English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

6:42 AM

@anang Jello

@Cerberus Water? Yeah, water could work

Ruslan Doronichev

8:18 AM

Hello! What is the correct sentence structure?

"How it should look" or "How should it look"

8:32 AM

@RuslanDoronichev Depends on what you want to say: "How should it look? is asking; How it should look is stating. For example: "How should it look? Is it OK like this?" and "This is how it should look, please fix it".

Ruslan Doronichev

Wow

Thanks a lot!:)

You're welcome.

Oh, you can also say Is this how it should look?.

12:17 PM

@Gigili is it too late ... nowruz mubarak!

1:46 PM

I know that "they" is a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and I know I can use "one" as another option, but sometimes I'd really like a word specially reserved as a gender-neutral singular pronoun for people.

why haven't we settled on "ze" or something, already?

I'll happily use "it" for animals, but not for people

How about "us" or "we"?

they already have a purpose, and so won't be specially reserved for gender-neutral singular

Perhaps, we need an example.

"They're not alone if they're dining with someone" would be clearer if I could say "ze's not alone if ze's dining with someone". But people would understand me even less at the moment, or assume I'm talking about Ze Frank.

I like "one."

One is not alone if one is dining with someone.

2:13 PM

Yeah, I guess one is alright there. But "One's getting away! Stop <?>" is obviously terrible

That one is getting away! Stop.

You could always use the ugly (s)he construct.

noöne would shout "him/her"

One could always use the ugly one constructs

and it wouldn't be "that one". I'm talking about a person

@MattE.Эллен No, but can totally shout S INSIDE PARENTHESIS HE

2:18 PM

if you wanted to indicate it was a man, "He's getting away! Stop him!"

@MattE.Эллен But what if it's an anime and we can't decide the gender?

@M.A.R. I do it all the time

@M.A.R. welcome to the conversation

except, in general not just anime

@M.A.R. If it's anime, it's it. Definitely "Stop it." All amime should be stopped.

harsh! :D

@AndrewLeach Don't ever go to Anime & Manga

2:21 PM

@M.A.R. Thanks. I decided that some time ago :)

I suppose it could be "that one" if they'd broken off from the group

That's what I meant.

I want to live in a post-gender society where we have all the pronouns we need and I never have to remember if a cat is female

Le chat? La chat?

I don't know

it's a cat

Le Bruce Jenner

And everyone looks back and says "hahahahaha do you remember when we had to refer to people as either 'he' or 'she' for really arbitrary reasons and we'd get upset if one said the wrong thing. Oh! What crazy times."

and their friend would reply "Sure, but at least we weren't enslaved by robots."

and they'd get back to yttrium mining

ah, the future's bright. The future's radioactive

2

2:30 PM

:D

@MattE.Эллен Just remember it's not la chatte. That's something completely different.

noted

Hmm. I had three answers upvoted in less than two minutes this morning. That rep won't last long.

what's going to happen to it?

do you think it was serial upvoting?

Reversed by the script

In some 12 hours

Gah, it's even a worse torture than a serial downvote

2:35 PM

And mods don't have tools to tell who it is doing that.

it can be frustrating

Oh well. Easy come, easy go.

it's odd to think that future must be less radioactive than the present because of decay.

So life was far more radioactive before the Industrial Revolution? And unbearable during Neanderthal times? Perhaps that's what killed the dinosaurs.

@MattE.Эллен o.o

2:45 PM

@AndrewLeach exactly. it doesn't make much sense when you put it like that, but there must have been more radioactive material back then

I guess some of the dinosaurs that lived near where we find uranium must have died of radiation poisoning

theintercept.com/2017/03/26/…

3:57 PM

@MattE.Эллен Singular they entirely works for that too. (viz plural 'you' becoming formal 'you' becoming singular 'you')

Also, all those neologisms like 'ze' are just too weird. No one is going to be comfortable with a foreign word. It's unrecognizable. The semantic slippage needed for 'they' is infinitesimal compared to learning from scratch what 'ze' is.

@AndrewLeach too many bananas

@MattE.Эллен I never thought of it that way. except...by concentrating radioactive material (like in a nuclear power plant) they can make more radiation. If we left everything alone, then you're right.

@terdon That's extremely misleading. The source of the split happened then. BUt the major shiite country, Iran, only 'converted' in the 1700-1800s; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safavid_conversion_of_Iran_to_Shia_Islam

@Mitch people say "zoo", why can't they say "ze"?

@Cerberus @terdon And as much as I want to comment on ati-semitism vs anti-Israel, I came here to self-promote:

> As the machine belched up vile excrement from the toilet, the plumber in consort let out a strawberry-sweet laugh.

@MattE.Эллен People say 'zoo' for a collection of animals, not for 'those people there'

"Hey, zoo, quit playing in that dumpster"

you don't want a zoo in a dumpster

4:12 PM

It'd stink up the place

@Mitch but it's a foreign word that's been adopted to mean something I'm sure we already had a word for, like... bestiary or something

pronouns and other 'closed' (= finite?) set POSes are very resistant to change/borrowing/modification.

except for 'chez'

"We're going to have my 1 year work anniversary for Goldman-Sachs at Chez Guevera"

It's ironic because the 'at' is redundant.

does "chez" mean "at the home of"?

