www2.ncsu.edu/ncsu/grammar/Apostro3.html
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/tta/wordpunc/wordpunc.htm
http://open-dictionary.com/%27s
etc.
This is so serious to me that I want to report it as a bug rather than as wish list item. Is there an easy way to customize this?
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By GenoProSupport - Monday, January 16, 2006
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This is a known issue. In the section New Report Generator - Translation and Grammar Issues, there are two posts that may interest you, both dealing with the possessive rules.- Translation of Phrases in Dictionary.xml
- Translation of narrative phrases using pattern matching
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By PEH - Saturday, January 21, 2006
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Wow. That looks like a very powerful and elegant solution. I was quoting all the usage references because I thought I would have difficulty convincing you that there was actually a problem, but I now see that you have already embraced the problem and planned a "world-class" solution. I hadn't even thought of what would happen in non-English languages.
I presume that solution is still under development: at least I can't see any of the suggested tags in dictionary.xml, or am I looking in the wrong place?
When the beta is finalized, will there be a separate UK-English skin, with rules such as this one being specified differently from the default US-English one?
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By GenoProSupport - Sunday, January 22, 2006
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The plan is to produce a flexible solution to generate quality reports. Eventually, one dictionary will be capable to inherit from another dictionary, so it will be possible to have UK-English and US-English reports with little extra work.
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By PEH - Monday, January 23, 2006
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I'm looking forward to the final dictionary support. But, for the moment, I fixed my immediate gripe by customizing the StrPossessiveProperNoun function in Lang.vbs.
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By GenoProSupport - Tuesday, January 24, 2006
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PEH (1/24/2006)
I'm looking forward to the final dictionary support. But, for the moment, I fixed my immediate gripe by customizing the StrPossessiveProperNoun function in Lang.vbs.You are welcome to post your code of StrPossessiveProperNoun. I will update the master template with your code, so the next update has it.
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By genome - Tuesday, January 24, 2006
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PEH (1/16/2006)
I was horrified to discover that the beta GenoPro (unlike the 1.99b version) removes the final s in possessives for names that end is s. (Like: Les' family with Anne, Dennis' father was James.) This is not good UK English usage at allIt is some years (40+) since I was last taught (UK) English language. However I have spoken to a few of my contemporaries and they agree that the rule taught at that time was to omit the possessive s for names that end in s. However, I for one would not be particularly perturbed to see it go either way. So let's keep freedom of choice. 
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By PEH - Thursday, January 26, 2006
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You are welcome to post your code of StrPossessiveProperNoun.
I'd be embarrassed to do so. It is quite a clumsy reversal of the test you do for a final s and ends up always appending the apostophe-s. Which is the way I want it: the essence of customization. I recognize that others (even on the east side of the pond) may prefer a different usage, in spite of the citations in my initial post, so I'm quite prepared to leave the master template the way it is so long as I have a work-around.
Ron: we must have learned UK English grammar about the same time. But we differ. This particlular usage grates on me like fingernails on a blackboard.
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By GenoProSupport - Thursday, January 26, 2006
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English is my second language... and I barely passed the [English] test to graduate  . Grammar (both English and French) have always been my worse school subjects.
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By IainTait - Friday, January 27, 2006
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Don't feel ashamed, I was useless in French when I was at school and had to give it up in order to get through the sciences ! It was only when I moved to France 26 years ago that I was at last able to get to grips with the language.
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