[HPFGU-OTChatter] The Coma, The Portkey, and The Language

[Kathryn Cawte]

 bboy_mn     wrote -

Goblet of Fire; Am HB, Chapter "Veritaserum"; pg 688. Barty Crouch
Junior is speaking.
 
" ... Ensure he (Harry) reached the Triwizard Cup. Turned the cup into
a Portkey, which would take the first person to touch it to my master...."
 
Bear in mind that while far above average, I consider myself only
marginally proficient in the structure and application of the English
language. So my interpretation may be wrong, but I think it will still
serve to illustrate my point.
 
Interpretation 1:
" ...Turned the cup into a Portkey, which would take the first person
to touch it to my master...."
 
With the comma separating 'Portkey' and 'which', it separates those
entities into two separate events-
 
A.) create a Portkey out of the Triwizard Cup.
B.) Program that Portkey to take the first person to touch it to the
graveyard.
 
Interpretation 2:
" ...Turned the cup into a Portkey which would take the first person
to touch it to my master...."
 
Now with OUT the comma between 'Portkey' and 'which', the emphasis
shifts from 'Turned... into... a Portkey' to 'take ... to my master'.
 
The implication here is that the Cup may have already been a Portkey,
and all fake!Moody did was make it 'take.. (Harry)... to my master'.
 
Now me -

I fully admit that when it comes to punctuation commas are my weakness, I
tend to forget to use them - just ask my beta reader. Her main work is
throwing bucket loads of commas at my work :) Having said that I was taught
that whenever you use the word which it has to have a comma in front of it,
whereas using that doesn't. So the sentence couldn't be written without a
comma unless she wrote ".... turned the cup into a Portkey that ...."

I realise I'm completely ignoring your Portkey point and focussing on the
grammar, but I'm hoping someone here will be able to cite a reputable source
to either confirm my idea of comma usage or prove me wrong. In my corner is
the Microsoft Word spell checker, which picks me up on this constantly - but
I was taught this at school too. I think. 

Argh - does anyone know why my spell checker insists on resetting itself to
American English? Because it's really annoying me now. It just tried to
replace the s in realise with a z. 

K