English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

12:00 AM

@Tonepoet beveiligingnieuws.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/cbsmoord6.jpg

Look, another graph.

Now the murder rate is suddenly much lower, half of that quoted in your source.

No, that's just the police using military gear and such. This is actually sending in the military itself. See the difference?

Tonepoet

@Cerberus I see it but I can't read it.

Cerberus

Murder rate in Amsterdam: 2.3 per 100,000.

tchrist

Crosby,Stills,nash and Young Four dead in ohio

►

Tonepoet

@Cerberus Okay but if I'm supposed to read it like that, it seems like Amsterdam still has the highest murder rate on that chart.

Cerberus

12:02 AM

Yes, but that shouldn't be surprising.

Larger city means more murders.

Also because a very large part of murder victims and perpetrators are foreigners, of whom many live in the capital.

Tonepoet

One of the problems then is that I can't see how this method of determining the number of homicides compares globally. This might just be a difference in definition of what constitutes a homicide for all I know.

Cerberus

The top two bars are Dutchmen of Dutch descent who were murdered.

All the other bars are people of foreign descent.

Tonepoet

Another interesting factor is that my data was from 2009. Apparently, Amsterdam has had record lows in homicides lately.

tchrist

The Governor is the commander-in-chief of that State’s National Guard. This summer Missouri's has sent them into Ferguson, Wisconsin’s into Milwaukee, New York’s into New York City, North Dakota’s into the Sioux reservation, North Carolina's into Charlotte. These are not disaster-relief missions.

It was especially freaky to hear that Nixon had sent in the National Guard.

These are all about breakdowns in race relations.

Cerberus

@Tonepoet Right, but I don't think those records mean much: low numbers will just fluctuate a lot.

@Tonepoet I don't think so, this is all very well researched.

Perhaps in some poorer countries not all murders will be registered.

@tchrist I hope things will calm down eventually.

Tonepoet

12:15 AM

@Cerberus Hmm, well it was at a record high of 65 in '98, which suggests a general downward trend. I'm assuming the population has gone up since then too. The reputation may've been worse before.

Cerberus

Yes, rate have been going down over the decades, but I think comparing between twenty more or fewer is not very significant.

The population has gone up, yes.

As to 1998, I believe all Western countries had higher murder rates then, since the rates have been going down for them for decades.

Tonepoet

@Cerberus It's down to 15, so it's a difference of 40, and several multitudes lower?

@Cerberus That'd be good news.

Cerberus

That could be just three gangs who happened to decide to assassinate a group of opponents in 1998 rather than 1999.

Again, the rate has been going down, but comparing one year to the next tells you little about this trend.

The rate could double next year, and it would still not be worrisome.

Maybe if you compare decades, or if you compare larger populations, or populations with a much higher rate to begin with.

Tonepoet

That'd be worrisome enough to me, although admittedly not indicative of a general trend.

Mitch

12:35 AM

screen shot from Wolfram Alpha.

where does all this data come from, they seem to have different sources.

anyway, this last one accords with my memory of what I've read. Chicago is terrible but getting better since the nineties

re labeling, I don't think these include mass shootings or police shootings because those are categorized differently (rare to have a police shooting converted to a homicide)

tchrist

Now run that up through present.

Mitch

yeah. I don't know what would happen, if it would go up or down. 7 years?

Tonepoet

@tchrist I was thinking the same thing. That chart only goes up to 2010. However it does seem to be indicative of a trend...

Mitch

no idea if it is too short or really long

but things changed real fast within 7 years around 1990

supposedly the sharp drop in NYC is thanks to Giuliani stop and frisk (that's what everyone says)

tchrist

> More people have died in Chicago in 2016 so far than died in armed conflict in Somalia over the entire course of 2015.

> Chicago's homicide rate had surpassed that of Los Angeles by 2010 (16.02 per 100,000), and was more than twice that of New York City (7.0 per 100,000) in the same year.[15] By the end of 2015, Chicago's homicide rate would rise to 18.6 per 100,000. By 2016, Chicago had recorded more homicides and shooting victims than New York City and Los Angeles combined.[16]

And the 2016 is like 70% increased over 2015’s.

Crime in Chicago

Crime in Chicago has been tracked by the Chicago Police Department's Bureau of Records since the beginning of the 20th century. The city's overall crime rate, especially the violent crime rate, is substantially higher than the US average. Chicago was responsible for nearly half of 2016's national increase in homicides in the US. == Overview == Chicago saw a major rise in violent crime starting in the late 1960s. Murders in the city first peaked in 1974, with 970 murders when the city's population was over three million, resulting in a murder rate of around 29 per 100,000, and again in 1992, with...

Mitch

12:46 AM

I'm surprised Rogers Park (top right) is so low-crime.

tchrist

Because it’s mostly non-white?

