Timeline for "main" vs. "major"
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 23, 2020 at 21:08 | vote | accept | RobertH | ||
| Jun 23, 2020 at 15:45 | comment | added | Jay A. Little | @RobertH Oh boy, talking about genres is even more subjective than grammar hahaha. Those examples are unrelated and are interchangeable as synonyms, so it's a bit different. BTW, you should mark this answer as accepted, and if you have other questions, feel free to open new ones. | |
| Jun 23, 2020 at 6:36 | comment | added | RobertH | @JayA.Little Thank you. I found another example, major film genres vs Main Film Genres | |
| Jun 20, 2020 at 13:37 | comment | added | KRyan | @RobertH “Significance” is highly context dependent. In this case, it’s probably most accurate to say that the “main” tenses are more fundamental than the “major” tenses, because the main tenses are the bigger, broader categories and the major tenses all fit under one of the main tenses. | |
| Jun 20, 2020 at 2:58 | comment | added | RobertH | Thank you. Does "significant" here mean "large". If it goes with meaning like "important", the quotation from the tutorial would become, "present tense is more important than present simple tense", which might be not clear. | |
| Jun 19, 2020 at 3:50 | comment | added | Jay A. Little | The other problem though is that these 3 and 12 items are not 15 separate things, but are actually 3 sets, with 12 subsets. So there should be better words to describe the importance and also that relationship, perhaps "3 primary verb tenses" and "12 secondary verb tenses". I think I've fallen into a nerdy rabbit hole haha. | |
| Jun 19, 2020 at 3:41 | comment | added | Jay A. Little | I tried that as well, "3 major verb tenses" and "12 main verb tenses". Ugh - that IS even more awkward, right? I don't like it the way they chose to write it, but I would like it even less if they were flipped around. So maybe that does mean I subtly understand major to be less important than main. | |
| Jun 19, 2020 at 3:34 | comment | added | KRyan | @JayA.Little I had the exact same thought about the versus a, and struggled mightily with how to express that. Articles are already a notorious source of difficulty for learning the English language, so I wasn’t sure it would be helpful even if I could wrangle a way to articulate what I meant. And yeah, I initially was like “no, they have nothing to do with one another, it was just something the authors chose to do here” and then was like “but wait... it would be wrong to do it the other way around, wouldn’t it?” | |
| Jun 19, 2020 at 3:32 | comment | added | Jay A. Little | Thinking of other examples, "main role" vs "major role" or "main issue" vs "major issue", is there an understanding that major is less important than main? Now that I think of it, "main" tends to be stated as "THE main..." while major tends to be "A major..." which places the importance indication on the articles more than the words "main" and "major". I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, just found myself fascinated by the question and really analyzing how I understand the subtle differences between the words. | |
| Jun 19, 2020 at 3:26 | comment | added | Jay A. Little | +1 Agreed. Hadn't thought about "main characters" vs "major characters" but I agree that if someone said "she is a major character in the story", then I would ask myself "Why didn't they say 'main' character?" And then I would realize they mean less important than "main". So I wonder if that is only for cases where "main" is commonly used and expected in the phrase. Otherwise, I don't think that is inherently understood between the two words in general. | |
| Jun 19, 2020 at 3:00 | history | edited | KRyan | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 532 characters in body
|
| Jun 19, 2020 at 2:55 | history | answered | KRyan | CC BY-SA 4.0 |