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semi-stupid language question: is there any difference between proved and proven?
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I'm a mathematical physicist and we prove physical laws with mathematical accuracy. Maaaany, many moons ago, I've learnt in school that the past participle of `prove' is `proven.' Now, in many, many articles you read `… has been proved.' The dictionary tells me that both past participles are correct. However, my intuition tells me that a `proved concept' just doesn't sound right, so they are not quite interchangeable. On the other hand, I would say `he has proved his worth' sounds about as good as `he has proven his worth.'
Are there subtle differences to the two you cannot find in any dictionary? Do these difference depend on the shade of the meaning or on the sound?
Thanks in advance!
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As a fellow physicist I'm familiar with this problem.
This is what the New Oxford American Dictionary (built right into OS X) has to say:
For complex historical reasons, prove developed two past participles: proved and proven. Both are correct and can be used more or less interchangeably: this hasn't been proved yet, this hasn't been proven yet. Proven is the more common form when used as an adjective before the noun it modifies: a proven talent (not a proved talent). Otherwise, the choice between proved and proven is not a matter of correctness, but usually of sound and rhythm—and often, consequently, a matter of familiarity, as in the legal idiom innocent until proven guilty.
And that's pretty much the way I use it: this proven method, but this method has been proved.
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Why did I post this in the wrong forum … ![Wink](http://forums.macnn.com/images/smilies/oldschool/wink.gif)
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"I don't know. A proof is a proof. What kind of a proof? It's a proof. A proof is a proof, and when you have a good proof, it's because it's proven."
Jean Chretien
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Proven if it's a thing/concept, proved if it's a person?
I have had many beers, but that sounds about right.
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Originally Posted by OreoCookie
..... I would say `he has proved his worth' sounds about as good as `he has proven his worth.'
Thanks in advance!
He proved his worth.... He proved it could be done...
He has proven...
If there's going to be a "has" then "proven" just seems to sound better. But maybe thats improper to say "he proved" so i dont know.
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The past participle of ‘prove’ is ‘proved.’
In modern English, ‘proven’ is an adjective only.
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Originally Posted by red rocket
The past participle of ‘prove’ is ‘proved.’
In modern English, ‘proven’ is an adjective only.
Neither of these claims has been proven. ![Wink](http://forums.macnn.com/images/smilies/oldschool/wink.gif)
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Last edited by lavar78; Jan 21, 2009 at 09:36 PM.
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Originally Posted by red rocket
The past participle of ‘prove’ is ‘proved.’
In modern English, ‘proven’ is an adjective only.
I'm fairly certain I was taught the past participle is proven and not proved.
@Others
So it seems that with few exceptions (use of past participle as adjective), it is a matter of custom and sounds.
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You were taught something wrong, then. ‘Proven’ as a past participle is archaic. I’ll prove it to you, will upload some photographs of actual dictionary entries later, as well as a snapshot from the online OED.
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Rocket is actually making sense here (now I'm sober again) with this "proven is an adjective" thing.
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The text you've included in your post says that `proven' is actually the more common form (in American English, at least) … so why is it supposed to be archaic?
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Unrelated to "proven" vs "proved", but why are you using an accent grave (or whatever people call it) in place of a straight quote at the beginning of single-quoted words and phrases?
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That `issue' has been brought up before...I never remember hearing why though.
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Originally Posted by shifuimam
Unrelated to "proven" vs "proved", but why are you using an accent grave (or whatever people call it) in place of a straight quote at the beginning of single-quoted words and phrases?
Those are back tics. Proper quotation marks distinguish between opening and closing quotation marks, e. g. “proper quotation marks” or »proper quotation marks«. In LaTeX (which I use to write my letters, papers and thesis), you need to distinguish between opening and closing quotation marks to get the output you want. For opening quotation marks, you have to type ` or `` to get ‘ or “ and ' or " to get ’ or ”. You quickly get used to this.
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Ah, I suppose that makes sense. I also just noticed for the first time that Linux does the same thing in bash.
Snap.