> Rogers Park has a higher rate of residents with Master's, Professional, and Doctorate degrees than the state average.[7] In addition, the rate of residents that work for non-for-profit institutions is almost twice as high as the state average.[7]

Tonepoet

@tchrist Chicago being especially murderous since the 1960s isn't particularly convincing that this has much to do with race relations, unless you're suggesting things are worse now than they were before the Civil Rights Act...

tchrist

@Tonepoet I’m saying the National Guard deployments this summer have been about race relations.

Tonepoet

@tchrist And what is the basis for that assumption?

Mitch

@tchrist oh. hm. mixed bag. Loyola and lots of vegetarians. but non-stop car alarms

tchrist

12:50 AM

@Tonepoet All five instances were to prevent non-white unrest/rioting.

You don’t need to sent in the military if race relations haven’t tanked.

Cerberus

@Mitch Huh, are you sure?

I don't think we have any police shootings, but if we did I'm sure we would count them as homicides?

tchrist

Wisconsin, Missouri, North Carolina were all about the shooting of a black man by white police. New York was about terrorism. North Dakota was about Indian unrest over a pipeline.

Cerberus

The police kill like 2 people a year.

Incidentally:

This is nice.

tchrist

@Cerberus We saw around 1,500 killed by police last year.

Tonepoet

@tchrist Is this a continuation of the Baltimore protests?

Cerberus

12:57 AM

I suppose the police would kill more civilians if those civilians are more likely to bear arms.

tchrist

@Tonepoet I don't think Maryland has sent in the Guard yet. But yes, I imagine that Baltimore and Charlotte are connected.

And now for something of real import:

45

Q: Did Balrogs have their own language?

As seen in the movie, Durin's Bane made rather unpleasant and irritated growls and roars when awoken. During the early stages of the world when the Balrogs weren't in hiding, did they have their own dialects to speak like all other beings in Arda (Valar, Elves, Men, Dwarves and Hobbits) and com...

Cerberus

It seems three people are killed by the police here every year, and one policeman is killed every three years.

Hmm in 2014 and 2015, noöne was killed by the police.

tchrist

Does that mean that nine people will be killed by police this year there?

Tonepoet

I believe every three years, there's a fight between 10 people and one police officer where only one man is left standing, and it's not the cop. =P

tchrist

I see that you are an arithmetist.

@Tonepoet You are Tazendra, and I claim my $5.

Wait, no. You are Khaavren!

Cerberus

2:26 AM

@tchrist Yup, that's how chance works.

tchrist

1 hour ago, by Tonepoet

I believe every three years, there's a fight between 10 people and one police officer where only one man is left standing, and it's not the cop. =P

I've decided that idiotic AP "rule" about using words for one to nine but figures for ten and higher is just that: idiotic. It offends me to see two like things so close to each other expressed using two completely different notations.

In particular things we have single words for. Nine and ten are of the same class!

Tonepoet

2:58 AM

@tchrist I wasn't even thinking of A.P. style, or any style for that matter. It's a dozen of one, twelve of the other and 12 more left over besides that tchrist.

tchrist

What about one for the baker?

Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover

Tonepoet

@tchrist He's too superstitious for that.

tchrist

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

Tonepoet

I cover my eyes.

tchrist

The baker obviously having eaten two first.

A. thousand nights and a night.

Lawrence

6:37 AM

@tchrist Hmm, were typesetters paid by character count?

Tonepoet

7:19 AM

@Lawrence Maybe if they paginate classified ads.

Lawrence

8:05 AM

@Tonepoet That went above my head; you'll need to dumb it down for me :) . My comment to @tchrist was referring to the number of characters used to print the numbers: for 0-9, it's one character using digits but multiple if spelled out. Hmm, it just goes up to 2 characters for 10-99 and more than 2 when spelled. There goes that theory. :)

Tonepoet

8:52 AM

@Lawrence The so-called classified advertisements are the newspaper print equivalent of craigslist. They offer a small spot in a local publication for the private advertisement of jobs and relatively large sales, such as those of machinery, cars ect. They often do charge by the word or by the letter. I may have inattentively misused the word paginate to mean typeset.

Lawrence

9:04 AM

@Tonepoet Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks for elaborating. :)

Mitch

12:21 PM

"Never before has a website given me a worse first impression."

(emphasis theirs)

Mitch

12:33 PM

On the brighter side, in comparison to Quora "Stack Overflow doesn’t serve us countless idiotic questions like 'Does Sheryl Sandberg ever procrastinate?' "

tchrist

2:26 PM

Why didn't anybody tell me you could buy a Batmobile?

Lamborghini Murciélago

The Lamborghini Murciélago (Spanish: Bat) is a sports car produced by Italian automaker Lamborghini between 2001 and 2010. Successor to the Diablo and flagship of the automaker's lineup, the Murciélago was introduced as a coupé in 2001. The Murcielago was first available in North America for the 2002 model year. The automaker's first new design in eleven years, the car was also the brand's first new model under the ownership of German parent company Audi, which is owned by Volkswagen. It is styled by Peruvian-born Belgian Luc Donckerwolke, Lamborghini's head of design from 1998 to 2005. A roadster...

Færd

3:46 PM

@tchrist Well, maybe you could, but not everybody is as loaded.

