How To Improve Your Grammar And Punctuation (part I)

By : kirakeivan

Individual words too can have relatively different meanings in different cultures depending upon expectations, values and experience of the two persons, the speaker and the listener. For example a word such as ‘far’ when applied to distance, may convey something totally different to a city dweller in North America who practically never walks anywhere, compared with someone who lives on the land in the middle of an African country. Similarly words such as ‘big’ or ‘large’ when related to size of an object or a contract.

In the various languages, punctuation marks and other symbols such as the full stop (.), the comma (,) the colon (:), the semicolon (;), the question mark (?), the quotation mark (‘) and many others are not necessarily written in the same way, nor positioned in the same manner within text. Many different kinds of diacritical signs and marks are used, and some specialist signs and ligatures, such as the ampersand (&) or the ‘at’ sign (@) may not be understood.

All languages using romanised script are written from left to right on a horizontal line, while many others including Arabic script and languages in Asia and South East Asia are written from right to left. Chinese characters, pictographs or ideograms are printed from top to bottom in vertical columns shifting from right to left, but sometimes also from left to right in horizontal lines. There is a saying in diplomatic circles, that when a diplomat says yes, he means maybe; if he says maybe he means no; and if he says no, he is no diplomat. It is to oversimplify matters to state that
in Western European countries and in North America the word ‘yes’ means the affirmative and ‘no’ the negative, in many other countries and cultures even these two words are often the cause of serious misunderstandings. In France people will often say ‘no’, when they actually mean — maybe, but try and convince me. In most European languages the response to a question is ‘yes’ or ‘no’ according to whether the answer is positive or negative, as in the following examples:


Question Answer to be conveyed Answer

• Is your name Peter? (My name is Peter) Yes
• Is your name Peter? (My name is not Peter) No
• Isn’t your name Peter? (My name is Peter) Yes
• Isn’t your name Peter? (My name is not Peter) No

But in many African and other languages the choice of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is made in the light of whether the question and answer are both negative, when the answer is ‘yes’, but if they are not, it will be,’no’. The answers to the four questions above are therefore:

1. Affirmative question + affirmative answer = Yes
2. Affirmative question + negative answer = No
3. Negative question + affirmative answer = No
4. Negative question + negative answer = Yes

To be Continue .......

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