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Comment by myfonj | Hacker News Reader

OT question from non-native speaker: those commas that mimics speech pauses are syntactically acceptable in English? (Or Greek?)

> In Greece, we have a similar phrase [...] > Readable code, is a piece of code [...] > In Germany, they say [...]. > In 16th century, in the Habsburgermonarchy [...] > [...] but let me, tell you a secret: [...] > Readable code, is a piece of code [...]

(I'm from Bohemian village where we were taught commas delimits sentences and such usage would be technically incorrect, but I suppose there are different rules in other languages.)

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A comma separates clauses that make grammatical sense on their own, or at least where one of them does. So "In Greece, we have a similar phrase" is fine, because "we have a similar phrase" is complete in itself. Whereas "Readable code, is a piece of code" is not correct, because "is a piece of code" is not complete - it's missing a subject. Likewise, "In Germany, they say" and "In 16th century, in the Habsburgermonarchy" are fine, but "but let me, tell you a secret" is not.

As a native speaker, i can understand those sentences well enough, but they look wrong, and i wouldn't expect a fluent native writer to write them.

I have a Greek friend who is similarly scattershot with commas (eg "Hey send me, the photo of your office!"). I wonder if this comes from mapping some feature of Greek sentence structure onto English?

I am Greek and we don't use that many commas. Definitely not in this way. I think the Greek language is also not as flexible with comma placement as perhaps English is.

What I've noticed is that some people never learned how to use them. They just write a sentence (or a whole essay) and generously sprinkle some commas afterwards, normally wherever they would make a short pause. I've seen this with colleagues from Germany, Greece, Russia and the US.

Russia and the US

AP style, or Oxford and a subtle political commentary? ;-)

I'm Greek also. I was taught at school that you place commas where you would naturally have a pause when speaking a sentence aloud. You can hear that rule very clearly in operation in the way school kids read when asked to read a text aloud (e.g. in national holidays etc). They always very deliberately pause after each and every comma.

Anyway, other than the last two examples, the examples above don't look wrong to me.

English uses commas more liberally than many languages. None of the commas OP used are particularly surprising, but some of them would be considered improper in more formal contexts. They are used to delimit the boundary between dependent and independent clauses, as in my previous sentence. They are also used around some kinds of parenthetical remarks, like this one, or to separate an initial prepositional phrase from the subject of the sentence (“In Greece, we have”).

They should not appear between subject and verb (“Readable code, is...” or “let me, tell...”).

It’s been a long time since I got this stuff in school, so there’s probably a lot of subtleties I’m forgetting.

Most modern writers use fewer commas. It was common in 19th century English to use commas for pacing like in the article. So native speakers are familiar with the style, but I don’t recommend imitating it.

1, 3 and 4 are acceptable but unnecessary, and would probably be frowned upon by English teachers. The other examples are incorrect.

> 1, 3 and 4 ...

As we’re talking about comma usage in English, it may be worth noting that there is wide disagreement about the Oxford, Harvard, or serial comma[1] in lists; no matter which choice you make, it will look wrong to many people.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma

But that's a question of style and tradition, not correctness. "I, went, home" is incorrect, no matter if you adhere to Chicago or Oxford.

Well, it will look jarring, annoying, and wrong to those people who are wrong.

While overall the article is well-written (grammatically), the author uses too many commas in a number of sentences. I wouldn't say that their comma use is "unacceptable", but it's not proper. An editor would remove many of them, and an English teacher would ding them if grading it.

Yes, completely acceptable :-)

There might be some technicality/formality that insists otherwise but this is so natural a writing style, and so invisible as a result, I had to reread the examples a few times before I understood what you were asking about (thought initially you might be asking about the ... notation which is a bit more idiosyncratic and up for debate as to how to use correctly)

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