You use "hairs" in sentences like, "The fairy godmother told Prince Florimel he must get three hairs from the tail of the unicorn."

You're absolutely right about "rums." A representative example might be, "I just stocked my liquor cabinet with two vodkas (Stolichnaya and Absolut), two mixers (Bloody Mary and Margarita), two tequilas (one with the worm and one without), and two rums (one white plain and one dark spiced).

"Test.prg," "Test2.prg," and "Test3.prg."

is correct standard American English.

"Test.prg", "Test2.prg", and "Test3.prg".

is correct standard British English (and Canadian, etc.)

Pick the option that most closely corresponds with the remainder of yourt documentation.

As far as it looking stupid, nothing correct ever looks stupid. The only entity that looks stupid when something is done wrong is the person who knew better but did it wrong anyway.

Wow, Berger, terrific post.

Tell your Welsh friend that if he is writing in French, he may use the "hat" over the O in role. In English it is dead as the dodo.

English as a pidgin... Hahahaha...hah...ah... you may have a point there ;) Or you may just be discussing the general way in which most languages get started in populations in which individual speakers come from widely different linguistic backgrouds. Or I could be repeating myself. :)

Finnish is in the same "language family" as Hungarian, the "Finno-Ugric" group. English is part of a different family, "Indo-European." In Hungarian as well as in Finnish, every vowel has its own individual letter. I'm not familiar with the way to type them out, but I know that the O vowels can have either one or two accent marks, or an umlaut, or nothing at all. The U's, I think, are the same. Other vowels have their own sets. In any event, when writing the Hungarian alphabet, you write all the different vowels. In the French dictionary on my desk, by contrast, the basic alphabet is given and diacritics are added to words as a sort of afterthought.

I wonder if we don't use diacritics in English because we just spell out the letter combinations that are made into a single symbol in other languages. You know the German symbol that looks like a big fancy B and is pronounced with an S sound? Actually I know that it comes from the old calligraphic way to write a ligature (connected letters) SS. In English we are forced to always write SS. (Interestingly, I see German words that also use SS without using the special symbol; what's up with that?)

(shrug) Whatever it is you're talking about (and frankly I'm not sure I can make it out), it isn't a valid distinction in English grammar. It sounds like you have a personal "thing" against using a perfectly correct and acceptable English sentence. To each his (her?) own, I suppose.

Yeah, I've heard it... it is not standard. You would only use it informally, to people you were friendly with. It's considered "cute" and somewhat affected.

Preliminary research suggests that English does not use diacritics because the written language was heavily dependent on Latin. The basic Latin alphabet used no diacritics. The macron, or long sign, that is frequently seen in Latin textbooks (and was, if I remember correctly, borrowed from Greek), is only used to help out students of Latin.

The natural next question is why Latin did not use diacritics. Well... uh....

Ladylucy, a question in the form "I don't think (something)" does not refer in any way to whether or not you actually have thought processes.

The concept you're having trouble with is whether the verb is transitive (it has an object) or intransitive (it does not). If you were to disagree with me, you would say, "I don't think so," or, "I don't think that you are correct." in either case, something follows the phrase "I don't think" and that thing is the object of the verb "to think." (I'm not sure whether the verb "to think" can ever be fully intransitive; whenever a person thinks, he necessarily thinks OF something.)

If the distinction doesn't make sense to you, compare these pairs of statements:

"Elbert Snowden runs away." (Intrans)
"Elbert Snowden runs a major multinational oil company." (Trans)
"My feet hurt." (Intrans)
"My feet hurt the delicate flowers I walked upon." (Trans)
"I leaned against the barn wall." (Intrans)
"I leaned the rake against the barn wall." (Trans)

English doesn't use ANY diacritics. Any that you may see are on words taken recently from other languages. When fully assimilated into English, such words lose their diacritics.

As far as WHY this is so... oh, Christ on a stick, I don't have the slightest vestige of an idea. Just reading the question left me in a state of mental paralysis for a few minutes, because I've always taken this so for granted. :) I'll see what I can dig up; in the meantime, anyone else have a theory handy?

Eduardo, I'm ashamed to admit that it probably sounds fast to me because I'm completely ignorant of Portuguese. This is not helped by the fact that the engineer is the excitable type. :)

Janet, read the whole thread for more options.

"Aliens." LOL

I don't think anyone I know uses that word anymore to refer to any immigrants from locations within the orbit of the Moon. :)