[MPlayer-DOCS] CVS: main/DOCS/man/en mplayer.1,1.706,1.707

[D Richard Felker III]

On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 04:43:08PM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> Guillaume POIRIER writes:
> > Le mar 07/09/2004 à 23:07, Diego Biurrun a écrit :
> > > On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 10:27:10PM +0200, Guillaume Poirier CVS wrote:
> > > > +You can build such a file with xvid4conf's matrix editor.
> > > 
> > > I'd prefer "with the xvid4conf matrix editor".
> > 
> > I know what you mean, but I don't think that it would be correct.
> > xvid4conf allow transcode users to set all XviD options with a nice GUI,
> > and it just happens that it has a matrix editor. That's why I wrote: the
> > matrix editor of xvid4conf. ;-)
> 
> Then I'd say "with the matrix editor of xvid4conf".  The rule being
> that only persons get the genitive "'s" while "X of Y" is used for
> inanimate things.

this is nonsense. in english, 's and "of" have a distinction in
meaning that's not made in most languages, but it's not a matter of
animate or inanimate. the best way i can describe it is that "'s"
indicates "possession", in the sense of ownership (diego's computer),
authority/authorship (diego's words), part-to-whole (diego's hand,
mplayer's demuxer layer, xvid's rate control engine), etc.

on the other hand, "of" has more of what i would call a sense of
relation or "with respect to", but without possession or ownership. in
common usage, "'s" can be used for this too ("the organization's
founder" or "the founder of the organization"), but often using "of"
instead of "'s" can emphesize the non-ownership status of the
relationship. for example, "the president of america" versus
"america's president" (the latter sounds more populist but less
powerful, imo). i see the use of "'s" in all these cases as slightly
slang, and i'd be especially careful of using it when the 'object' of
ownership would be a person, since it could cause offense.

one more use of "of". sometimes "'s" becomes awkward or unusable if
the possessor is a long phrase, or if there are several levels of
possession. so sometimes of gets used for possession too, but using it
for something simple like "the matrix editor of xvid4conf" would sound
weird. :)

rich