| Whom will succeed? | Who will succeed? | A simple rule-of-thumb is to use "who" when "he" would also make sense; and use "whom" when "him" would also make sense (e.g. "Him will succeed" does not sound right, while "he will succeed" does). |
| Who did you give it to? | Whom did you give it to? | As above. "You gave it to he" does not sound right, while "you gave it to him" does. Thus, use "whom". |
Monday, August 04, 2008
My Common Grammatical Errors
I'm as guilty as others in committing many of the grammatical errors stated here, including the one on whether to use who or whom. Thankfully there is an explanation to that:
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2 comments:
I looked for a link to contact you, but I couldn't find one. I hope you don't mind my replying to one of your articles to reach you.
A friend of mine is studying for his PhD degree in computational linguistics. His goal is to make a better automatic translator. The problem with many online translators, like Babelfish or Systran, is that they use dictionaries. That ignores a lot of the grammar and meaning of the text.
My friend wants to try to make a better translator, but he needs large documents, one in English and one in another language. The two documents need to be good translations of each other. They do not (and probably should not) be word-for-word translations, but they do need to be sentence-for-sentence translations. I would like to see his work succeed, so I volunteered to find large English and Malay documents, since I sometimes need to translate to or from Malay.
Can you suggest some large, public documents? Maybe an online copy of a book in English and Malay? Or maybe legal documents? I thought that maybe the Malaysian constitution might be available in English, but I can't find it.
I appreciate any help you can provide.
Hi,
Thank you for writing. It's quite difficult to find large documents in English and Malay, especially if they are translations of each other.
For a start may be you can check this document, not a large one but this is what I can find at the moment:
English version:
http://www.agc.gov.my/agc/oth/Akta/Vol.%201/Act%2015.pdf
Malay version:
http://www.agc.gov.my/agc/oth/Akta/Vol.%201/Akta%2015.pdf
By the way, my email is jaxonsblog at gmail dot com.
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