Ha - ha: "Capitalization is never used, under any circumstances whatsoever, after a colon or a semi-colon in British English"
See:
"2001: A Space Odyssey",
"2010: Odyssey Two",
"2061: Odyssey Three", and
"3001: Final Odyssey",
All written by the great, great Englishman, Sir Arthur C. Clarke.
D.A.W.

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The gross overuse of semicolons in one of those strange artifiacts of British, Irish, and African English.

Jack said it right: "Just use a period and get rid of the years of bickering and comments," and this is the good habit of American and Canadian English.
Just end your thoughts with periods, and then start new sentences.
There isn't any need to try to "blend" them together.
D.A.W.

There is a more significant difference between Chinese (and some other Oriental languages) and the Western ones. When it came to learning how to do the different verb tenses in German -- present, present perfect, future, past, past perfect -- at least I knew all about these tenses in English. There are a lot of similarities in how these are formed, too, and in English we SHOULD do it all on automatic pilot.

In contrast, in Chinese the verbs do not have any tenses, hence for a native speaker of Chinese, the whole concept is a NEW and STRANGE one that they have never heard of. Conjugating verbs in English, French, German, etc., is something that they have to learn from scratch. (The Latin phrase is "ex nihilio" = "from nothing".) It is really, really difficult to do.

Likewise, when it comes to masculine, feminine, neuter, and (maybe) plural pronous, that has to be learned "ex nihilio" by a Chinese person who is studying a foreign language. This is hard to do.

To give another kind of an analogy, let's go to mathematics. It is like taking a person who knows about the integers and fractions, but they do not know anything about the real numbers such as irrational numbers and trancendental numbers. These are hard concepts.
Likewise, there was a time when the concept of a negative number was really strange and foreign to everyone. For example, the ancient Greeks, Romans, and the people of Medieval times didn't know anything about them.

When negative numbers were finally invented and accepted during the Renaissance, it is rather surprising that it took "only" 100 to 150 years before the square roots of negative numbers were accepted by many mathematicians. On the other hand, so of them never accepted these numbers until they died.
As an electrical engineer and a mathematician, I use them all the time.They are amazing and useful things. I have taken entire courses that had to do with the results you get with the square roots of negative numbers.
D.A.W.

Oh, Chinese vs. English.
There are some HUGE differences between the spoken languages that make it very difficult for Chinese people in learning English.

1. About 95 percent of Chinese words have only one syllable, and the remainder have only two syllables.The way that Chinese supports a large vocabulary is called "tone" (you can look this up) in that some syllables are given a "rising tone", some a "falliing tone", some "rising then falling", and some "falling then rising".
In Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Celtic, Arabic, etc., we just have hundreds of thosands of words with two or more syllables. How about some words in German, Finnish, or Russian with 10 syllables in them? Completely different from Chinese.

Spoken Japanese and Korean are also very different spoken languages from all kinds of Chinese, with thousands and thousands of polysyllabic words.

2. Chinese does not have ANY conjugation of verbs like all of the Western languages do. No past tense, present tense, future tense, present perfect tense, singular verbs, plural verbs, 1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person, and no moods: indicative, interrogatory, imperative, subjunctive mood, and no modal auxiliaries. Chinese has thousands of different adverbs for all of this, which is completely different from the way that we do it in Western languages.

3. Chinese does not have any masculine, feminine, or neuter pronouns.
Have you ever heard a Chinese person, a learner of English, struggle with { he, she, it }? I surely have.

4. We have nearly gotten rid of it in English, but Chinese does not have any declension (or inflection) of adjectives the way that they do in Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, etc.

I was quite amused to read some years ago that the French Academy was still having a heated discussion about whether the word should be "la microchip" or "le microchip" !! LOL, how amusing to an E.E.

