English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

user116848

3:00 AM

I see.

""I thought she might have had a chance to win it" wipes out the openness of the possibility. Whatever happened, it’s all settled by now. And from the sound of it, she probably didn’t make it.

Maybe it would be useful to think about perfects as always being all done with.

They’re closed off.

I am not altogether positive that these are completely set in stone.

user116848

nods

tchrist

Your last one is something else again yet.

> The big woman's face was bright red. For a minute I thought she might have a stroke. It was 100 degrees in the shade.

That means this:

> The big woman's face was bright red. For a minute I thought she might be going to have a stroke. It was 100 degrees in the shade.

Compare with this version:

> The big woman's face was bright red. For a minute I thought she might have had a stroke. It was 100 degrees in the shade.

That one means this:

> The big woman's face was bright red. For a minute I thought she perhaps really did have a stroke. It was 100 degrees in the shade.

So the perfect ties up loose ends.

The action is not complete in "might have" a stroke. With "might have had", it is.

user116848

Very nice explanation! tchrist

tchrist

I wonder whether there are resources to help with this kind of thing.

I think the problem is that these aspects/concepts do not map to your language(s?).

It is a bit harder to explain in English, because things are more ambiguous. In Romance, everything from moderns ones all the back to Latin, whether an action is completed or ongoing is very very obvious in the tense selection.

user116848

3:08 AM

You are right. Although I have CGEL but didn't find this structure with any explanation in it.

user116848

@tchrist By Romance you mean romantic novels?

tchrist

That’s because they have two separate tenses for past actions, one where the action is all done with and the other were it was still going on.

No, no.

Romance means from Rome.

In this case.

user116848

Oh, that.

tchrist

In older English-language writing about it, like from earlier last century, you will sometimes see them referred to as Romanic languages instead.

user116848

So in Roman language it is much more easy to understand?

tchrist

3:10 AM

But it is all easy to confuse if you miscue. Like how the Roma were not from Roma.

No.

user116848

then?

tchrist

But in Latin and in the languages that Latin became, the perfect/imperfect aspect is always part of the formal tense system. You use a different inflexion of the verb for perfect as for imperfect tenses.

In English, we have to use circumlocutions if we want to make sure.

Like we may use past progressive constructions for what a Romance speaker would think of as imperfect.

In English then,

While I was showering, the phone rang.

You can tell that the first part is a narrative past, an ongoing one.

user116848

True.

tchrist

But the second one is an all-done-with past.

This is really annoying with the auxiliaries, because they don’t really have separate forms.

While I was at the store, I was called by my friend.

You cannot really tell those two apart in terms of doneness/perfectness aspect.

You cannot say "While I was being at the store", for example. That is not grammatical.

So you get longer things. While I was shopping at the store, I got called by my friend.

Now you can tell.

That is also why to be able get supplants for can/could.

Because it is easier to indicate tense and aspect.

But you still have trouble because it is be. Better though than the defective verbs.

So there is no future construction using can/could. You have to go to "will be able to" or "am going to be able to".

Yesterday, I could not hear. I still cannot hear today. But tomorrow I will be able to hear.

If only I had been able to call you yesterday, you would have been able to cash in your winning lottery ticket before it expired.

So there are times we just have to resort to these circumlocutions, these periphrastic constructions, to convey just what we mean. Because the basic tense and aspect system breaks down in places.

All the modals, being defective, share this um defect. :)

user116848

Yes. thanks for explaining.

tchrist

3:20 AM

Yesterday, he said that I must leave today. Today, he says I must leave today. Tomorrow, he will tell me that I er er er must leave tomorrow. Will have to leave tomorrow.

user116848

I am bookmarking your answer here

tchrist

That is why a lot of the modals, maybe all of them, not sure, have periphrastic versions that you can apply more grammatical markers to.

Normally people just close and and all tense and mood question in English to this big old master monster with 100 dupes about the relationship of the English "tenses" to each other.

This is a problem, because it still forces the poor asked how to apply whatever that answer says to his own problem, which per my experience is almost never straightforward, and may often be impossible.

Hey, I have a question for you.

user116848

Yes?

tchrist

Do you know native-origin people from the Subcontinent, not British or Australian ex-pats or something, but real natives, who grew up speaking English as their first language, or at least as one of their first languages?