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Originally Posted by red rocket
The past participle of ‘prove’ is ‘proved.’
In modern English, ‘proven’ is an adjective only.
Not in my dialect of English, at least. People I know are far more likely to say "I've been proven right" than "I've been proved right." The latter sounds downright unnatural to my ears.
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What about pronunciation of 'proven'? I tend to say 'pro-ven' (rhyming with 'snow-ven') although I think most people say 'pru-ven' (rhyming with 'shoe-ven').
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Originally Posted by philm
What about pronunciation of 'proven'? I tend to say 'pro-ven' (rhyming with 'snow-ven') although I think most people say 'pru-ven' (rhyming with 'shoe-ven').
Do you pronounce "prove" like "drove"?
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Originally Posted by Chuckit
Do you pronounce "prove" like "drove"?
Nope, but I pronounce 'prove', 'love', 'drove' differently too.
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Originally Posted by philm
What about pronunciation of 'proven'? I tend to say 'pro-ven' (rhyming with 'snow-ven') although I think most people say 'pru-ven' (rhyming with 'shoe-ven').
I stumbled at that in red rocket’s pic. I’ve never, to my knowledge, heard anyone pronounce it like that. And yet, even OS X’s built-in dictionary has both variants listed. How odd.
Originally Posted by shifuimam
Unrelated to "proven" vs "proved", but why are you using an accent grave (or whatever people call it) in place of a straight quote at the beginning of single-quoted words and phrases?
Please, please, please—never encourage people to use straight quotes anywhere outside coding. Please. For normal writing, straight quotes are in dire need of rapid extermination and swift death. They’re disgusting.
The back tick trick is not exactly pretty, but at least it disintinguishes opening and closing quotes.
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Originally Posted by Oisín
Please, please, please—never encourage people to use straight quotes anywhere outside coding. Please. For normal writing, straight quotes are in dire need of rapid extermination and swift death. They’re disgusting.
The back tick trick is not exactly pretty, but at least it disintinguishes opening and closing quotes.
I hate to break it to you, but I'm not going to do some BS finangling to get smart quotes when I'm posting stuff online. There's nothing wrong with straight quotes - if you're too dense to figure out when a quote is opening or closing, you can DIAF.
Not only that, but using smart quotes in HTML is bad unless you go to the effort of using the actual HTML-encoded character codes. Just using the unicode characters means your pages won't necessarily render correctly in all browsers and operating systems.
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Originally Posted by shifuimam
I hate to break it to you, but I'm not going to do some BS finangling to get smart quotes when I'm posting stuff online. There's nothing wrong with straight quotes - if you're too dense to figure out when a quote is opening or closing, you can DIAF.
I can figure it out fine (usually). It’s just ugly. Fugly-fugly-fugly.
I don’t do much BS finangling, either, by the way. Took me about thirty minutes one time (two or three years ago) to set up my own keyboard layout (that also has loads of other neat features I constantly use), so now to type »‘« is one keystroke, and so is »’«.
Not only that, but using smart quotes in HTML is bad unless you go to the effort of using the actual HTML-encoded character codes. Just using the unicode characters means your pages won't necessarily render correctly in all browsers and operating systems.
Not if you use a proper charset. (ISO–8859–1 can DIAF, if you ask me.)
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Originally Posted by shifuimam
Not only that, but using smart quotes in HTML is bad unless you go to the effort of using the actual HTML-encoded character codes. Just using the unicode characters means your pages won't necessarily render correctly in all browsers and operating systems.
Yeah, you have to think about all those people running browsers and operating systems that can't handle UTF-8.
Also, I'm often kept awake at night by the thought that normal ASCII text on my site might not render correctly on an EBCDIC system.
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Originally Posted by Oisín
Not if you use a proper charset. (ISO–8859–1 can DIAF, if you ask me.)
That's like deliberately designing a site so that it doesn't work in Firefox or, better yet, so it doesn't work in IE. It's one thing when it's print media or a PDF or some other situation where you have complete control over the appearance.
