Language Overflow

Let's say that John is going to have a trip to New Orleans soon, and in the context Jane had such a trip before. I wonder if I can write, "Jane enjoyed the trip to New Orleans, and I expect John to do as well." And if I can, what is this do? An auxiliary verb? Or an intransitive verb?

Damkerng T.

2:57 AM

Note to self: a candidate for 'How to Read English Sentences': ell.stackexchange.com/questions/82850/…

Damkerng T.

4:24 AM

Curiosity of the Day: Why isn't beau pronounced like beautiful?

(Related: “Bros.” pronunciation: “brothers”, /bɹɒs/, or plural of “bro”?)

CopperKettle

9:45 AM

Word of the day "worked example"

I was reading a textbook, and there were "worked examples", so I typed it in Google and got this:

Worked-example effect

The worked-example effect is a learning effect predicted by cognitive load theory (Sweller, 1988). Specifically, it refers to the learning effect observed when worked-examples are used as part of instruction, compared to other instructional techniques such as problem-solving (Renkl, 2005) and discovery learning (Mayer, 2004). According to Sweller: "The worked example effect is the best known and most widely studied of the cognitive load effects" (Sweller, 2006, p. 165). Worked-examples improve learning by reducing cognitive load during skill acquisition, and “is one of the earliest and probably...

2

@DamkerngT. indeed

IͶΔ

11:42 AM

@CopperKettle Haha nice

Can Japanese Actually Write Japanese Kanji?

►

@Snail ^^^

CopperKettle

12:10 PM

> I am intending to say 'I met my friend yesterday and hung out. After that, we went back to each one's home

0

Q: Two Questions 1) In a bad condition VS In bad condition 2) I said good bye to him

When I am trying to express that 'I felt really bad yesterday.', should I write 'I was in a bad condition' or 'I was in bad condition'? do I need to put 'a' between 'in' and 'bad'??? Is it a right way to say(or write) 'I said good bye to him.'?? What I intend to express is not about breaking up ...

(0:

IͶΔ

@CopperKettle So they met each other in the way?

@CopperKettle Why are there so many question marks??????

Damkerng T.

12:40 PM

@IͶΔ I think it's similar in all languages. The less frequently used a word is to a person, the more likely the person can't remember how to write the word.

I wish I had said 'likelier'.

0

Q: Two Questions 1) In a bad condition VS In bad condition 2) I said good bye to him

When I am trying to express that 'I felt really bad yesterday.', should I write 'I was in a bad condition' or 'I was in bad condition'? do I need to put 'a' between 'in' and 'bad'??? Is it a right way to say(or write) 'I said good bye to him.'?? What I intend to express is not about breaking up ...

articles

Reminds me of the song: Just Dropped In

Anonymous

It's really not similar at all, though.

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

Reading and writing are asymmetrical.

Anonymous

Many commonly used words are hard to write.

Anonymous

It's okay because people mostly either type them or read them, and rarely have to write by hand.

Anonymous

12:47 PM

Chinese characters are unlike Latin letters in this way.

Damkerng T.

Ahh... I should've added that the it depends on how frequently used the medium is as well.

Some not long English words are frequently misspelled, too, though, I think.

Anonymous

It takes much more time and effort to commit and retain Chinese character writing.

Damkerng T.

(I suspected that the Japanese guy chose the words that people may not write very often.)

Personally, I think the same thing in the video can happen to a lot of Thais, too.

Anonymous

Remembering how to write a word you rarely or never write in English is much easier.

Anonymous

Reading and writing aren't quite as asymmetrical in English.

Anonymous

12:53 PM

Certainly spelling is a challenge.

Damkerng T.

I think Chinese characters aren't equivalent to English letters. They're more like English words.

Anonymous

They're certainly different from Latin letters.

Damkerng T.

I wonder what the townspeople think of their town: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boring,_Tennessee

2

Anonymous

Our English spelling system works well enough for most people, but it's really a challenge for a significant minority of speakers. Most people can eventually learn to spell well even without explicit instruction, but some people have a hard time even with explicit instruction.

skill patrol

1:08 PM

yep, too many exceptions

Damkerng T.

@skillpatrol The pronunciation sometimes doesn't help much. For example, what's "shedyule"? Another example, "restront".

skill patrol

::nods::

Damkerng T.

My favorite (on spelling thingy), "flem". :-)

skill patrol

I think the British pronounce their words more closely to the actual spelling of the words than the Americans do.

Damkerng T.

I'm not sure we can say that!

Anonymous

1:15 PM

It's usually the reverse.

skill patrol

::runs::

Anonymous

American pronunciation is more conservative, and so not as far detached from Middle English.

