Hi Quintus,
I don't want to appear to be overly critical here. The suggestions I made are very small adjustments to make the phrases sound more natural and I don't want to give the impression that I am painstakingly dissecting your use of English. Your English is remarkably good, and the better it becomes, the finer the points of adjustment become. That is the case here.
Far from me the idea of arguing with native speakers, but the difference must be so small that Collins couldn't see it either:
«11 - You can use say or let's say when you mention something as an example.
To see the problem here more clearly, let's look at a different biological system, say, an acorn...»
In general, yes, you can use either. What Collins doesn't address is when one has a better flow, sound, than the other.
Also, I am a bit confused as to "in the far Glasgow" versus "in far off Glasgow". According to the WordReference dictionary, "far off" is an adverb, not an adjective:
You are correct! I made a mistake in omitting the hyphen from the phrase; it should have read 'far-off', which is an adjective.
http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictio ... sh/far-off?
So, yesterday, before posting my message, having no other chance to know if "in the far Glasgow" was correct, I googled (with Advanced Search):
in the far "in the far"
and I found 1,050,000,000 results. For example:
«Play Nicole Adventures in the Far East and other flash games...»
«They were in the far South on a regular visit to buy fruit...»
«But Sevilla have huge misses and likelihood think about draw in the far Moscow...»
Examples 1 & 2 are accepted usage and are covered by the Wikipedia extract noted below*.
Example 3 is incomprehensible and looks like some sort of machine translation. If that was written by an English speaker, I'll eat my hat!
Results taken from Google can be misleading since they record only the level of occurrence not the validity of a phrase. However, let's take it as a measure of frequency and carry out a search for "in the far Glasgow.". The search returns zero instances of that phrase and you can try it with any city you choose and the result will be zero or incredibly low.
In your original sentence, and correct me if I'm wrong, you were trying to convey the idea that Florentine speaking habits were now known as far away as Glasgow.
That sense can be rendered by using any of the following:
# distant Glasgow
# far-off Glasgow
# far away Glasgow
I've never heard an English speaker use the construction "the far Glasgow.".
Time permitting, I always search the net for parts of my sentences, just to check out if they are at least minimally comprehensible. For example, as to "one more way" vs. "one way more", couldn't it be that "one more way" translates to "un altro modo" and "one way more" is instead for "un modo ancora"? I don't know it, I'm just asking. Both these constructions have a lot of occurrences on Google. E.g., see "one more kiss" vs. "one kiss more", although the former is more common.
As you have noted, the former is the more commonly found usage. If you look at the results for the latter you'll see that they are all related to song lyrics where poetic licence has been used to make the phrase rhyme with another line.
regards,
Calum
* Extract from Wikipedia 'English Articles'
- An area in which the use or non-use of the is sometimes problematic is with geographic names. Names of rivers, seas, mountain ranges, deserts, island groups and the like are generally used with the definite article (the Rhine, the North Sea, the Alps, the Sahara, the Hebrides). Names of continents, islands, countries, regions, administrative units, cities and towns mostly do not take the article (Europe, Skye, Germany, Scandinavia, Yorkshire, Madrid). However there are certain exceptions:
Countries and regions whose names are modified common nouns, or are derived from island groups, take the article: the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, the Czech Republic, the Middle East, the Philippines, the Seychelles. Note also the Netherlands.
Certain countries whose names derive from mountain ranges, rivers, deserts, etc. are sometimes used with an article (the Lebanon, the Sudan), but this usage is declining, although the Gambia is the recommended name of that country. Since the independence of Ukraine (formerly generally called the Ukraine), most style guides have advised dropping the article (in some other languages there is a similar issue involving prepositions). Use of the Argentine for Argentina is now old-fashioned.
Some names include an article for historical reasons, such as The Bronx and The Hague.
Names beginning with a common noun followed by of take the article, as in the Isle of Wight (compare Christmas Island). The same applies to names of institutions: Cambridge University, but the University of Cambridge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_articles
