English Language Learners - 2014-10-21 (page 2 of 2)

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9:02 PM

> The Hollows series (also called the Rachel Morgan series) is a series of thirteen mystery novels, eight short stories, two graphic novels, and one compendium resource by Kim Harrison, published by HarperCollins Publishers, in an urban fantasy alternate history universe and set primarily in the city of Cincinnati and its suburbs.

This is a bit confusing, about what the series really is.

I guess you meant the novels when you said the series ended.

Anonymous

Yes, the novels are the main series

Anonymous

The author wrote an ending! It ended.

Anonymous

I read all sorts of urban fantasy series. :-)

She might come back to it again one day, I hope!

Oh, I just (mis)assumed that the author is female because of the name Rachel Morgan.

Anonymous

The author is female

9:07 PM

But the author, Kim Harrison, is indeed female!

Anonymous

So it wasn't a mis-assumption :-)

Anonymous

It turned out to be true!

Hooray!

Anonymous

She's also published under the name Dawn Cook

Anonymous

Pen names are very common among authors, of course

9:08 PM

nods

I think Listenever is now reading the new series by JK Rowling.

Anonymous

I didn't read Harry Potter until all seven books were out.

(I remember that she uses another pen name for that series .)

Anonymous

Then I bought all seven and read them back-to-back.

@snailboat Wow! I'm not sure if I still can do that.

Anonymous

I'm a reasonably fast reader

Anonymous

9:10 PM

It still took me a little while (a few weeks?)

Anonymous

It's a lot of pages.

The last novel I read straight in one session was probably By the Light of the Moon, and I remember I skipped a lot.

Anonymous

Well, I don't mean I read them all literally without stopping! :-)

Anonymous

It's 3400 pages!

All together, they're a tome!

Anonymous

9:12 PM

That would be, if they were published in a single volume

Anonymous

To be honest, book five is a bit tomey on its own :-)

:-)

Anonymous

I think tome can only refer to a single book.

nods

I have some tomes in my house.

Anonymous

The Complete Yale Shakespeare is the book I own most suited to use as a blunt force weapon

Anonymous

9:14 PM

For years, it was my monitor stand :-)

Wow, that's really a tome!

Anonymous

Yeah, you know a book is a tome when it's also available in a 40-volume edition :-)

LOL

Another way to know that it's a tome is when you dropped it on your feet and got hurt!

Anonymous

Oh, I hope that never happens!

Happens to me sometimes!

Which is why I would buy the paperback edition of a book instead when possible, because besides cheaper, it hurts less.

Anonymous

9:18 PM

The Complete Yale Shakespeare is just huge. It's got fewer pages than CGEL or Quirk et al, but it's physically heftier

Anonymous

The 研究社新和英大辞典 has more pages than any of them

Anonymous

It's maybe slightly smaller though

Oh, the Online Dictionary, on paper!

Anonymous

LOTR is the largest single-volume work of fiction I own

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. The 新和英大辞典 isn't online

Anonymous

9:20 PM

I do have it on my electronic dictionary though

Anonymous

So I haven't been using my paper copy

Anonymous

Where did I put it??

Anonymous

I found it! 2827 pages :-)

Oh!

Anonymous

The 中辞典 from the same company is available online for free, though

Anonymous

9:21 PM

I own that one on paper too, let's see...

Anonymous

2039 pages, but they're very thin pages and it's pocket-sized, so it's smaller.

Anonymous

But it smells really nice!

Anonymous

Don't you just love how some books smell?

@snailboat I guess mine is probably Arthur C. Clarke The Collected Stories. It's mere 966 pages, and it's about two-inch thick. Yet it's so light (considering its thickness).

@snailboat I do!

Anonymous

I wasn't counting the Yale Shakespeare, by the way, which is larger, but a lot of it's annotations and introductions and such :-)

9:23 PM

Particularly papers of books from the US! I don't know why they smell different.

Anonymous

I don't know if it makes sense to call that volume a "work of fiction"

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. It's funny, I was going to say books printed in Japan mostly smelled nicer!

