Full stop instead of comma?

... I don't understand. Could you...

Hi,

It seems to me that there isn't a lot of difference between the two, although admittedly I don't have any special grammar knowledge.

Is there something in particular that I'm missing here?

Hi Rob

To me it seems that you have two main clauses joined by a comma. The two parts of the sentence before and after the comma could stand alone as a sentence. If you said "If I have a maths problem, could you help me?" that would be OK with a comma because "if..." is a dependent clause and can't stand alone in a sentence.

I think it's referred to as a comma splice. See

http://www.chompchomp.com/rules/csfsrules.htm

I agree there's not a lot of difference. I recently added a sentence with such a comma splice and corrected it after someone picked it up. See http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/2798614

cheers (good to have a UK English speaker on the project!)

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. I'll keep an eye out for it in future.

This makes me wonder though: how would you differentiate in print between a small spoken pause between the two parts or lack thereof? It would seem silly to lose the distinction because of this..

ps. Isn't everything regulated by style guides only a recommendation (thankfully), though considerably enforced?

I’m unlinking the French sentence because it doesn’t refer to anything like a “mathematical concept” [1]. The French just says that there is “something” the speaker doesn’t understand in math, which could be anything, like a particular question from a homework, or why multiplying two negative numbers results into a positive number, or a mathematical concept.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...tical_concepts