I ask because I have been told that this does happen, but that it is fairly uncommon and possibly rare.

user116848

@tchrist No I don't know anyone like that. But here are many people who grew up in abroad countries and don't know Urdu well. But still those are Pakistanis and Indians.

tchrist

3:27 AM

I say Subcontinent because it is tedious saying from India or Pakistan or Kashmir or Bangladesh or Sri Lankha or perhaps also Nepal and Bhutan or even Tibet.

user116848

Yes :)

tchrist

Oh, so they grew up in like England and moved back?

user116848

Yes that sort of thing.

tchrist

I see.

user116848

Or like someone from here marrying someone from the Caucasian side etc.

tchrist

3:28 AM

I have known many, many, many Subcontinentals with utterly immaculate English.

But they always were born in England or America.

Or moved here/there so young as to make no difference.

And sometimes, even those born in an Anglo country still have an accent.

It depends on how integrated they were.

I have a friend who very much was born here, but she had an accent nevertheless.

Her family emigrated from Persia, and she has that storybook beauty about her. But she has the strangest of accents, because they emigrated to Louisiana, where she was born.

Not that Persia lies below the Himalayas, but you get the idea.

user116848

Yes of course.

user116848

I have an okay English too. But some grammar questions confuses me. Not all grammar yanno :)

user116848

There are Persians here on SE sites too. I have noticed.

tchrist

The Louisianan accent can be exceedingly difficult to understand.

Well, they have a long cultural history of being well-educated in Persia. They are not just a random nomad tribe wandering the deserts of Africa and Arabia.

So it is not surprising that they should turn to SE sites to learn things.

user116848

You are right. They have a lot of history.

tchrist

3:33 AM

Come to think of it, I once had a Persian who worked for me. But he had no accent at all, while she did. I do not know how that works.

Here is something that may surprise you.

user116848

which is?

tchrist

Almost every American you ever meet will tell you that the tales of Scheherazade, the ones she recounted in A Thousand Nights and A Night about Aladdin and Ali Baba and Sindbad and all the rest, that those are stories about Arabs, not Persians.

And while I realize there is some margin of mixture, it is still thought of Arab instead of Persian.

Now, being in Pakistan, I wonder what you guys’ cultural take on that might be.

user116848

I didn't know that :)

tchrist

Ah, but do you yourselves more think of Scheherazade and her tales as tales out of Arabia or tales out of Persia?

user116848

Here we take that story as Arabian one.

tchrist

3:38 AM

The famous Arabian Nights, right?

user116848

But 'Prince of Persia' as the Persian one :)

user116848

Yes 'The Arabian Nights'

tchrist

> The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Caliphate era, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hazār Afsān (Persian: هزار افسان‎, lit. A Thousand Tales) which in turn relied partly on Indian elements.[

I own a reprinted copy of the original uncensored translation done by Sir Richard Francis Burton between 1885–1888. It was very scandalous due to Victorian rules about obscenity.

It is 17 volumes. The English is very old-fashioned and flowery.

> In 2008 a new English translation was published by Penguin Classics in three volumes. It is translated by Malcolm C. Lyons and Ursula Lyons with introduction and annotations by Robert Irwin. This is the first complete translation of the Macnaghten or Calcutta II edition (Egyptian recension) since Burton's.
It contains, in addition to the standard text of 1001 Nights, the so-called "orphan stories" of Aladdin and Ali Baba as well as an alternative ending to The seventh journey of Sindbad from Antoine Galland's original French.

Almost one and quarter centuries before a new complete translation. I am not completely sure why. It might be because of the difficulty in finding scholars with “the chops” to tackle it.

> The Lyons translation includes all the poetry (in plain prose paraphrase) but does not attempt to reproduce in English the internal rhyming of some prose sections of the original Arabic. Moreover, it streamlines somewhat and has cuts. In this sense it is not, as claimed, a complete translation.

Ok, that makes sense. I couldn’t see how 17 volumes could be cut down to 3 and still be complete.

It is hard to quickly bring famous historical Persians to mind. They simply do not teach us much in school about that part of the world. Oh, we may have heard of Omar Khayyam, but not much else.

But Persia is very very far from America, no matter which way you go to get there.