Anonymous

Japanese paper is often very nice

Anonymous

But in both the US and Japan there are cheaply printed books that don't seem to smell like much of anything

@snailboat Ah, I don't have any books printed in Japan. Maybe I will change my opinion if I have one. :-)

Anonymous

9:25 PM

Most reference books printed in Japan are on nice acid-free paper and smell really nice :-)

Anonymous

But isn't the Progressive J-E printed in Japan?

Anonymous

I don't own that dictionary myself

Anonymous

But it's published by 小学館

Shogakukan!

Anonymous

はい！

Anonymous

9:26 PM

正解！

Yippie!

I can remember 正 in 正解 (seikai). :-)

Anonymous

解 literally means to cut the 角 horn off of a 牛 cow with a 刀 blade

Anonymous

From this it means to take something apart, to analyze it, to understand it, to explain it

Oh!

Anonymous

And in Japanese, the basic words indicating "understanding" are literally related to "taking apart"

Anonymous

9:29 PM

わかる "understand" is related to わかれる "divide"

Anonymous

正解 literally means to correctly interpret something (= correctly take it apart = analyze/interpret it)

Anonymous

But of course as you know the word means "right answer"! :-)

Yay!

Anonymous

One possible way to write わかる "understand" in kanji is 解る

Anonymous

The same kanji!

9:31 PM

I like the way seikai sounds. Maybe because I've heard it so many times.

Anonymous

You'll also find 解 in words like 理解（りかい） "comprehension"

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. I think it's only natural that 正解 would come to have a positive association! :-)

Oh, indeed!

Anonymous

Oh, I think you might know the word 了解（りょうかい）!

Not really.

Anonymous

9:33 PM

That has the same 解 :-)

Anonymous

Aww!

Anonymous

Jul 11 at 10:51, by Damkerng T.

I heard りょうかい very often in anime!

Anonymous

I remembered that conversation... :-)

Not the characters, I think. :-)

But りょうかい, I do know!

(And it's very likely that I will hear it as yokai instead. :-)

Anonymous

Oh, that's why I put the reading in parentheses

user116848

9:35 PM

in The Overlook Hotel, 2 mins ago, by Arrowfar

@KitFox Miracle

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. It is difficult for speakers of English to distinguish Japanese /ryo/ from /yo/

Anonymous

I don't know if you have anything like that in Thai

user116848

Sorry for the language in my story :-)

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Any time I write kanji and then write kana in parentheses, you should pretend the kana are furigana over the kanji :-)

user116848

I couldn't come up with anything today!

user116848

9:36 PM

:D

@snailboat I'm not sure, but I think this r this ryokai is not very prominent.

Anonymous

So 了解（りょうかい） tells you the word in kanji, but then tells you the word in kana so you don't have to know the kanji

Anonymous

Parentheses are very common in media where furigana can't be used

Anonymous

And they are sometimes used even when furigana are possible

Anonymous

@Arrowfar Let's take a look!

9:37 PM

I might misremember how to write furigana on JSE. (I thought it might be in square brackets.)

Anonymous

You can't do it in chat.

Anonymous

But on the site itself, you can write 漢字【かんじ】 or [漢字]{かんじ}

Anonymous

The latter works if you need to specify which characters the kanji go over, like if I wanted to say 接尾[語]{ご} and just tell you the reading of the last kanji

Anonymous

@Arrowfar You should do dramatic readings of your stories

Ah, so my vague memory is probably somewhat correct. I remember the square brackets!

user116848

9:42 PM

@snailboat You mean they look silly?

Anonymous

@Arrowfar Well, the story is a little silly, but I didn't mean that, no :-)

Anonymous

It would just be fun

user116848

I never write jokes in stories but today I tried to write 'dialogues'. So, that happened. LOL.

user116848

I am good at exposition type writings I guess.

user116848

Yep.

user116848

9:46 PM

I depends on my mood. If I am feeling 'gloomy' then I write sad stuff there.

Anonymous

Arrow never believed in miracles

Anonymous

while watching his car fall from the sky

Anonymous

and placed it at

user116848

Thanks for the corrections :D

user116848

@snailboat So, 'fall'?

user116848

9:58 PM

Is this like the question here that I answered----> ell.stackexchange.com/a/37063/6200

You even wrote "I saw my friends mount the Kumba" in your own answer!

user116848

@DamkerngT. Yeah, but I made the same mistake while writing the story. My bad.