In German, the gender of a noun depends strongly on how it ends:
"der Computer" (masculine) because words ending in "er" are usually masculine.
So are "der Lehrer" = the teacher and "der Fernseher" = the television

"das Flugzeug" (airplane, neuter) because words ending ine "zeug" are neuter. The same rule applies for "chen", "lein", and all infinitives, such as "das Fliegen".

All past participles that end in "ung" are feminine.

Words adopted from French that end in "eur" are masculine, too, such as "der Ingeneueur" = the engineer.

DAW

A fab American singer (from California) named "Weird Al" Yankovic has specialized for decades in making "spoofs" of songs, especially the pop songs of the time.
There was a song, orginally from the 1950s or 60s, called "I Think We're Alone Now," by there was a hot remake of it by "Tiffany" back in about 1987. Weird Al spoofed this one with one called "I THINK I'M A CLONE NOW." Cloning was also a hot topic back in the 1980s. At least, Weird Al's clone was a man.
You ought to listen to this one - find it on YouTube.

Another completely remarkable song of his was set to the tune of "Lola", but it was called "Yoda" and it told practically the whole story of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, such as wilh lyrics like these:
"Luke, stay away from the Darker Side,
And if your thoughts lead you astray,
Let The Force be your guide.
Oh, my Yoda,
Yo, yo, yo, Yoda. Yoda!"

Watch out for a spoof of a song by Michael Jackson which is called FAT,
and it appears in Weird Al's album EVEN WORSE.

Then there are the songs that I think are completely American in taste, such as
"My Balogna", "I Love Rocky Road", and "Another One Rides the Bus".

D.A.W.

To: English Knight 1
You ought to read about the Austrian mathematician Kurt Goedel and his works. There are good articles about these on the Internet. Goedel lived at the same time as Russell and Whitehead, but he was a little younger, hence he was their successor in some ways. Back during the mid-1930s, Goedel proved this remarkable theorem:

In any system of axiomtic logic large enough to contain arithmetic, there are theorems that ARE TRUE, but there is not any way to prove them.

As for false statements, those can be dealt with because all we have to do is to find a counterexample to a false theorem.

The first actual example of one of the true but unprovable theorems (an important one) was not found until the American mathematician Paul Cohen did so in 1963. It is a remarkable statement in mathematical set theory.

Both Goedel and Albert Einstein were fortunate enough to be able to escape from Naziism during the 1930s, and they both went to the (new) Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where they remained for the rest of their lives.They became close friends in Princeton, and they spent many, many hours together.

Einstein was lucky in that he was working temporarily at Cal Tech (Pasadena, California) when Hitler took power in 1933, and Einstein never returned to Germany or Switzerland to live. Goedel had a few more years in Europe because he was an Austrian, and the Nazis did not take over Austria until 1938.

Among the other greats who have spent time at the Institute for Advanced Study have been John von Neumann, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Andrew Wiles, the English mathematician who recently proved Fermat's Last Theorem and several other important results in mathematics.

D.A.W.

The American author Isaac Asimov, who was a biochemist, visited a large gathering at which someone presented one verse of a song that he had written to be sung to the tune of the song "Home on the Range." That verse went something like this:
"Oh, give me a clone, a clone of my own..."

Asimov was quite inspired by this one, and as usual, he had sheets of paper and a pen in his pocket. He got these out, and he quicky wrote four more verses PLUS a new chorus. This chorus went something like this:
"Clone, clone, clone of my own,
With a Y changed to an X chromosone..."

LOL, Asimov's wacky new verses and chorus were about creating a female clone of himself and then engaging in debauchery with his clone!
Recall that all men have XY sex chromosones, and women have XX chromosomes. Thus, it you change a Y to an X, you change an XY to an XX and you get a female!

Asimov died on April 5, 1992, so we have just commemorated the 20th anniversary of his passing away. I still miss him so much. Between his hundreds of books of fiction AND nonfiction, I estimate that I have read nearly 250 of them.
D.A.W.