In the world of the Internet, however, you have to ensure as much cross-compatibility as possible. This includes not using any characters that are outside of the basic ASCII set - which even includes letters with accents and whatnot, like the second i in your username. A conscientious designer/developer would use í instead of the unicode character.
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Originally Posted by shifuimam
That's like deliberately designing a site so that it doesn't work in Firefox or, better yet, so it doesn't work in IE. It's one thing when it's print media or a PDF or some other situation where you have complete control over the appearance.
Ehhh, no. Using UTF–8 will work just fine in any even relatively modern browser, even IE.
In the world of the Internet, however, you have to ensure as much cross-compatibility as possible. This includes not using any characters that are outside of the basic ASCII set - which even includes letters with accents and whatnot, like the second i in your username. A conscientious designer/developer would use í instead of the unicode character.
Again, no. As long as you specify a character set for the page, you can use whatever character falls within the scope of that character set with no issues. This forum, for example, uses UTF–8, and has been for at least three years. I’ve never had a problem, anywhere, with my name being incorrectly displayed. Not even on that behemoth of devil-incarnate browsers, IE 5.2 for Mac.
If you’re using ISO–8859–1 and you want characters that aren’t part of that scheme, though, then you’d be wise to use HTML values instead. But then you’re very likely misusing ISO–8859–1 anyway.
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Originally Posted by shifuimam
That's like deliberately designing a site so that it doesn't work in Firefox or, better yet, so it doesn't work in IE.
It's more like deliberately designing a site so it doesn't work in a sewing machine. Any remotely modern system will be able to handle UTF-8. If yours doesn't, it probably doesn't support modern HTML standards anyway. So, for example, it wouldn't understand the ‘ entity. Maybe not even divs.
Originally Posted by shifuimam
In the world of the Internet, however, you have to ensure as much cross-compatibility as possible.
Do you ensure that your pages will render the same in both NCSA Mosaic 1.0 and Firefox 3? (I actually have a copy of the old Mosaic from my dad's old computer. Let me tell you, it does not like this XHTML+CSS stuff one bit.)
Originally Posted by shifuimam
This includes not using any characters that are outside of the basic ASCII set
ASCII? What about EBCDIC? Think of the 1960s-era mainframes, man!
And what are all the people from non-English-speaking countries supposed to do? Are they just locked out of the Internet forever, resigned to press their faces against the window while we ASCII users eat htmlicious cake and play with our fun new divs?
Honestly, can you come up with a real-world example of a real-world problem that's caused by using UTF-8? Because your objections sound more like dogma than an actual practical concern. It's worth giving up 100% compatibility with ancient systems nobody uses in order to give actual, breathing people a better experience.
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Originally Posted by Oisín
I don’t do much BS finangling, either, by the way. Took me about thirty minutes one time (two or three years ago) to set up my own keyboard layout (that also has loads of other neat features I constantly use), so now to type »‘« is one keystroke, and so is »’«.
How does one set about doing something like that, OisÃn?
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Originally Posted by Doofy
How does one set about doing something like that, OisÃn?
By using Ukelele. Takes a moment to get the hang of, but once you get how it works, it’s easy as pie, and the sky’s the limit.
Also: I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE!!1!1 Ye sneaky bastid.
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active vs. passive?
i've proved a case of your stupidity.
your stupidity is proven to be perpetual.
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Originally Posted by Oisín
By using Ukelele. Takes a moment to get the hang of, but once you get how it works, it’s easy as pie, and the sky’s the limit.
Cheers ducks. ![Smilie](http://forums.macnn.com/images/smilies/oldschool/smile.gif)
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Originally Posted by shifuimam
In the world of the Internet, however, you have to ensure as much cross-compatibility as possible. This includes not using any characters that are outside of the basic ASCII set - which even includes letters with accents and whatnot, like the second i in your username. A conscientious designer/developer would use í instead of the unicode character.
