English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2012-10-18 (page 1 of 4)

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12:00 AM

@Mitch I had no idea you were so much younger than me; I thought it was the other way around.

@tchrist Kinda like running into a wall.

ouches

The weirdest thing happened to me yesterday: I got a text message claiming to be from one of his kids asking me to call him.

In fact, it was from a previously-unknown number, and because Aron Wall was at the top of my list of known numbers, somehow in my pocket my phone assigned it to him as a second phone number. So weird!

It wasn’t Aron. :)

Phones never say "are you sure?". They just do funky things at you.

@Jasper lex certainly is . . . persistent. We should probably try to help him.

1

Q: when sound changes spelling but not meaning

Please read carefully. The question is: is there a word to describe the phenomenon, I mean the uh, the thing, when a word we commonly use today, and accept as meaningful without noticeable evidence, turns out to be an otherwise spelled, different word than the orginal, meaningful word? For e...

> the site is keeping a stigma list.

Huh?

Show us your stigmata, O Lex!

I was going to say O Lex Beate, because I think of him as a guy, but lex should be feminine, so I gave up. :)

Genderbenders are so hard on me sometimes.

Maybe he isn’t a Lexus. Maybe she is just a Lex.

12:18 AM

@tchrist You remember what Stroustrup said.

@MετάEd Unix doesn’t say "May I. . .?" ?

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone. —Bjarne Stroustrup

Ah that one, yes.

@tchrist Yeah, well, if you split a line in your text file, that means the compiler will join the lines. So is that called splitting or joining?

@Cerberus The compiler will join the lines? Huh?

12:21 AM

@MετάEd Okay, so I have a test script for you.

The line is split.

It is not joined.

One line is split across seven.

Not one line is joined across seven.

The compiler will join the two lines into one command/variable/whatever.

That is different.

The physical line is split in your file.

It reforms in memory.

But the recidivism rate is high.

It tends to go to pieces if you tug at its threads.

> Thank you for looking back and reconsidering..as I hope you appreciate my patience and fortitude in repeatedly re-doing ill-considered posts. Perhaps today is proving a test because the site is keeping a stigma list(?). So am I but only mentally. (And one thing: I haven't time to chase awards and such, other than plodding or because of mental exception, so nothing to worry about competing ambitions.

And then:

> This question may be copy cut to remove the extraneous if you so desire.

I don’t know what copy-cut means, but it looks like the extraneous has already been.

@tchrist In what way?

Poor prison joke.

12:33 AM

@MετάEd pastebin.com/zfbPW8t2

There's your script.

It should work. It works for me.

I can add some more comments to the loop lines if you like.

I could also make it possibly twice as fast.

But I don't think it will be necessary, and chances are slight that it would make much of a difference.

If the Input command can't handle such long lines, then cutting the load in half probably won't help much. It that works at all.

@Cerberus Found it. Awesome.

Good luck...

I will try it out tomorrow at my work PC and give you a full report.

OK, I hope your 1900 entries won't be too much.

@MετάEd Oh, if the total number of characters in your list is more than 16,000-something, it needs to go into two continuation sections. See comment.

I think that'

s no problem.

12:40 AM

OK.

Replacing some {U+blahblah} codes with the actual characters could also reduce the number.

12:51 AM

Sure.

1:17 AM

@tchrist me neither? I know, right? all these kidses here.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

1:35 AM

@Cerberus In Arabic there most educated speakers are effectively bilingual in their local dialect and Standard Arabic. For cultural reasons they insist that there is no distinction, but it is analogous to Latin and the various European languages descended from it, only, if everyone in France used Latin and, eg, French interchangeably and pretended there was no difference, while everyone in Spain used Spanish and Latin the same way.

@Carlo_R the situation with Korea is that they used to write in Chinese characters and they instead invented a new writing system called Hangul which is phonetic. I don't know to what degree it stays current with pronunciation.

So does anyone find it strange that Souta edits Lex's question and adds all this commentary as if they asked it first?

1:54 AM

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 What percentage of the population speaks standard Arabic?

And what percentage can read Arabic?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus The educated percentage

So you don't know?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

I don't know the details

but wikipedia has information on this. They call it "diglossia"

I was under the impression that many more people from one end of the Arab world could read a newspaper from the other end than have a normal conversation.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus If they are educated in standard arabic, and the paper is written in standard arabic, then yes. Similarly if they can speak and understand it.

