Visit #15000, coming up soon

[pne]

Apparently, I have visited Gmail before today. In fact, "Yes, 14.945 times" according to Firefox.

Comments

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

Ah, now I see that "before" is probably a preposition in your sentence and not an adverb. I wondered how you had managed to check your mail so often on the same day.

See also: Heavy Metal Umlaut

[ifeedformula.livejournal.com]

Save the Umlaut! (http://community.livejournal.com/metaquotes/7034185.html)

*l*

Thought it might make you LOL. It did me.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Oh! Yes, quite so: it's a preposition in that sentence.

Re: See also: Heavy Metal Umlaut

[pne.livejournal.com]

Heh.

Though as some comments pointed out, the same two-dot diacritic mean different things in different areas - in some, it changes the pronunciation (as in the quote; German is an example of this; often called "umlaut" in this function), while in others, it signifies that the letter is pronounced separately (as in French, or sometimes English loan-words from French such as coöperate or naïve; often called "diaeresis" (UK)/"dieresis" (US) in this function).

And then there's Hungarian, which makes a three-way distinction (well, four-way really) between o-ó-ö-ő and u-ú-ü-ű, so they have two kinds of "umlaut" :) (In German, writing the umlaut with two dots or two short lines would be equivalent in handwriting, but in Hungarian it makes a difference.)

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

I think what caused my misunderstanding is that you used the present perfect. I (perhaps not quite correctly) associate it with periods of time that are not completely over yet whereas "before today" seems over to me.