@Arrowfar I think it's understandable in writing. When we write, there are too many choices, which makes it difficult to choose the right one, and sometimes there are too many correct choices, depending on what we want to say (or write).

user116848

@DamkerngT. Yeah, I agree :-) You are right, there!

Also, another construction like I watched my car falling from 20 feet is possible, I think.

user116848

10:06 PM

yeah

The question about nonverbal learning disabilities on the MathEd stack is very interesting. I wonder if there is a kind of verbal learning disability too. I guess there is.

Anonymous

@Arrowfar Yes

Even more curious is how they would diagnose it.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. There are all sorts of learning disabilities. Many are related to language in one way or another.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. If I'm writing and I find myself editing a sentence over and over, I try expressing the idea out loud (perhaps to an imaginary friend or to a plushie), and then I write down whatever I said :-)

10:14 PM

Ah, reading or saying it aloud is indeed a good trick!

Anonymous

Sometimes we can lose the connection between what we say and what we write.

Anonymous

And often when we do, our writing suffers

nods

Anonymous

I may not be a good writer, but I do have a lot of experience with my writing suffering ;-)

pathema mathema said the Greeks: "Suffering is learnng".

2

10:15 PM

@snailboat Hehe... I'm sure you can write way better than I can.

Hello @StoneyB!

Good evening, all.

Or whatever-it-is where you are!

user116848

Hello :-)

Anonymous

It's early in the afternoon here. The students at the school here are emptying out of the building as we speak

user116848

It is late night here :)

user116848

3 AM

10:18 PM

It's at dawn here.

user116848

Or 3:15 to be precise

Anonymous

@Arrowfar Hey, that makes things easy! I can just flip the AM and PM and figure out what time it is where you are :-)

Anonymous

At least until Daylight Saving Time gets in the way.

user116848

@snailboat Yeah, I know :-)

@snailboat In a couple of weeks, I think?

user116848

10:19 PM

I have noticed that snail is exactly 12 hours behind :-)

@snailboat You're on the west coast?

Anonymous

I am! I live in California at the moment.

Ah, well, so do many worthy people. I have a brother in LA.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Well, there's daylight saving time here, and there's daylight saving time there, and I think the two don't quite line up, so the interaction between the two is probably too much for my poor brain to comprehend

Anonymous

Luckily, I can make my phone tell me what time it is elsewhere in the world :-)

user116848

10:20 PM

Awesome :-)

In phones we trust!

user116848

Yay!

ELL is an empire on which the sun never sets.

user116848

Exactly!

user116848

It is an Empire. I never thought of it like one lol :D

10:22 PM

Imposing the tyranny of English around the globe.

LOL

user116848

So, in ELU chat today someone said "Which room am I in today?". I wrote you are "Alice in Englishland" Or "English in Wonderland"

Or Ellis in Angleland.

user116848

It was a kind of 'meh' joke.

user116848

@StoneyB haha

10:25 PM

My wife is taking a course in History of the English Language now. The students, of course, call it "hell".

Hah!

user116848

@StoneyB Is the History course tough or boring?

She's OK with it, but it's her period this semester: OE and ME. She will probably enjoy it less next semester when it's ModE.

user116848

I see.

user116848

Oh, OE-->Old English

user116848

10:29 PM

ME--> Modern English

user116848

I just figured :-)

user116848

I had to think for a bit though :D

ME = Middle English. Modern is ModE. Some folks think we're postmodern now: PDE, Present Day English.

user116848

Good to know these words.

But I think we're still two or three generations away from postmodern. I'd like to be around to see it.

user116848

10:31 PM

:-)

Except that I'd be about 150 years old and probably wouldn't enjoy it all that much!

20 hours ago, by Damkerng T.

> It came from a man in Tennessee who began by writing that he didn't vote for me -- which is okay.
It having come from an in-Tennessee, beginning-by-he-didn't-vote-for-me-writing man is okay.

But whatever it is we can be sure that articles still won't make sense.

How about that as a postmodern? :P

Anonymous

Linguists discussing Japanese sometimes use N for "New"

10:33 PM

@DamkerngT. That's German!