Anonymous

But neither is very close.

Anonymous

Both have lots of changes.

Anonymous

So you can find examples where the BrE spelling is closer to the original than AmE, too.

Anonymous

1:25 PM

Er, pronunciation.

Anonymous

My brain isn't working yet this morning.

Man_From_India

3:06 PM

@DamkerngT. Sorry for late reply :-( it's page no. 641 at the end of the page. Marked with (g)

Damkerng T.

Thank you very much!

It's a bit late for me tonight. I'll try to read it tomorrow.

IͶΔ

"late for me tonight" Yeah right

Damkerng T.

BTW, how are you? Are you feeling better now?

IͶΔ

Was I feeling bad?

Damkerng T.

I meant MIF!

@IͶΔ o/

IͶΔ

3:09 PM

@Man-In-flack are you feeling better?

@DamkerngT. \o

> A post office called Boring was established in 1881, and remained in operation until it was discontinued in 1903.[2] The community might be named for a member of the Boring family known to be residing here in the 1870s.

O_o

Man_From_India

@DamkerngT. Yes I know it's a bit late. I just got back home. Did full utlisation of holiday :D yea, I am feeling better.

Damkerng T.

Yay!

Man_From_India

:-)

One of my brothers left for Thailand today. A long holiday for him, so enjoying :-)

Damkerng T.

Hope he'll have a great time here. :D

IͶΔ

@Man_From_India Did he meet Man_From_Thailand?

Man_From_India

3:19 PM

@IͶΔ Of course he will :-) But if I someday plan to travel there I will definitely try to meet another Man From Thailand, our robo that is :-)

Damkerng T.

LOL

IͶΔ

@Man_From_India But he's not a man, he's a king.

Man_From_India

A king has to be a man :P

Damkerng T.

wondering how many Man_From_India there are...

Man_From_India

hehe...a lot :-)

Damkerng T.

3:21 PM

:D

IͶΔ

@DamkerngT. It must be raining

Man_From_India

Actually it's raining here. Water. Not anything else :P

Anonymous

There are snail kings, too. A snail king is a snail that grows with inverse chirality. Most snails are dextral, so in those species sinistral snails would be called kings.

Anonymous

In some species sinistrality is the norm, so in those cases kings would be dextral.

Anonymous

They're quite rare.

CopperKettle

3:28 PM

Good evening, @snailboat!

skill patrol

sorta like a lion king :-)

Anonymous

Good morning! :-)

CopperKettle

Snailking

Snailking is the second album by the Italian experimental metal band Ufomammut, released in 2004. == Tracklist == Blotch - 6:06 Hopscotch - 3:00 Lacrimosa - 6:50 Odio - 8:21 God - 6:15 Alcool - 4:08 Braindome - 6:08 Demontain - 28:06 == References == ^ [1]...

2

Anonymous

Le Roi lion!

CopperKettle

Король-Лев (Korol'-Lev)

Man_From_India

3:30 PM

@snailboat I thought there are only snail queen :P

Anonymous

Hee

skill patrol

snail princess

CopperKettle

@DamkerngT. That Wikipedia article is quite.. boring.

Anonymous

I like that one better :-)

IͶΔ

@Cop be quick before someone claims "kettleking".

Damkerng T.

3:31 PM

@CopperKettle :D

IͶΔ

I should be working my way towards "chemiking".

skill patrol

chemking

CopperKettle

Fucking, Austria

Fucking (German pronunciation: [ˈfʊkɪŋ], rhymes with "booking") is an Austrian village in the municipality of Tarsdorf, in the Innviertel region of western Upper Austria. The village is 33 kilometres (21 mi) north of Salzburg, 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) east of the German border. Despite having a population of only 104 in 2005, the village has become famous for its unusual place name in the English-speaking world. Its road signs are a popular visitor attraction, and they were often stolen by souvenir-hunting tourists until 2005, when the signs were modified to be theft-resistant. == Etymology == It...

skill patrol

:O

Man_From_India

@IͶΔ some sort of evil wizard? :O

IͶΔ

3:33 PM

@DamkerngT. I think they're tired of the visitors.

CopperKettle

> Named for: 6th century nobleman named Focko

Anonymous

There are Vietnamese restaurants named Pho King.

IͶΔ

@Man_From_India evil, yes, wizard, no.

@CopperKettle Such nobleness

Damkerng T.

@snailboat Oh, I kinda like Pho!

CopperKettle

@snailboat A bad choice of name for the US. (0:

Anonymous

3:34 PM

They do it on purpose, I'm pretty sure :-)

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. It's good, and cheap, too!

