Steve Jenner, from the Plain English Campaign, said punctuation, including the apostrophe, was one of the basic rules of language and he described the council's decision as "nonsensical".

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Source words were then replaced by target words selected from a dictionary, and their order rearranged so as to comply with the rules of the target language.

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We have invented language and unwritten rules of behavior that are emotion-neutral.

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Brown based the grammar for his ten-thousand-word language, called Loglan, on the rules of formal predicate logic used by analytical philosophers.

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Despite the concerns over language, MEPs were broadly supportive of the rules on mutual recognition and called for the time taken to recognise the qualifications of EU professionals such as doctors and engineers applying to work in another member state to be sped up.

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Roy Corden, professor of language and literacy at Nottingham Trent University, says rules often make things more confusing.

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Another way to determine attitudes is natural language processing methods, where software algorithms use different sets of rules to decipher statements and try to glean their intended meaning.

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One MP has found a novel way to circumvent the arcane rules which dictate whether language is parliamentary or not: by outsourcing questions to users of social media website Twitter.

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In addition, even if an English-only policy is adopted for nondiscriminatory reasons and applied uniformly, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and some courts take the position that such rules burden national origin minorities because they prevent many members of these groups from speaking the language in which they are best able to communicate.

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