1:57 AM

I would need more details.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

But standard arabic is a different language than, say, Egyptian Arabic or Iraqi Arabic.

It is exactly like Latin and French/Spanish/Italian/etc

Only, pretend that the Bible had been written in Latin, and you were forbidden from ever changing it by even a single character

What happens when an uneducated speaker reads a major newspaper?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Now pretend that the language evolves as it does, but Latin is kept alive in order to study the bible

@Cerberus The uneducated can't read

Someone who doesn't speak standard Arabic, then.

But who can still read.

Because the large majority can read in Morocco or Egypt.

Or at least a majority.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus Imagine the situation where when you learn to read, you are taught that "when writing formally, use this approach (latin) and when speaking with friends, you can use this method (french)"

2:01 AM

Are you suggesting that nearly everyone who can read can also speak standard Arabic, enough to have a decent conversation in?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus Well, I don't know how good the average person's spoken vocab might be. But probably? Most big media is in Standard. TV news, newspapers, etc, are all written in Standard.

Just read the first few paragraphs of the wiki article

Arabic language

|agency = |iso1 = ar |iso2 = ara |iso3 = ara |iso3comment = Arabic (generic) |map=Dispersión lengua árabe.png |mapcaption=Dispersion of native Arabic speakers as the majority (green) or minority (chartreuse) population |map2=Arabic speaking world.svg |mapcaption2=Use of Arabic as the sole official language (green) and an official language (blue) |notice=IPA }} Arabic ( ' or ' ) ( or () is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD. This includes both the literary language and the spoken Arabic varieties. The literary language is called M...

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Okay, I am under the impression that many more people can read Standard Arabic than speak it.

> In instances in which highly educated Arabic-speakers of different nationalities engage in conversation but find their dialects mutually unintelligible (e.g. a Moroccan speaking with a Kuwaiti), they are able to code switch into MSA for the sake of communication.

Only a small proportion seems to be able to speak it well enough.

But everyone learns Standard Arabic in writing.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus It would make sense that more people can understand MSA than can generate it.

They can write in it too, I would presume.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Well, if they can write in it, why couldn't they speak in it?

assuming they can write in it at a normal pace and not, eg, laboriously slaving for hours over a single paragraph

2:15 AM

My theory was that it was not often used by speakers with less education in speech.

I heard something like that.

But I don't know how it works exactly.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus Well, I don't really know. My own experience with languages suggests that if you can write it, you can probably speak it.

Anyway, the situation with Arabic is similar to the situation with Chinese: for hundreds of years, the written language was restricted to Classical Chinese. Nobody wrote stuff in "Mandarin" or "Cantonese". For this reason, people believed that there was only one language, with essentially different pronunciations or accents.

But in fact, Classical Chinese is as different from modern Chinese as Latin is from French or English.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I can write in Latin much better than I can speak it.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus Well, probably because you never have to speak it and never hear anyone use it. And can take as much time as you need to write.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 But don't you think that perhaps people who have to read Standard Arabic out loud may pronounce it as in their own dialect, sometimes?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

But if you were fully literate, being able to, eg, read a newspaper comfortably, surely you'd be able to speak it to some degree.

2:18 AM

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yeah.

I can read simple Latin quite comfortably. But we only ever read complicated literary texts.

Comparatively.

Something like the Vulgate or Caesar is usually easy enough.

cornbread ninja

@tchrist excellent. tents fingers

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

I am under the impression that the MSA words are spelled differently than their colloquial cognates. So perhaps a reader might substitute for colloquial speech, but I don't really know.

user image

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I got the impression that perhaps they did that sometimes, from my (now unknown) source.

@cornbreadninja Thank you, sir. beams

@Cerb Like the font?

2:23 AM

I see some nice ligatures.

That’s the point, yes.

Are those automatic?

They can be.

See here.

OpenType font tech can be quite clever.

Good.

The old chancery Greeks cut by the masters have only very very recently been approached in beauty.

Just as much of the subtle clevernesses of Gutenberg were forgotten, lost, or discarded until quite recently. They were just too hard to automate before computers.

Ok, that's enough.

I'm going to bed.

Good night.

2:30 AM

Haha.

Isn't it time you started improving your Greek?

You would like it.

There are snappy comebacks to that, but not in mixed company. :)

'Night!

You can pick whichever variety you are more inclined to.