We don't link, we embed!

Anonymous

MJ "Middle Japanese" NJ "Modern Japanese"

Anonymous

It goes nicely with O for Old :-)

@snailboat N for New!

Anonymous

But people seem to expand the "N" to "Modern"

10:34 PM

German, too: AHD, MHD, NHD.

Althochdeutsch, Mittelhochdeutsch, Neuhochdeutsch.

Anonymous

I don't remember seeing people use N for Modern English, although I suppose I'm mostly ignorant when it comes to historical linguistics

@snailboat PJ "Postmodern Japanese"? Hmm... I think it goes nicely with the rest!

And FJ "Future Japanese" ?

Hehe!

Anonymous

Oh, Future Japanese will be fun! Potential -(r)are- will be obligatorily leveled to -(r)e- across the board!

10:39 PM

FE will lose all the modals except will/would, which will be cheered by learners everywhere.

(The loss will be cheered, not will/would.)

LOL

Anonymous

Who needs modality anyway? I think modality is for wafflers! We should all be certain about every proposition we express!

Oh, we still have must for certainties!

Duckspeak!

Anonymous

Must usually adds epistemic weakening

Anonymous

10:41 PM

Compare:

Anonymous

> That is true.
> That must be true.

Anonymous

"That must be true" is relatively certain, but less certain than the simple "That is true"

There will be no uncertainties, and consequently the notion of certainty will become meaningless.

Poof -- Must was gone!

May is intolerable and will be reserved for cursing.

Anonymous

10:43 PM

May it be reserved for cursing for all time!

Anonymous

A maledictive optative

But there will be an underground black market in modal literature.

A forbidden society!

A latter-day Hugh Hefner will challenge social convention in the semi-pornographic journal Mayboy.

LOL

10:51 PM

Subordination will follow the subjunctive into oblivion. Strict parataxis will prevail. Conditionals will disappear, all three of them.

I really like the last one!

Do will remain (uninflected, however), but it will serve only as an interrogative preposition. "Do you be ready?" "I be ready." "We go."

Future tense: "Do youll be ready?" Past tense: "Do you been ready?"

0

Q: How is it called in linguistics when you change a word from one word of speech to another?

so, how is it called when, for instance, the following happens: mad(noun) > madly (adv) > madlyness (noun)

Assignment: Construct a sentence using the noun madlyness.

11:07 PM

Very difficult!

Anonymous

There's still the Zeroth Conditional: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

But when the language has been Reformed there will be no distinction between humanity and robotity anyway.

@snailboat Which will drive robots to do all sort of things to prevent the humanity from harming itself!

@StoneyB Ahh... robots will become part of the humanity!

Gotta destroy humanity to save it.

"Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens."

"Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain."

Anonymous

11:20 PM

@DamkerngT. Did you read those, too?

Anonymous

On the subject of Asimov

Anonymous

I don't much like the comparative tag. It's too singular for me.

Anonymous

It could be, say, comparative-constructions

Anonymous

Or just comparatives

@snailboat I did not. Though I've read The Gods Themselves.

Anonymous

11:22 PM

@DamkerngT. That's what I meant! :-)

Anonymous

I suppose I should start actually saying what I want to communicate :-)

Ah, I thought you meant The Maid of Orleans. :-)

Anonymous

I hope this tunny person sticks around.

@snailboat I think comparatives goes well with other tags, like articles.

Anonymous

By way of conclusion is flatulent. — TRomano 3 hours ago

Anonymous

11:25 PM

Do you suppose we could call this use of flatulent autological?

Anonymous

I might just be biased against the word since I don't really like the imagery

Anonymous

Well, I just don't like that word. Personal vendetta, I guess. :-)

I think it's more formal than typical formal.

It's sort of sunk in the social scale. There was a time when poets spoke of divine efflatus.

(My first thought, actually, was that you were casting aspersions on TRomano.)

Anonymous

Oh, I'm sorry, it's just baseless language peeving. I don't like flatulent.

Anonymous

11:29 PM

books.google.com/ngrams/…

Anonymous

I thought that use of flatulent might have been more prevalent in the past

To me, the word is pretty much the same as bloated.

And we have a lot of that in code.

