{"id":9,"date":"2016-05-04T15:30:11","date_gmt":"2016-05-04T13:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.fu-berlin.de\/ausdrucksfehler\/?p=9"},"modified":"2017-07-27T10:12:22","modified_gmt":"2017-07-27T08:12:22","slug":"commas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.fu-berlin.de\/ausdrucksfehler\/2016\/05\/04\/commas\/","title":{"rendered":"Commas"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m no expert on official punctuation rules, and there’s quite a bit of freedom in English anyway, but here’s one thing that will reduce mistake (and annoyance) rates drastically for some people: Germans, please don’t transfer German Kommaregeln <\/em>to English! I know you’ve probably put a deal of effort into learning this in high school, but German punctuation rules,\u00a0I regret to inform you, will lose rather than win you points in English. So please: DON’T PUT A COMMA IN FRONT OF EVERY THAT<\/em>! That<\/em> can be a relative pronoun (like which<\/em>, which requires a comma if\/because a non-defining relative clause ensues) or a conjunction, and in neither case does it need a comma!<\/p>\n

\"fact<\/a>
\nPersonally, I don’t think we should transfer English punctuation practices to German, either. I never put commas in front of the main verb (as in Anders gesagt, sind…<\/em>)—after all, German’s a V2 language, and the position before the verb can be filled by complex constituents, so there’s no reason why I should. \ud83d\ude42 But I think the Duden’s against me on this one. \ud83d\ude41 In any case, you should have a good reason for putting a comma before the main verb in German. This is a general rule of thumb, actually: You should have a good reason for any comma you put.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m no expert on official punctuation rules, and there’s quite a bit of freedom in English anyway, but here’s one thing that will reduce mistake (and annoyance) rates drastically for some people: Germans, please don’t transfer German Kommaregeln to English! I know you’ve probably put a deal of effort into learning this in high school, … Continue reading “Commas”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allgemein"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.fu-berlin.de\/ausdrucksfehler\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.fu-berlin.de\/ausdrucksfehler\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.fu-berlin.de\/ausdrucksfehler\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.fu-berlin.de\/ausdrucksfehler\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2610"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.fu-berlin.de\/ausdrucksfehler\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.fu-berlin.de\/ausdrucksfehler\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.fu-berlin.de\/ausdrucksfehler\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions\/80"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.fu-berlin.de\/ausdrucksfehler\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.fu-berlin.de\/ausdrucksfehler\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.fu-berlin.de\/ausdrucksfehler\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}