You forget that most languages have more characters than ASCII characters, a standard from the 1960s, I believe. All modern encodings that are commonly used, e. g. Windows latin1 in the Windows world or UTF8, know how to deal with these not so special characters. Straight quotes are a relict of the era of type writers.
@Oisín
You're right that it's not ideal, but LaTeX, as I mentioned, converts these characters into the correct typographical objects.
@Doofy
On a US keyboard, you can type “í” very easily: press Alt + e, then i and presto.
Getting back to the question: sealobo, that's an interesting characterization. But do you actually used `proved' as a past participle? I have rarely -- if ever -- heard it.
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Originally Posted by OreoCookie
@Doofy
On a US keyboard, you can type “í” very easily: press Alt + e, then i and presto.
Cheers.
I knew about that (although wouldn't have done if I hadn't messed around with KeyCaps before they dropped it) - I was thinking more along the lines of swapping the angle brackets with the square ones for all that tedious HTML work. ![Smilie](http://forums.macnn.com/images/smilies/oldschool/smile.gif)
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Originally Posted by OreoCookie
@Oisín
You're right that it's not ideal, but LaTeX, as I mentioned, converts these characters into the correct typographical objects.
In LaTeX, it’s completely appropriate, of course. I meant carrying the habit over into regular writing—not exactly a pretty outcome, but at least a distinguishing one.
Getting back to the question: sealobo, that's an interesting characterization. But do you actually used `proved' as a past participle? I have rarely -- if ever -- heard it.
In an active construction, yes (“I have proved you wrong” doesn’t sound wrong to me at all, while “I have proven you wrong” sounds slightly awkward to my—non-native—ears). In a passive construction, not likely to. “You have been proved wrong” sounds awkward (more so than “I have proven you wrong”) to my ears, too, though perhaps not downright unnatural as it does to Chuckit.
Of course, the distinction between the adjective vs. participle and active vs. passive schemes is a fine (if not moot) one, since past participles in passive constructions are for all intents and purposes adjectives in Modern English.
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Originally Posted by OreoCookie
The text you've included in your post says that `proven' is actually the more common form (in American English, at least) … so why is it supposed to be archaic?
Because it is in Standard English. It is originally a Scottish variant, designed to rhyme with ‘woven’ and ‘cloven’. If I were a Scot and I said ‘proven,’ it would rhyme, and I would be consciously paying homage to Scotland. Because of significant emigration of Scots to America, as well as America’s generally more pastoral nature, archaic forms are popular over there.
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Originally Posted by Oisín
I stumbled at that in red rocket’s pic. I’ve never, to my knowledge, heard anyone pronounce it like that. And yet, even OS X’s built-in dictionary has both variants listed. How odd.
I hear it quite regularly. Posh English people, usually, in addition to Scots and some amongst the intelligentsia. Even the Queen says ‘pro-ven’, if memory serves.
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Originally Posted by Chuckit
It's more like deliberately designing a site so it doesn't work in a sewing machine. Any remotely modern system will be able to handle UTF-8. If yours doesn't, it probably doesn't support modern HTML standards anyway. So, for example, it wouldn't understand the ‘ entity. Maybe not even divs
....
Honestly, can you come up with a real-world example of a real-world problem that's caused by using UTF-8? Because your objections sound more like dogma than an actual practical concern. It's worth giving up 100% compatibility with ancient systems nobody uses in order to give actual, breathing people a better experience.
Actually, I all too frequently run into a site that has some odd encoding, causing the smart quotes or accented vowels to show up as a jumble of foreign characters or a question mark. Setting it to UTF-8 doesn't always fix it, either - I don't know why; I've just found that it sometimes happens that way.
As a web dev, I'd rather take the extra four seconds to use the HTML codes (which are easy to memorize, since most of them are pretty explicitly defined) so that I can be certain that my client's browser is rendering the characters correctly.
And, WRT to smart quotes, I'm just not seeing how it's that critical - especially on the web, where most text is sans-serifed. It does make quite a difference when you're using a serifed font in printed text, but fonts like Arial are barely any different between straight and smart quotes on-screen, especially at smaller text sizes like 10pt.
