English Language Learners

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Damkerng T.

7:00 PM

My little brother once wanted to be an Ultraman, then a masked rider, among other things. :-)

MARamezani

So we're poor devils of the same root!

Ngrams, Google books' comparisons and simply Googling them is my method. — MARamezani 1 min ago

Anything you think is better that I might add?

Damkerng T.

@MARamezani Yeah, sometimes I was zapped by his Storium Ray. Whatever that is!

@MARamezani I wanted to suggest COCA, but I tried searching for his such as on COCA and found no results.

MARamezani

Did that look anything like this?

Damkerng T.

Precisely!

MARamezani

How did you not die?

Damkerng T.

7:04 PM

lol

MARamezani

Teach me teach me teach me!

Damkerng T.

Maybe because I was from the planet M88!

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. COCA is a contemporary corpus.

Anonymous

Law Area wants to find examples of archaic usage that is no longer part of English

Anonymous

That sort of thing only shows up in COCA in quotations or occasionally as deliberate archaisms in fiction, etc.

MARamezani

7:04 PM

@snailboat Digs into the base, I'd say.

Anonymous

In any case, rarely

Damkerng T.

But trying to find that such as on Google Books is challenging, I think.

Anonymous

Probably.

MARamezani

I just threw something there! ;)

Anonymous

But a historical dictionary like the OED is a good place to start.

MARamezani

7:05 PM

@snailboat A question has bothered me for some time.

To what extent should I know archaic English?

Anonymous

Well, you need to know the few things people use as deliberate archaisms, things like thee and thou or verbal postnegation

MARamezani

That sort of thing just doesn't happen to come in normal speech.

Anonymous

Verbal postnegation: "I know not." (for standard I don't know)

MARamezani

Yep. Those.

Anonymous

But most English speakers don't know much archaic English

MARamezani

7:07 PM

But not digging as hard as Law, probably?

Anonymous

But if, for example, you'd like to read Shakespeare

Anonymous

You'll find that there are things you don't understand, or things that you think you can understand but had a different meaning back then

Anonymous

Of course, in the case of Shakespeare you can pick up a copy with annotations

Anonymous

But it's really up to you if you'd like to read older English

Anonymous

How much you want to learn

MARamezani

7:12 PM

Thee, thy, thou etc. I read the holy Quran's English translation and I saw a lot of them "amongst" the verses. That was when I did a search on what they meant.

Not the best use of amongst there, though.

Anonymous

Oh, right, sometimes when people translate stuff like that they deliberately use archaic-sounding language to make it sound old

MARamezani

And "Goddish".

Anonymous

You'd generally double that consonant in spelling, so you'd write Goddish

MARamezani

Yes. I didn't remember that. Because of fatigue, I guess.

Fun fact: You remember @Majid?

The other day he told me he wanted to change his user name.

He said: I came up with Dan. It's a cool name. And then guessed it would be better if I added an "e". It just came out of nowhere. Now I'm Dane!

Btw, are you familiar with academia.SE?

It just seems like a chat for me!

Martin is used to complaining about their jibber-jabbers!

Wait a sec: Am I earning another "alone"?!

Anonymous

7:39 PM

I'm still here

MARamezani

NOOOOO!

Anonymous

Badge blocked!

MARamezani

I already got three!

Let me gaze at the "newest" questions' tab, see if I find anything worth nagging about.

Damkerng T.

@MARamezani :)

Anonymous

@MARamezani I can, actually.

Anonymous

7:44 PM

It's broken by design.

Anonymous

See, it used to be a real-time indicator of the number of suggested edits for all users.

Anonymous

But right now, for you, that indicator shows every type of review task you can do.

MARamezani

@snailboat ...before the dark times...

Anonymous

And they decided it'd be too much to update that in real time for every user

Anonymous

That is, it'd take too much processing power to make it accurate. They say.

Anonymous

7:45 PM

So!

Anonymous

Instead you see a number which represents the total number of tasks that need handling, even if they aren't available to you specifically

Anonymous

For example, if you've already reviewed something, but it still needs reviews from other people, it'll still show up in the brown number.

Anonymous

But the brown number is also cached (remains perpetually out-of-date)

MARamezani

Wow, I realize today we had less than 10 questions on ELL.

Anonymous

And is also hidden if it's below a certain threshold

Anonymous

7:46 PM

Less than

Anonymous

So the result is, the brown number isn't particularly meaningful. I ignore it entirely.

Anonymous

I believe low-reputation users are still presented with the old suggested edit indicator. I miss that indicator

MARamezani

Let's do the right thing: Screw reviewing!

Anonymous

I do reviews, but I just click the review link by hand every now and then instead of using the numeric indicator :-)

MARamezani

A: What does "a cotton candy view" mean in this sentence?

StoneyB explains what cotton-candy is quite well, and this interpretation makes a lot of sense, but the metaphor "cotton-candy view" can be interpreted in another way as well. Cotton-candy is mostly consumed only by young children. Therefore it is sometimes associated with childishness or naïve...