.

Sometimes I get surprised when I press the up arrow key and the page scrolls down. It's so easy to go blank.

Nick T

4:31 PM

Is there something akin to "The Awful German Language" but for English?

The Awful German Language

"The Awful German Language" is an 1880 essay by Mark Twain published as Appendix D in A Tramp Abroad. The essay is a humorous exploration of the frustrations a native English speaker has with learning German as a second language. == Background == Twain made his first unsuccessful attempt to learn German in 1850 at age fifteen. He resumed his study 28 years later in preparation for a trip to Europe. Upon his arrival in Germany, the fruit of this recent scholarship was attested to in the advice of a friend: "Speak in German, Mark. Some of these people may understand English." During this 1878 stay...

Most things I find are about heteronyms...are they uncommon in other languages?

tchrist

5:16 PM

@NickT Perhaps.

Nick T

5:34 PM

@tchrist that was a solicitation for a citation, not just a boolean :P

TRiG

6:11 PM

Eggcorn of the day: barely a blimp on the radar.

tchrist

Blimps are so easy to miss.

Tonepoet

6:36 PM

@NickT I'm not sure but if there is, I'm pretty Mark Twain Twain probably would've been the one to have written it too. You might like Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses but that's more lit. crit.

Færd

6:54 PM

@tchrist I just see that. When and where did those interactions between Latin and Arabic took place? The Arabic word in question dates back to over 14 centuries ago.

Maybe the word went into Arabic from some other Indo_European language. Actually, the Farsi translation of cedar is also سدر, the same as the Arabic word, but I was under the impression that it was borrowed from Arabic. But maybe it's the other way around, like many other Arabic words that originate in Farsi.

I just looked it up in a Farsi dictionary that has brief etymology notes, and it would mention the origin of the word if it was from Arabic, but it doesn't.

So it seems more plausible to think the Farsi and English words come from the same root.

Nick T

7:12 PM

@Tonepoet I've read that as well. In talking to some Germans and Romantic language speakers about The Awful is how things like gender are not given a conscious thought.

No trees in the forest or something like that

Or asking a fish about water?

Cerberus

7:36 PM

Welcome! Could you explain what those terms mean? And what arguments have you been considering? Apart from that, your question seems rather broad... — Cerberus 13 secs ago

Tonepoet

@Cerberus I'm not entirely sure that's a question about the English Language specifically. It might be better asked on the Linguistics S.E. if it's not.

Mitch

@Færd etymology is hard because we aren't there watching it borrowed from place to place. Most western etymologies trace cedar back to Ancient Greek. Most words of Semitic origin in Latin didn't come directly from an Arabic ancestor but via Greek. The Romans considered Greek to be the educated language/culture and had conquered it well before the (the Romans) had (tenuous) control over Mesopotamia and Judaea.

So it is more likely that cedar came to Latin via Greece's longer occupation (the Alexandrian empire) of that area.

Of course that says nothing about who had it first, the Arabic speakers or the Persians, given that Alexander conquered an existing Persian empire. So it could have started in Persian, then borrowed into Arabic precursor, then Greek, then Latin. Or it could have been borrowed by the Persians towards the east like it was borrowed into Greek to the west.

Cedar is so strongly associated with the area of Lebanon which I can only presume was speaking some semitic language 2K years ago, that I suspect that the word started in Arabic (but there's still the lack of mention in your dictionary).

AHD is great. They have a list of semitic roots with derivations in English

tchrist

8:25 PM

@Færd Fourteen centuries isn’t very long when we’re looking at Greek and Roman origins.

Færd

8:35 PM

Nice explanation, @Mitch. Thanks!

Now I have to confess that I was mistaken all along. The Arabic sidr is not the equivalent of cedar. Cedar translates to arz (أرز) in Arabic (similar to Hebrew erez) and bears no apparent resemblance to cedar to suggest a common root. Sorry to have misled you, @tchrist and @Mitch.

Mitch

@Færd Oh. Now I'm not sure where to roll back to.

but Persian and English do sound a like, right?

Færd

Yes.

Mitch

in other news...

Færd

It was so obvious to me that the Arabic word should mean the same as the Farsi one, since they sound exactly the same.

Mitch

so much angst

If SO were a person, they'd be crying now.

all from the previous link about The Decline of Stackoverflow

Tonepoet

8:57 PM

@Mitch "Not only do you have to be very knowledgeable about a subject, you’ve also got to be very fast in providing said answer." Ugh, I know that feeling.

@Færd The dead spirits are more infamous for their moans than the living ones! Well, most of the time anyway...

Mitch

10:03 PM

@Tonepoet That situation is an unintended consequence of the supposedly good things of rep-incentive and large pool of answerers. So many people, who may not have any expertise at all, even less than the OP, will try to answer, almost like a commodity filling up the niche quickly.

Also, there's the side issue that the community most likely to inhabit any SE site, especially the tech ones, are both quicker to find it and quicker to be attracted to it by their either innate or occupationally learned literalist 'nerdview'.

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…