Anonymous

I'm not sure what to search for. I tried "flatulent prose"

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. It actually made me think of bloviate!

Anonymous

Now there's a word I can get behind.

11:31 PM

That's an odd Ngram. Look at all those Golden Years where nobody wrote flatulent prose.

Or possibly nobody wrote flatulent prose, so the criticism could not be uttered.

Anonymous

That is the likeliest thing I've heard all day.

Anonymous

books.google.com/ngrams/…

Anonymous

By way of conclusion is surprisingly popular.

Maybe Google systematically bred out flatulent prose in some years. :P

Anonymous

At least compared to flatulent prose: books.google.com/ngrams/…

11:32 PM

Sturgeon's Revelation forbids it (as long as we're on a SciFi Golden Age kick).

Anonymous

I like to think that Sturgeon's Revelation applies recursively

Anonymous

The phrase "by way of conclusion" doesn't actually sound very familiar to me. I don't know where all these people are writing it.

Anonymous

Looking at Google Books results, apparently in legal writing!

@snailboat That's what I guessed!

To be precise, I was thinking of Congressional reports.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. To me it sounds like one of those phrases you stick into a formulaic junior high school essay because you have to have one at the beginning of each paragraph

2

11:36 PM

"By way of" usually implicates an unsuccessful attempt.

In Real English, anyway. Lawyers will say anything for a laugh.

LOL

Anonymous

My brother is a lawyer.

Anonymous

Legal writing terrifies me.

Oh, he must be rich!

I worked in law offices for several years.

@snailboat Oxymoron? Like military music?

Anonymous

11:38 PM

Oh! One of my friends taught clarinet in the military for years.

Anonymous

Apparently joining the military is one way to get the government to buy you lots of clarinets.

Hey, that's cool!

My son was seriously considering joining the army to play drums - until we pointed out that most guys who signed up as musicians were being sent to Afghanistan anyway.

Anonymous

Joining the military sounds really scary to me.

Anonymous

I mean, I'd like to get musical instruments for free, too.

11:40 PM

LOL

Anonymous

But I guess there are other aspects of joining the military besides just free instruments.

I told him if he had to enlist he should join the Navy. There are very few IEDs on aircraft carriers.

Anonymous

My friend was a marine stationed in Japan. Now he's back in Chicago, where I grew up, but I'm out here in California so I haven't seen him

Anonymous

But they're activating the reserves for something Ebola-related, I think.

Anonymous

So, um, yikes!

11:41 PM

I think they're going to relieve me from the Air Force next year.

My brother-in-law was a marine, and he was stationed in Japan for I think four years.

I'm not a real officer, though.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Do you have compulsory military service there?

Well, how should I put it?

Delicately.

11:43 PM

By laws, all men here have an obligation.

But ...

@StoneyB He is back in the US now, I guess.

The road I chose put me into the permanent reserved force for about three decades.

He retired a Lt. Col. and is now flying for one of the airlines - they keep merging, so I don't which one this week.

Anonymous

The 1990s were the decade of the merger.

Anonymous

So were the 2000s.

Anonymous

11:45 PM

And the 2010s.

I got drafted into Vietnam, but they 4F-d me at my physical. I expressed my chagrin very prettily.

@StoneyB Was you in Vietnam back then too?

It was a very strange time.

No, I got called up but they found bad vertebrae in the X-rays and declined my services.

@DamkerngT. Dylan summed it up pretty well: "Something is happening but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. When singular you first became popular, there was a lot of you was, but people got pretty grumpy about it and it was relegated to non-standard usage, where it can still be found today

@snailboat Heh, indeed! And it's too late for me to edit. I will blame it on my cat.

11:52 PM

Was you was pretty well entrenched in polite usage in the 18th century.

Anonymous

I kind of like it. It seems to make sense :-)

When they trained us in the reserve force, I could still feel the side effects of the war. They taught us a lot of uncommon things, like how to survive in the wild, psychological warfare, how to bomb a bridge, and so on.

Most of them I'm sure I don't have to use, all my life. :-)

I imagine you're happier to have wasted that time than to have been called upon to use it!

Definitely!

How many bridges a man should bomb in his whole life? -- None! I'd say. :-)

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