Night!

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 By the way, I have already read that article on Unicode.

Several months ago, perhaps a year ago.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Consider the situation in Chinese: in some cases a Cantonese speaker will use a different word than a Mandarin speaker. So "we" is 我们 (wo-men) in Mandarin but 我哋 (ngo dei) in Cantonese.

@Cerberus forgot it, I guess?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I don't know, I probably remember some stuff, though I don't consciously remember having learned fact x from that article specifically.

It's not knowledge that I normally use, so it never got time to mature.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

A cantonese speaker reading a standard Mandarin text might just substitute "ngo dei" for "wo men" instead of reading "ngo men" (or however they pronounce 们), but the Cantonese pronciation of 们 is not "dei"

And 哋 is not part of Mandarin as far as I know.

There are also sentences that are ungrammatical when read aloud in the wrong dialect.

2:38 AM

My Chinese prof told me that the degree of difference in Chinese dialects is approximately the same span as English to German.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

I assume the same is true in Arabic. Any two speakers from different regions will be dealing with 3 languages: MSA, and their two local ones. All three have different grammar, different spelling, and different vocab.

@KitFox I would have said Italian to French or Spanish. English is maybe a bad example because it's Germanic but so many germanic words are gone.

But essentially, yeah.

Pretty close to mutually unintelligible.

At the far ends.

Somehow, Italian and Spanish seem more closely related than French.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus That's my impression. But then the same is true of the various Chinese dialects. Mandarin is more closely related to some than others.

(The langues d'oc excepted, no doubt.)

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 It's just odd because French is in the way.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

2:46 AM

Eg I can understand much Shanghainese despite having never studied it; but I understand zero cantonese, and the words sound completely different, instead of just a little different.

Yeah, I heard Cantonese was very different.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus Well, doesn't French have a lot of non-latin influence?

Yes.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Cantonese is very different from Mandarin, but not so different from some other dialects. And I'm told it's among the closest to "classical" chinese.

Really?

I thought it was mainly spoken by a fair poor underclass?

Or am I confusing things.

In Judge Dee, the native Cantonese are basically pariahs.

But then those might have been an entirely different group.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

2:49 AM

There are class-based distinctions among the dialects. But I think it's more regional than class-based. Cantonese is from the south. And Hong Kong's official language is Cantonese.

0

Q: What types of antonym are there?

In this question antonym for Schadenfreude was considered to be a word (W1) for the feeling of discomfort derived from witnessing the misfortunes of others. Would a word (W2) for the feeling of joy derived from witnessing the good fortunes of others also be considered an antonym? Is there a na...

This question makes me want to punch the wall.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Robusto don't hold back on our account

Yeah, I was confusing Cantonese with a much smaller group.

Because, of course, every word must have an antonym.

Bah, I'm going to bed. This place is fished out.

Hi, there

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

2:56 AM

@PeterPAD hello

I want improving my communication skill? Please give me some suggestion? I'm not native english

Come and chat.

Journeyman Geek

@PeterPAD: read lots. Listen to BBC world service. Chat. ;p

You can chat here if you like, but any of the chat rooms will probably provide good experience.

thanks, but I want improving my speaking skill first. Noone can understand what I speaked

3:02 AM

Listening and repeating will help then.

Journeyman Geek

@PeterPAD: listening helps you speak better

I have been listening CNN for 1 month, and now I can separated some sounds. But I cannot speak anything. Should I change to another level?

News is good because they tend to speak slowly and clearly.

Journeyman Geek

I learnt to speak english entirely from cartoons and BBC >_>

(well, later I did it in school, but fluency came from both of those)

You might try reading aloud, but repeating sentences after a native speaker can be useful too.

(Well, doesn't have to be a native speaker, just someone who speaks English clearly.)

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

3:09 AM

@PeterPAD First, practice reading and writing as much as you can. These can be done without a partner. You need some work in your basic grammar, at minimum.

> Thanks, but I want to improve my speaking skills first. No one can understand what I say.

Second, you need to converse with fluent speakers. Depending on where you are, that might be easy or hard. Often there are groups that get together just for that purpose: pairing up learners with natives.

Listening to the news will help you discern words, but won't help you say things. But, the more you listen and the more you read, the bigger your vocabulary will be.

And that helps comprehension.

And never give up. You seem to be on the right track so far.

@JourneymanGeek I didn't realize you were a NNS.