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When you want to be really good at something, you have to be anal about some things. (I really dislike some formatting habits of my coworkers -- but when I'm the junior partner, all I can do is politely ask to have it changed. In the projects I'm the senior, you bet I enforce high standards.)
My job as a student didn't help either: a tester for localizations of software. I can spot an extra space from a mile away now (like that is going to be handy at one point in my life ![Wink](http://forums.macnn.com/images/smilies/oldschool/wink.gif) ).
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Originally Posted by shifuimam
Actually, I all too frequently run into a site that has some odd encoding, causing the smart quotes or accented vowels to show up as a jumble of foreign characters or a question mark. Setting it to UTF-8 doesn't always fix it, either - I don't know why; I've just found that it sometimes happens that way.
That's because it's not UTF-8; it's some other odd encoding that isn't properly declared. A properly declared UTF-8 page won't do that. Avoiding UTF-8 because of that is like being afraid to write HTML because you once ran across an Office Open XML file that wouldn't render in your browser. It's more superstition than logic.
Actual Real Experience: I've been doing pages in UTF-8 for years and the only time I've gotten a "Help, our curly quotes are ****ed!" call is when some genius converted all the text to some bizarre Swedish encoding. I put it back to UTF-8 and all was right with the world. UTF-8 is the new ASCII.
Originally Posted by shifuimam
And, WRT to smart quotes, I'm just not seeing how it's that critical - especially on the web, where most text is sans-serifed. It does make quite a difference when you're using a serifed font in printed text, but fonts like Arial are barely any different between straight and smart quotes on-screen, especially at smaller text sizes like 10pt.
Sorry, as a designer, I care about typography and other details that make things look nice. You'd rather have a page's type render wrong 100% of the time by using tick marks than run the nonexistent risk of a browser not being able to read UTF-8? You're right that it's barely detectable in 10pt Arial, but I'm hoping your sites aren't set entirely in 10pt Arial.
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Originally Posted by red rocket
Because it is in Standard English.
But Oreo’s in the US, not Britain.
Originally Posted by shifuimam
Actually, I all too frequently run into a site that has some odd encoding, causing the smart quotes or accented vowels to show up as a jumble of foreign characters or a question mark. Setting it to UTF-8 doesn't always fix it, either - I don't know why; I've just found that it sometimes happens that way.
That’s irrelevant, though, and a whole other issue.
Chuckit and I are talking about properly coded pages (or at least properly coded in this particular regards), i.e., HTML documents where the character set has been explicitly specified, as it should always be, in the meta tags in the head section.
Occasionally, something can go wrong when text is pulled from different databases in different encodings and served to a page with another different encoding, but even that is quite rare, and is not at all a problem if you only have static HTML or HTML with only databases you yourself control, to deal with. It’s also usually a sign of bad coding somewhere. An example of where things can sometimes go wrong: previously (they’ve since fixed it) Yahoo! Mail classic used UTF–8, but didn’t properly check and convert the character encoding received e-mails had been sent with. Certain Chinese e-mail providers/servers (like 126.com) send all e-mails encoded as GB-2312, the default encoding for Simplified Chinese—but without specifying in the document itself that that is what it is. Therefore, you would sometimes have to switch to GB–2312 to see what your Chinese e-mails said, at which point accented letters in other e-mails would become nonsense characters, since they were now interpreted according to their GB–2312 values, rather than their UTF–8 values.
But even there, the problem was not that Yahoo! Mail used UTF–8, but that the Chinese e-mail server sent the message out without specifying any character encoding.
The particular problem you’re referring to, where the text actually appears as garbled regardless of which encoding you use to display the page in your browser settings is very often the result of someone saving the file itself in one encoding (for example ISO–8859–1), but specifying a different encoding (like UTF–8) in the meta tags in the HTML document.
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Back on topic:
For me, it's always gonna be provinated.
-t
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Originally Posted by Oisín
But Oreo’s in the US, not Britain.