I have know of people like Averroes from the Cordoban Caliphate or its leftovers, but they do not normally teach us non-Western heroes and famous people.

When we study history, it is always American and European history, and that is all.

For us, history begins in Greece. It is strange.

I guess it is justified by the time.

Córdoba today has many tributes to their three greatest scholars: Seneca, Averroes, and Maimonides. The curious thing is that none of those were Christians.

So it was not politically correct to honor them for many centuries.

user116848

Yes, Spain is very rich in history.

tchrist

It is always sad when that sort of political correctness gets in the way of honoring great men who have done so much to contribute to our world and our understanding of it.

user116848

3:54 AM

You are right. It looks complicated how we never hear of such people.

user116848

Unless we study them of course.

tchrist

I imagine it is little different in other places. Do you really think the Japanese or Chinese are taught about those people? I would be surprised.

But they have their own heroes whom we in turn never hear of.

We may hear a little bit of Genghis Khan and grandson Kublai Khan, the “Chinese” emperors from Mongolia. The whole Tamerlane thing. But those are all very exotic to us, the stuff of legend now, more distant than Saladin.

Who was that picture of that you were using for your gravatar? Some soccer hero?

user116848

@tchrist Nay. He is Matt Boomer. Some actor. :)

tchrist

Oh, let me guess: you’re not really an actor, but you play one on TV? :)

user116848

Me no. Why do you think that? :)

user116848

4:03 AM

Oh, you mean watch on TV?

tchrist

It was a twisted joke.

user116848

Ya I figured :)

tchrist

“I’m not a real doctor, but I play one on TV” > “I’m not a real actor, but I play one on TV”

user116848

Now it is easy to understand

user116848

Why don't you use some gravatar?

user116848

4:07 AM

Nice talking. See ya!

user116848

Bye

tchrist

@Arrowfar Because I remember that one of the Ten Commandments had stern words about worshiping false idols. :)

tchrist

4:21 AM

@Cerberus Because he is a snobby élitist who thinks people mustn’t be permitted to use their own language in ways that he curls his lip at. “A free-for-all may appeal to libertines, but the language deserves better” drips with sanctimonious stuckupitude to put down as “libertines” any who would use a living language instead of that dead thing he worships behind bullet-proof museum glass.

This is a new banner:

But I think the guidelines on deletion, wherever they are, probably say it should be downvoted rather than deletevoted. So that is what I have done. I wish it were more clearcut when we were expected to deletevote stuff.

tchrist

9:59 AM

Question: Is this an acceptably professional tone of discourse?

> Whiz-deletion is a layman botched-up definition. If you decide that 'placed' is a verb , then: "there is a book (someone has) placed on the table is just elliptical. If you say it is equivalent to: "There is a book on the table. It was placed there by Ara", this is simply off topic, wide of the mark. It is a red herring invented by someone who wants to make up an answer that looks different, original. These detours have nothing to do with the question and the issue at hand.

This is in an answer that is addressing something that was said in another answer by Araucaria.

She said it was Whiz-deletion.

First, you aren’t supposed to fight with other answers like that.

SEcond, it is quite rude.

Or so it apears to me.

Let cooler heads than mine decide.

AH#1:

-4

A: Existential sentence...in the passive voice?

Then I came to this sentence: There was something placed on the table. . When turned into a nonexistential sentence it is passive: "Something had been placed on the table [by X]". Although, another reading could be that it isn't passive. Placed on the table may be seen as a (past)...

AH#2:

-3

A: Existential sentence...in the passive voice?

I think this construction is, in fact, using a past participle. Further, because it uses a past participle it is definitely passive voice (which I believe is a different conclusion than you were expecting!) Here is a well written example from UNC at Chapel Hill: Once you know what to look f...

I’m convinced that neither of those two knows what he is talking about, won’t shut up about anything, and they are both acting in ways that are not up to the standard of civil discourse to which we aspire.

If you think that’s bad, look what had to boxed up and put away:

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. — KitFox ♦ 14 hours ago

The first two answers are short and two the point — and legible.

The other two are meandering, confusing, and most of all, rude.

I know. I shall apply my votes, not my flags.

Perhaps others will do the same. Or not.

skullpatrol

Rudeness is a part of human nature :)

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…