CopperKettle

> Lindlbauer recalled how she had to explain to a British female tourist "that there were no Fucking postcards."[13]

Damkerng T.

Hmm... I'm not sure how to call another Vietnamese dish that I like.

IͶΔ

Ping it.

@Another_Vietnamese_dish_that_@Dam_likes

Damkerng T.

The pronunciation of the dish: [nɛ̃(ː)m˩˥.nɯːä̃ŋ˧]

(th.wiktionary.org/wiki/…)

IͶΔ

3:36 PM

No thanks

Anonymous

Pho is pronounced /fʌ/, although English speakers often see the letters and pronounce it /foʊ/ instead.

IͶΔ

Pho Pho Pho is when Santa becomes a chemist.

This is pretty awesome: languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24203

Damkerng T.

@snailboat It's pronounced /fɤː/ here, with the rising tone.

IͶΔ

I think South Asian English speakers tend to have lotsa giggles everyday.

Damkerng T.

^_^

IͶΔ

3:38 PM

^^^ Whenever I see that, I think of Teddy bears.

Damkerng T.

Giggling is good!

IͶΔ

sashoalm

16.1k 1 11 28

discussion duplicate-questions vote-to-close canonical low-quality-posts question-quality questions

How would you pronounce the name?

Damkerng T.

"sh-sho-alm"?

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Neat! I wonder if we can find a Vietnamese pronunciation on Forvo

Anonymous

I think it's supposed to be a dipping tone.

IͶΔ

3:43 PM

What? Why two sh's?

Damkerng T.

@IͶΔ Ah, a typo!

tchrist

@IͶΔ 'sɑʃwɔm

IͶΔ

O_O

I don't pronounce it with ʃ for some reason.

tchrist

sæs.hu'ɒ:ləm

IͶΔ

Something like that.

tchrist

3:47 PM

I prefer the bisyllabic version over the tet.

Does over even collocate with prefer?

IͶΔ

Gee, it would give me an identity crisis thingy if people can't get to pronounce my name.

tchrist

Could we just call you Bob?

Damkerng T.

@tchrist I've seen some ELLer's insist on using it.

Anonymous

31

Q: Which is correct: "prefer X to Y" or "prefer X over Y"?

Many say that "prefer X to Y" has a more formal ring to it than "prefer X over Y". Are there any dialects where you wouldn't use "prefer X to Y" in colloquial speech at all? Conversely, are there any manuals of style that discourage using "prefer X over Y" in formal writing?

word-choice prepositions formality

tchrist

Nothing new under the sun.

skill patrol

3:51 PM

interesting question...

...from a master of word choice

tchrist

That was from back when Reg and Lauren were seeding the site.

skill patrol

and Jasper protected it

Damkerng T.

Interesting; wherever over is used, above could be used, too. Or at least it seems so.

> He prefers X above Y.

> He prefers X before Y.

skill patrol

it's used with fractions a lot too

Anonymous

Above? I'm not so sure about that one.

skill patrol

4:01 PM

I meant "over"

Anonymous

I prefer to to over, but I prefer over over above.

skill patrol

:P

Damkerng T.

> Above can also be used (“Prefers this brand above all others”), although they note that above, along with before, were noted by the OED as being used formerly.

(in nohat's answer)

Anonymous

@skillpatrol Sorry, I was typing that as a reply to Damkerng's message, but I was very slow :-)

skill patrol

np

Anonymous

4:03 PM

@DamkerngT. Oh, above sounds okay there, I suppose. I think that above in general sounds rather strange, though.

Damkerng T.

I don't prefer above than over, and I don't prefer over rather than to. :P

skill patrol

:-\

Anonymous

What's your favorite preposition?

Damkerng T.

To, with prefer, of course. :D

tchrist

nohat's point that like would be more common in casual registers is a good one.

Damkerng T.

4:05 PM

nods

skill patrol

::claps::

tchrist

Do any of you have first languages in which ny- or ly-, or variations of those, are common at word onset?

Damkerng T.

ny- as in "nai" or as in "ni"?

tchrist

Ok, back to IPA with me. :)

For ny, read /ɲ/.

For ly, read /ʎ/.

Damkerng T.

Oh!

Anonymous

4:08 PM

English is my only native language.

tchrist

I know that the Japanese syllabary is rather small, so wouldn't expect those there but am often wrong. I was wondering about Thai and Arabic.

Well, or Persian.

Read Farsi.

Damkerng T.