I know. He’s also a scientist, which means that it is in his own interest to take up the habit of using the past participle form ‘proved’, just in case he ever wants to get anything published in a British or international journal.
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@red rocket
Most international journals in my field use American English or just mention `English'. In science, the language is largely shaped by American English. Exceptions are journals based in America (e. g. those associated to the AMS or APS) or in England (e. g. J. London Math. Soc.), but I wouldn't know one article that has been rejected because the author chose to write in American English.
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Originally Posted by red rocket
I know. He’s also a scientist, which means that it is in his own interest to take up the habit of using the past participle form ‘proved’, just in case he ever wants to get anything published in a British or international journal.
I'm a scientist as well. I publish in American and international journals and I'm a reviewer for two APS journals. I have always used American spelling. I have not once had a problem getting a paper accepted because of spelling.
Actually, even if a British journal would object to the spelling, what would happen is that after the review process their copy editor would make the modifications, ask me to confirm, and then the article would be printed. At least in my field it is completely unthinkable that a scientifically sound article would be rejected because of spelling. And I can assure you when I'm doing a review the last thing I worry about is AE vs. BE spelling.
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Last edited by Simon; Jan 23, 2009 at 10:42 AM.
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Proved and proven are not always interchangeable.
"He proved it was true."
"It was proven to be true."
Isn't the "was" a passive sentence? I'm not an english major.
(Me fail english? That's unpossible!)
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Originally Posted by OreoCookie
Most international journals in my field use American English or just mention `English'.
Not that I am doubting you, but I would still like to see some statistics on that. Also, if the submission guidelines specify ‘English’, that isn’t clear enough. The UK, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, India, all over Europe, considers ‘English’ to be BE, not AE. My own experience in getting fiction published is that when I submit something to a US publisher, they expect consistent use of AE, and it appears simple courtesy for someone who submits something to a publisher in Britain to consistently use BE.
The key factors here are consistency, and bearing in mind the target audience.
In science, the language is largely shaped by American English.
That does not seem to follow. It may be the case in the field of mathematical physics, but you cannot extrapolate from that.
Exceptions are journals based in America (e. g. those associated to the AMS or APS) or in England (e. g. J. London Math. Soc.), but I wouldn't know one article that has been rejected because the author chose to write in American English.
Unless it were one of your own articles, or you knew the author personally, you wouldn’t necessarily find out about it, would you? Assuming that the number of articles submitted exceeds the number that the journal will publish, there is always going to a pressure on reviewers to find fault with an article. Take the LMS, for instance: you will notice that they ask for submissions in English or French. Presumably, we can all agree what they mean by French, educated mainland French with proper grammar. Do you think by English they mean AE or BE? Bear in mind, AE is not taught in the UK. If they receive two submissions of equal merit, it seems logical to me to assume that they will accept the one which conforms best to their house style.
Here are a handful of links containing discussion and advice on English for technical and scientific purposes, in case anyone’s interested:
http://stcforum.org/viewtopic.php?id=990
http://eusoils.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ESDB...r/EUR22191.pdf
http://files.nothingisreal.com/publi...ler/advice.pdf
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/British_English
http://www.indopedia.org/American_an...fferences.html
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Originally Posted by Simon
I'm a scientist as well. I publish in American and international journals and I'm a reviewer for two APS journals. I have always used American spelling. I have not once had a problem getting a paper accepted because of spelling.
Actually, even if a British journal would object to the spelling, what would happen is that after the review process their copy editor would make the modifications, ask me to confirm, and then the article would be printed. At least in my field it is completely unthinkable that a scientifically sound article would be rejected because of spelling. And I can assure you when I'm doing a review the last thing I worry about is AE vs. BE spelling.
Do you worry about consistency?
Besides, it should be ‘if a British journal were to object to the spelling’, and if they did in fact object, they would probably consider it rude on your part to have caused them the extra work.
Speakers of American English expect to see AE spelling, grammar, and punctuation. There are vast numbers of people across the world who expect to see BE, especially if the journal is published in a country where BE is the norm and/or for an international audience.
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