Journeyman Geek

@KitFox: grew up speaking tamil, since my parents were worried we'd not speak the native language, entirely tamil speaking at home too

I am so envious of multilingual people.

Journeyman Geek

@KitFox: most people here are at least a little bilingual

I suppose I am a little bilingual. The area is steeped in French/Franglais.

Journeyman Geek

3:18 AM

I speak a little french

or used to

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@KitFox 不忘了你会说中文啊！

Journeyman Geek

apparently I sound like a toddler

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 That doesn't count as bilingual.

I learned Chinese as an adult.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@KitFox You are at least still "a little bilingual" in it.

Your brain was enhanced by learning it.

It's not the same.

pouts

I was pretty talented with languages once upon a time.

So I envy everyone who speaks more than one fluently.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

3:23 AM

So? learn another. or finish learning Chinese. you can still do it.

I am thinking of taking up German.

I really really enjoyed my trip to Austria and am actually considering moving there.

I want to learn Russian.

But I'll study German with you if you like.

I need to go to bed. I just came downstairs to pour that crap out of my head into the summit room.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

okay, well, goodnight

Guten nacht.

Bye!

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Moving??

Are you sure? Why?

Well, you're not sure.

By anyway, how come?

Not that Austria isn't nice.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus It's just an idea I've toyed with.

3:33 AM

The cities, at least.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

There are many reasons why it is not likely to happen

Hmm.

Job? Family?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Not least of which is that my wife is not employable there

I could possibly do my current job from there.

Why is she not employable?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

She's a pharmacist.

3:34 AM

Hmm.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Her job is 90% technical jargon and 10% legal jargon.

She would probably need extensive training to do the same job, yes.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

She'd need to achieve fluency, and then probably one or two years of full-time schooling.

Aside from that, is she interested?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

But I would like the kids to be immersed in another language if possible

@Cerberus She's not not interested.

It's not a very serious idea on my part.

3:36 AM

Hmm.

I see.

If you did, would you move to a city?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

I guess I sorta have a crush on Wien.

I really liked it there.

Heh.

It is nice.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

And I found German much easier to understand than I expected. I had almost zero experience with it before.

So if we moved there, we'd all have to learn German.

I bet my daughter would be fluent within a year.

She'd be teaching ME within two.

Anyway, I guess it's more of a fantasy than an actual possibility.

Plus I hear property is cheaper in Germany.

At least: cheaper in the part of Germany near Salzburg, than in Salzburg itself.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yay!

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 *Austria

Oh, the "plus" meant you would in fact rather move to Germany than to Austria?

As to houses, I think prices are not that different country to country: cities are just much more expensive than most rural areas.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus Well, "rather"? who knows. But if you're going to uproot and move to a foreign nation in the EU, may as well consider all the options, eh?

3:44 AM

Sure!

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus That's true everywhere

You might consider Holland.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus The dialect of German is weird there

Nah.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Although, all joking aside, if I learned Dutch I could use it in Aruba, which I visit often.

3:44 AM

Of all languages in the world bar Frisian, it is the one closest to English.

Aruba...yes, I suppose...

So you could move to Friesland.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

On a spectrum of English <-> German, where would you put Dutch?

A little bit closer to German.

And we have some influence from French too.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

If only I had time to study ALL the languages. That's actually what I want.

English is far more mixed than Dutch or German, so in that way it is different from Dutch.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Many linguists regard Dutch and German as part of one language continuum.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

3:47 AM

@DavidWallace yes, I'm aware of that.

Your Scandinavian and Latinate elements are significant.

@Cerberus Why, thank you.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus Are not the scandinavian elements germanic?

@DavidWallace You could say that. The eastern and southern dialects are much closer to German the standard Dutch.

Some Dutch dialects are considered separate languages even, like Limburgs.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yes.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Anyway, cerb, I thought it was funny when you warned me that Austrians had a funny accent.

3:49 AM

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 But they are still farther removed from German-Dutch than the Anglo-Saxon of yore.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Oh, yes?

Was it funny?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Cerberus Yeah. Because I have no idea how I am supposed to discern their accent. It's all greek to me.

Heh.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

I tried to see if I could see any difference from what I assume was a standard german-speaking Google Translate bot. But I didn't really find any difference.

I'm sure I couldn't possibly hear it.

Go listen to some Austrian and Wesphalian Youtube videos...

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