> It may just be a game to you but, it means the world to us
The placement of that comma really irks me. Isn't "It may just be a game to you, but it means the world to us" the grammatically correct form? I'm somewhat surprised to see this in official communication from the Canadian Red Cross group.
I feel like I've seen this "post-but" comma more and more recently. I guess people feel like they would speak the sentence with a pause after the conjunction and therefore the comma goes there in writing.
Yep, that's what I would go with. I can't see a use case for a comma after the "but" in British nor American English.
> I guess people feel like they would speak the sentence with a pause after the conjunction
Even this feels off to me when I read up to the "but" and then pause (as opposed to pausing on the "you").
German and English have similar grammar but they are very far from being the same. Particular here with commas. Clauses in German are almost always marked with commas. English uses the comma much more sparingly.
> "It may just be a game to you but" Red Cross spokesperson tine said "it means the world to us."
In English there's also a difference in comma usage with restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses (restrictive relative clauses, which indicate which specific entity is referred to as opposed to others, don't use commas, while nonrestrictive relative clauses, which merely add additional information, do), but I seem to remember that native German speakers will commonly write both with commas.
*The person, who was here yesterday, has come back.
Conversely, it's sometimes hard for me to remember to use that comma in German. I want to write something like *"sie sagt dass man hier kein Komma braucht".
This is just another instance of North Americans (I haven't really seen this in British English speakers) placing their commata not at the boundaries between clauses/phrases, but where they pause when they read the sentence out loud. You may argue with descriptivism -- that the grammatical rules have changed and this is the new normal -- but placing a comma like this has the probably unintentional effect that reading the sentence out loud now causes you to pause in yet a different place.
I also wouldn't say that German has "otherwise the same grammar as English". (Or in wrong German: "Ich auch würde nicht sagen dass Deutsch hat ansonsten das gleich Grammatik wie Englisch" - even if we're just talking about comma rules, the German version should have a comma before the "that/dass").
[1]: http://www.neue-rechtschreibung.net/2012/04/30/kommasetzung-...
Extreme comma tension now relieved above.
If you want to indicate a pause to show how you want it read you can use an ellipses (...).
Also on Windows using WinCompose http://wincompose.info/