This sentence could either mean that the speaker called his superiors, as well as Sally and Michael, or that Sally and Michael are in fact the speaker’s superiors. " I immediately called my superiors, Sally and Michael. In the article the piece about the Oxford Comma seemed to me a little confusing, in that you find it confusing.
After all they seemed to want to change everything else that the English historically held dear, but these articles and comments demonstrate a new view for me and thanks for that. Million^2 and a Trillion was a Million Billion = Million^3 and so on and that this new fangled Billion (1 000 000 000) was just an Americanism. So eg a Billion was a million million i.e. As a young English boy back in the late 40's, the system I also learnt was that large named numbers increased not just in 'ions but in Millions. I found William's comment regarding the 'ions very interesting. Which brings me to the next challenge: Different international measuring units – but that's another story for another day!Īll this goes to show how enjoyable and wonderful language is whilst being simultaneously annoying and frustrating. In German: „Der jährliche Wasserverbrauch in New York beträgt durchschnittlich 161 655 Liter pro Kopf.“.In English: “The yearly water consumption in New York is 42 705 gallons on average per capita.”.To avoid confusion, especially in international documents, in recent years the use of spaces for digit grouping (preferably a "thin space") has been advocated in numerous German and English style sheets and standards. Notice how in US/UK English a comma, and not a point, is pla ced as a 3-digi t group separator. Notice how in UK/US English a decimal point, and not a comma, is placed as separator before the cents (the fractional part of the decimal number). In German: „EUR 999 ,50“ or „EUR 2 ,5 Millionen“.For the sake of clarity I have boiled this complex topic down to the following rules for German and US/UK English when it comes to writing figures, e.g.
Duden or DIN standard DIN 5008), and in the different versions of English (UK, Canada, South Africa, etc.). Please note that there are different conventions when it comes to writing numbers, both in German (e.g. In both German and in US/UK English, commas and points are used they are, however, placed differently in the two languages. When writing figures, German speakers sometimes forget that the symbols used are different in German and English. One of the most common mistakes I see when proofreading bilingual annual reports (German/English) is that the periods and commas are placed incorrectly as delimiters in numbers and figures.
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