🚀 go-pugleaf

Colin Fine wrote:
>
> You've cast your net wide for groups, haven't you!

Well, you know, it's usually the little coterie of regulars who
frequent newsgroups, it appears, so I thought that I'd have a better
chance at a variety of opinions this way.  Besides, a "multiple
discipline" approach is often interesting.

> There's little of relevance to sci.lang here, but as best I can answer:

So it now seems, but at the time I just thought that maybe there could
be some "linguistic principle" involved.  I'd have tried a psychology
newsgroup, too, but alas, google seems to think cross-posting more than
five groups is spamming.

> '100' is read 'a hundred' or (perhaps more formally) 'one hundred'. I
> can't off-hand think of a context in which it would be read 'hundred',
> though there probably are some.

I wonder if it's the same in other languages.  In Chinese, though, it's
almost always "one hundred" -- there are no articles, definite and
infinite, in Chinese.  I say almost always because it's conceivable
that in some poem might use it in an "abbreviated" fashion.

> 'The deal' about quotation marks is that somebody to whom others accord
> authority has decreed that it shall be done one way or the other. Or
> perhaps two someones have decreed differently.
> As I've said in another post on sci.lang recently, this is etiquette,
> not linguistics.

Well, even etiquette usually follows some kind of logic.  The
assumptions may be arbitrary -- like toilet paper over or under -- but
there is logic leading to the final outcome.  I tend to stick with
tucking things within quotes just because it looks better (more tidy),
except in cases where doing so would be misleading (question marks
which are mine and not part of the original quote, say).

> Colin