Thai has no /ɲ/, but /ŋ/ at the beginning of a word is common.

tchrist

We have a question from Jacinto who is wondering why almost all words in Portuguese with an initial /ɲ/ are from Amerindian languages. The same is true for Spanish, where ñ virtually only ever starts a word if it came from there. But there is a split between ES/PT in whether there's much initial /ʎ/.

@DamkerngT. What's the IPA for someone whose surname is Nguyen?

Damkerng T.

Hmm... /ŋien/, I suppose. (Not sure about the vowels.)

tchrist

I have some feeling that the palatalized versions are somehow unstable at word-onset, or that the palatalization that occurred tracing down from Latin was mostly a yod phenomenon that didn't occur there.

Anonymous

4:13 PM

Japanese has initial [ɲ] as an allophone of /n/ before /y/. (The Japanese [j] is usually written /y/ in phonemic transcriptions.)

tchrist

"Most" American speakers of Spanish and perhaps Portuguese collapse /ʎ/ to /j/. This is less common in Iberia but still the majority rule for Spanish. In Portugal, it's considered low-class to do that.

Damkerng T.

Come to think of it, I think /ŋ/ and /y/ can come out as a [ɲ] in Southern Thai. (Both of them.)

tchrist

Yod happens. :)

Anonymous

But /ny/ in Japanese is mainly in loans from Middle Chinese, not in native words.

tchrist

@snailboat Lawler does that.

tchrist

4:29 PM

Sumelic has bountied the primmer question out of frustration.

Ok, I need to play the piano. Can't tpey worht spit.

IͶΔ

5:35 PM

Hey what do you know, ELL's color theme right now reminds me of Language log.

in English Language & Usage, 50 secs ago, by tchrist

> Fernandina's flicker, Colaptes fernandinae, an endangered bird native to Cuba. Fernandina was an early name for Cuba.

O_O

CopperKettle

Now it's more like Fidelina.

IͶΔ

Or used to be.

Hullo @Stoney

IͶΔ

6:58 PM

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24253

Something fun to discuss whenever the Twilight king or Snailqueen or anyone else returns.

IͶΔ

7:51 PM

ELU post of the day:

20

Q: Suffixes for verbification: -ify, -icise, -ificate

The suffixes -ise/-ize -ify -ificate are all used for verbifying nouns and adjectives. What are the differences in meaning/connotation/usage between them? (This is generalising from the sinification/sinicisation question, and is partially answered by @Garet Claborn’s answer there — an expa...

verbs connotation suffixes morphological-domains

@Stoney do you know who that user3286 is?

Actually, @Dam's username is 3281; so that guy may have been the evil twin of the twilight king: King of the dawn

Or sunset? I dunno. Antonyms are weird.

Morning @Snail

Anonymous

@IͶΔ You can find that sort of thing out fairly easily, but it might be nice to refrain from saying the name in chat.

IͶΔ

Huh, I used to think datum is the plural of data. :P

@snailboat Sure, just curious.

Anonymous

Data is an unusual case.

IͶΔ

Deleted users usually have a story behind them, and that's popcorny.

It helps keep my eyes open

Huh, unfamiliar name.

IͶΔ

8:27 PM

@Nathan's meta.SO efforts are just plain awesome. Claps

Anonymous

Yay, the (CDN?) cache finally updated.

Anonymous

Clearing my local cache didn't seem to do anything, but it's working now.

IͶΔ

@snailboat Yeah CDN

Let's flip a table. (/¯◡ ‿ ◡)/¯ ~ ┻━┻

┬─┬ ノ( ^_^ノ)

Anonymous

That's some very polite table flipping.

Anonymous

8:40 PM

@IͶΔ From what I understand, the meme comes from a show called 巨人の星 (kyojin no hoshi), which showed the same table flipping scene at the end of every episode.

Anonymous

It was a cartoon about baseball from around 50 years ago.

Anonymous

I don't have a YouTube link for you, but maybe you can find one with that information?

tchrist

8:54 PM

@IͶΔ Twilight occurs equally before sunup and after sunrise. It's when the sun is below the horizon.

Anonymous

Some of my favorite animals are crepuscular.

tchrist

0

Q: if coming at the end of a sentence?

Is it OK to use "if" at the end of a sentence as opposed to the beginning? For example, are these expressions correct: The weather is good if, we can play Tennis. And this sentence: I will play Tennis hopefully the weather is good if.

grammar expressions american-english punctuation sentence

I'm long out of migration votes. Today is Sunday.

Anonymous

I voted to migrate. I'm really curious how the OP came up with that question, though.

tchrist

Thanks. Perhaps they have come left-branching first language. Odd though.

Nathan Tuggy

@IͶΔ Mine? I'm proud of my work, but anything in particular made you notice it?

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