English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

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12:22 AM

@JasperLoy The Chinese characters allow vastly different pronunciations of the same words among the dialects. I've even heard the suggestion that since the characters don't encode pronunciation, you could justifiably write Chinese characters and read them in English. E.g. write the Chinese character for wo and read it as I, pronounced as aye (or copied from ODO, /ʌɪ/). If it's reduced to just pinyin, then while it would still be a language, the dialects' pronunciations would have been lost.

Lawrence

12:40 AM

@Mitch Some just COBOL'd together, others Lisp'd. C?

@Shafizadeh Possibly, provided it's punctuated differently and completed. E.g. For those who, expecting a child but finding an adult, found their lesson plans woefully inadequate, one might show some sympathy.

3 hours later…

Shafizadeh

4:12 AM

@Lawrence I see .. :-)

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 great explanation.

Tonepoet

4:45 AM

Ugh, now I want an éclair:

Chambers Dictionary

The Chambers Dictionary (TCD) was first published by W. and R. Chambers as Chambers's English Dictionary in 1872. It was an expanded version of Chambers's Etymological Dictionary of 1867, compiled by James Donald. A second edition came out in 1898, and was followed in 1901 by a new compact edition called Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary. TCD is widely used by British crossword solvers and setters, and by Scrabble players (though it is no longer the official Scrabble dictionary). It contains many more dialectal, archaic, unconventional and eccentric words than its rivals, and is noted for...

1 hour later…

Lawrence

5:57 AM

@Tonepoet Those are fun definitions :) . I wonder how they slipped by the editors the first time around.

Tonepoet

6:33 AM

@Lawrence I do not know, but I assume they either saw it, smirked and let the pages slip by them onto the printing press or did not care what the sentiment was being expressed, just so long as it was written with proper grammar. Another definition that is oft cited as being amusing is Samuel Johnson's entry for Oats, specifically for the opening sentence.

Lawrence

7:01 AM

@Tonepoet A delightful read. Thanks :) . It seems he wasn't particularly fond of oatmeal. I'm not quite sure what to make of his attitude towards the Scots. Also - "The oats have eaten the horses.", quoting from Shakespeare. What a turn of phrase from the bard.

Tonepoet

@Lawrence That would probably require more research into 18th century England. Also yes, it is an interesting quotation. If you look at the Stats. page you can see plenty of quoted sources. Let's see if I can get a hint as to where Shakespeare said it from the top ten quoted works.

Lawrence

The Taming of the Shrew

Tonepoet

It's not from any of those evidently. How unlikely.

Lawrence

nfs.sparknotes.com/shrew/page_140.html

Tonepoet

Oho, it looks like Shakespeare has an opinion on letters.

Lawrence

7:18 AM

Illustrating psychological transference? Kent, from King Lear - in reply to "... have you no reverence?", says "Yes, sir; but anger hath a privilege." (!)

Tonepoet

7:30 AM

Something tells me I need to read the story from the beginning to know just why these people hate each other so much.

Lawrence

I'm sure it would be very entertaining. Some of the character names are very familiar, but I must have not paid enough attention back in the day. :P

1 hour later…

Matt E. Эллен

8:33 AM

@DEAD there was a ELL meta post you'd edited that made me think you might not know that spelling

DEAD

@MattE.Эллен Oh, that one? Well, they did mean 'pundits', I think. That definition of pandits was pointed out in the comments.

But that was one stubborn OP, and I didn't want to get into a rollback war then.

Matt E. Эллен

@DEAD by the OP, IIRC. pundit (that is not pandit) makes less sense than pandit

but it's fine, since pundit is an alternate spelling pandit

DEAD

Shrug

If it were a big deal I would've edited it back.

Matt E. Эллен

aye, fair enough

4 hours later…

RegDwigнt

12:51 PM

@Mitch tools are always terrible. Hence the name, tools.

user227867

1:01 PM

I have 3 stars on the wall, yay!

user227867

3:11 PM

Anyone home?

Mitch

3:24 PM

@JasperLoy not me

SmokeDetector

3:57 PM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] All-caps answer, offensive answer detected: Dank memes. But why? by Saugat Ghimire on english.stackexchange.com

DEAD

@JasperLoy Yup

DEAD

4:32 PM

Q: Shall we experiment?

Overview There has been some concerns lately about whether we close too much. So we start giving leniency a chance. Scroll down to What we do to get to the fun part. Read the rest if you're interested. Why we do It's all about answers. Whatever we do here, whether it is commenting, asking, an...

Strangely apt.

tchrist

5:20 PM

@DEAD And conversely.

NVZ

5:41 PM

@tchrist I need a favor. Please migrate my question to MSE. I was gonna ask separately there, but why create dupes, when I can have this migrated!

Q: Just another edit suggestion, nothing big

Instead of seeing, (username) has approved 297 edit suggestions and rejected 121 edit suggestions and improved 21 edit suggestions can it be rephrased to this? (username) has approved 297, rejected 121, and improved 21 edit suggestions or something better? What are your thoughts? Is ...

discussion feature-request

DEAD

5:57 PM

Should've been there in the first place.

NVZ

@DEAD Yeah, and nope.

DEAD

Hmm?

What do you mean?

NVZ

Feature-requests can be asked on any meta, and still be seen by SE staff.

MSE's top users recommend asking network-wide meta questions on whichever meta we're comfortable with.

DEAD

@NVZ Yes, but compare the number of meta.SE implemented FR's and per site metas' and you'll see that if you want your feature to even be noticed, you should go there.

@NVZ I'm one of those, thankuverymuch

It's pretty simple. You have a thing to say that concerns or affects more than one site, you go to meta.SE for results.

NVZ

@DEAD yea, for more exposure, MSE. For opinions from familiar users, own metas.

DEAD

6:05 PM

@NVZ The point is that you weren't looking for ELU opinion, exclusively.

If you were, you're doing it wrong.

NVZ

Actually, I didn't even make a feature request. I had only asked for opinions from ELUers regarding the English wording. Then our mod KitZ added the FR tag.

@DEAD I was asking for ELU's opinions.

DEAD

When you're looking for a change, it's [feature-request].

44 secs ago, by DEAD

If you were, you're doing it wrong.

NVZ

I don't think all searches for change need a feature request.

DEAD

@NVZ If it's about a change, but discusses whether that change is good, it should be [feature-request] and [discussion].

But whatever, the tags don't define your question.

We're not bots.

The heart of your question is asking for a change.

NVZ

Be that as it may, people change minds. And therefore, now I'd like to have a bigger audience for that question. And hence the request for migration. :)

tchrist

7:01 PM

@NVZ Have you perchance done a bit of digging on MSE to see whether there's anything already talked about there that's related to this?

DEAD

@tchrist I did. There wasn't any that I could find.

tchrist

I didn't find any either.

DEAD

High five

NVZ

@tchrist Only close one I found was this:

Q: Improved X edit suggestions

I noticed today that the reviewer stats on suggested edits now says something like user31415 has approved X edit suggestions and rejected Y edit suggestions and improved Z edit suggestions I'm pretty sure I don't remember seeing the "improved X edit suggestions" part of that before today. I...