Oh, well, English Knght 1, I did leave one possibility open for you -- an unreal possibility, but I left it there in a humorously.
Maybe I am my father's daughter, and he and my mother named me for Dad's male Army buddy in South Korea, after all.
Then, when I met the other female Dale at my professor's house, she was so lovely (with a great pair of legs below her skirt, and this is true) that I had a "lesbian rush" on the other Dale and I wanted to "take her to bed".

Oh, well, the other Dale and I said "hi" and that was all, and I was a married man back then, anyway. My wife was there with me, too, because she had met practically none of my colleagues from the university before.

On earlier occasions, I had the chance to meet women named "Della", "Daylene", etc., but I think that this was the first time for meeting a female Dale.

Of course, since I have earned my M.A. in mathematics, I think of Bertrand Russell as being mostly a mathematician. (He moved into philosophy later on in his life.)
Russell and another man named Alfred North Whitehead worked together for more that an decade in writing a HUGE series of books through which they hoped to place mathematics on a secure logical foundation with no possibility of contradiction or vagueness whatever. This turned out to be a VERY deep work of mathematics and logic, but after all those years, they decided that they had set about on an impossible task -- and Russell came to this conclusion first. Of course, the reasoning is very deep, but Russell created a parallel explanation that can be written in ordinary English. It is in the form of a small story (a piece of fiction):

There is a village in England where nobody comes or goes to it. None of the men of the village wear beards, either, and the village is so small that it has only one barber. Here are the rules concerning shaving. Every man either:
1. Shaves himself regularly (no beards!). (Note that in general, nobody can get a shave from a woman, his sister, his mother, his brother, his father, etc. Also, the barber is not a woman.)
2. Or he goes to the barber and pays to get his shaves.
3. But not both.
Question: Who shaves the barber?

Difficulty: If the barber shaves himself, then he his getting a shave from the barber, too, and this is not allowed. Also, If the barber gets a shave from the barber, then he his shaving himself, too, and this is not allowed.
Believe it or not, there is a deep contradiction here when this is translated into a more general mathematical problem.

Some jokers have taken the problem as Russell first expressed it, and they said that they could solve the problem if the barber was a woman (!).Hence, the barber never needs a shave. However, I rephrased it a little bit to give it the form that Russell intended to begin with: the barber is not a woman, and nobody gets a shave from a woman. Delilah does not live here.

I will kind you about my first name. It is "Dale", and in the United States, Dale is mostly a man's name, but some women have it, too. When I was a graduate school in mathematics, I was invited to a Christmas party at a professor's house, and I met an attractive woman who had already earned her M.A. in math -- from the same school in Missouri. In the U.S., the name "Dale" is most popular in the Midwestern States, and even though my family is from the South, while my father was in the Army in 1954 - 55 (in South Korea) he had a close friend who was from Chicago. Aha, the Midwest. Hence that was the source of my name. Years later, I had a professor in Atlanta, Georgia, whose name was Dale C. Ray, but Dr. Ray's home state was Michigan - right in the Midwest.

Since then, I have read that "Dale" is a rather popular name in faraway Australia, too, but as we know, lots of these cultural things in Australia, Canada, the United States, and New Zealand have their common roots in England and Scotland.
For another example, there are more or less important cities and towns in Scotland, New York State, and Western Australia named "Albany". One Albany is the capital city of New York Also, there are there are towns in Scotland and Florida, and on the South Island of New Zealand named "Dunedin".
There are two cities named Newcastle in England, and several different towns in the United States named either Newcastle or New Castle, with the most well-known one being New Castle, Delaware. Then, there is Newcastle, New South Wales, which is probably the seventh largest city in Australia. There is even a warship in the Australian Navy named the HMAS NEWCASTLE, and one of the few "motorways" in Australia connects Sydney with Newcastle. Newcastle, NSW, has long been a center of coal mining in Australia, just as Newcastle in northeastern England has been for much longer.