Arthur A. Gleckler scripsit:
> >It's actually the English language that's funny. Unlike sensible
> >German, the negation of English "must" is "need not" or "does not
> >have to".
>
> Huh? It's at worst ambiguous.
"I must go" and "Ich muss gehen" have the same semantics: they express
the necessity of going. But whereas "I must not go" expresses the
necessity of not going (narrow-scope negation), "Ich muss nicht gehen"
expresses the non-necessity of going (wide-scope negation).
The sentence "Textual ports must no longer have an associated transcoder"
is in English but employs the German semantics: it was intended to
express the non-necessity of textual ports having etc., whereas the
English semantics express the necessity of having them.
> It would be a good idea to change the text to say "need not" to
> eliminate confusion if that's indeed what was meant.
Indeed.
--
"Well, I'm back." --Sam John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org>
Received on Tue Jun 26 2007 - 22:42:50 UTC