[sandworm101]

They don't need to trademark (verb) X to get a trademark (noun). Registration is a good idea, but failure to register doesn't mean any joe can start using X.org. So long as the organization used the mark in trade (ie sold something and/or took donations) their basic trademark will be protected.

[lucb1e]

The "(verb)" and "(noun)" actually make it less clear, by the way.

[KMag]

The difference is subtle to non-native speakers of European languages. Experience suggests that my girlfriend, for one, would find the gp easier to read with the notations.

[kmicklas]

> The difference is subtle to non-native speakers of European languages.

I don't think that's an accurate generalization. If anything, European languages are probably _more_ likely to morphologically distinguish nouns and verbs than normal, with English being an exception. (I don't have hard data to back this up though, could be wrong.)

[KMag]

I expect native speakers of English and other European languages to have less trouble than my girlfriend, who is not a native speaker of English or any other European language.

If (as you suppose) English and other European languages are likely to make large distinctions between nouns and verbs, then native speakers of those languages would more naturally notice the distinction in the sentence without having it pointed out to them, correct? I believe we're in agreement here.

Perhaps I went a bit too far in trying to reduce the wordiness of my statement and should have left it as "those who are not native speakers of English or any other Eurpean languages".

[kmicklas]

The point is that the reason for trouble here is that English is _not_ making a morphological distinction. Since most European languages do make more of a distinction, speakers of European languages should be _more_ confused. Of course many non-European languages make distinctions as well, although the most spoken of all (the various Chinese languages) don't, just as English.

Basically, there's little reason to expect a Czech speaker to find this any easier than a Japanese speaker.

[quonn]

I'm from Europe, and I found the gp very confusing and would have understood better without the hints.

[KMag]

Okay, but then I presume you're implying that you're a native speaker of a European language and my statement doesn't apply to you.

I expect people who are not native speakers of English or other European languages to be helped by the annotation. My girlfriend and many of my colleagues here in Asia speak natively only East Asian languages. Some of my colleagues are native speakers of both English and one or more East Asian languages, and I don't expect that they would find the grammatical notation to be helpful to them. I also don't expect my colleague who's a native speaker of French and Chinese to be helped by the annotation, even though his English is obviously a second language. But, that's just my intuition based on living and working in East Asia.

[sheepdestroyer]

It is not less clear but redundant with "to" and "a". They already make the verb/noun distinction apparent.