@Mitch if we start calling people who don't use "ze" low class, it'll catch on pretty quick

@MattE.Эллен Yes (in French, it really does come from sound changes of the noun 'casa' and slipping in meaning to a preposition). In English is comes from ... I suppose French restaurants, but does sort of meant 'at a place' rather than very specifically 'at the home of' except that it is mostly used that way.

chez nous

4:22 PM

@MattE.Эллен you're right, ze are so declassé

or is it declassée?

argh!

@MattE.Эллен that could be considered entirely a one off borrowing of the entire phrase. 'chez' can still be used productively (with restaurant names obviously).

Or can it?

Chez Marcel

Chez McDonald's

Chez KFC

@Mitch If you're thinking Matt is déclassée, something is seriously wrong somewhere.

@Mitch it would be "ze is"

Chez Kyer Booti

lol

4:26 PM

I know! And I barely knew her!

@AndrewLeach I've been stripped of rank! a mod no more sigh

@AndrewLeach I was talking about ze. Ze is lacking in social graces.

Wait, how is this supposed to work? Who are we disparaging in order to get people to use 'ze'?

Ze is probably OK.

people who don't use ze

People who use ze are the best!

or is it 'ze'?

yes

4:29 PM

@MattE.Эллен I was concerned about -ée rather than just -é.

There's gotta be a way we can fit 'Djibouti' in here somewhere.

@AndrewLeach I was considering my moderatorship a commission :D

@AndrewLeach To take that seriously, the Romance languages, oh and German. And Russian too. they'll all have to have a lot of changes to degenderfy

oh, google translate has just changed it's mind. declassée now means declassified

so I'm a secret no more

That's not what it means, is it?

4:42 PM

No

> déclassement
nm
1 fait de déclasser, de se déclasser, de changer de classe sociale
2 fait de déranger le classement
3 action de faire passer dans une classe inférieure un bien, un objet

@Mitch That's a poor praeterition!

5:07 PM

@Cerberus If I knew what praeterition was, I probably would have done it anyway.

@Mitch I won't explain to you how praeterition is when you say you won't say something but you're actually doing so at that very moment.

@terdon Hm... in English the only meaning is 'change in social class'

@terdon Sounds like sports to me.

Being degraded to a lower league or pool.

Changer de classe sociale is difficult!

@Cerberus I've been speaking prose all this time?

@Mitch Umm yes, but...why?

5:11 PM

@Cerberus Don't mention it.

I won't mention that I am not explaining it.

No, really, don't mention it, it brings up bad memories

I won't mention how you're a green square.

I thought that went by another name

anaphylaxis

It goes by three names.

That is one.

5:13 PM

protoparypton

Ana-something.

I forgot.

dermatoglyphics

prolepsis?

It's probably more benign than anaphylaxis, though.

Could be.

The names are not super descriptive.

prolepsis sounds very anodyne

avoid eschewing

> I'm not in the mood to quote the following:

"Apophasis (Greek ἀπόφασις from ἀπόφημι apophemi,[1] "to say no"[2]) is a rhetorical device wherein the speaker or writer brings up a subject by either denying it, or denying that it should be brought up.[3] Accordingly, it can be seen as a rhetorical relative of irony.

The device is also called paralipsis (παράλειψις) – also spelled paraleipsis or paralepsis – or occupatio,[4][5][6][7] and known also as praeteritio, preterition, antiphrasis (ἀντίφρασις), or parasiopesis (παρασιώπησις)."

5:14 PM

right!

prolepsis is anticipating arguments

You could say that...

Pro = before

Lêpsis = grabbing

Or it could be frok leipô, "leave".

Probably the latter.

@Cerberus Degraded? Downgraded, perhaps? :P

In the literal sense, to a lower step on the ladder.

Well, semi-literal...

> to reduce (someone) to a lower rank, degree, etc.; deprive of office, rank, status, or title, especially as a punishment:
degraded from director to assistant director.

Oh. Damn. The only thing worse than a pedantic know-it-all is a pedantic know-it-all who's wrong. :(

Aww although I wouldn't know who's what.

5:22 PM

@terdon How about a person who strangles frogs to death?

@Mitch You mean a Frenchman?

No, you're right.

@terdon du pays de la guillotine? Non, franchement!

Frogs have no necks, dude!

That's how terrible they are!

bastards.

5:24 PM

the stranglers, not the frogs.

just to clarify

I don't want people to get the wrong idea

Like "the integral of e to the -x^2/2 from -\infty to \infty = \pi"

That's a totally wrong idea

It goes without saying that this is no apophasis

I believe most frogs are now imported from Indonesia, actually.

And their legs are torn out...alive.

It's pretty horrible.

@Cerberus sacrée grenouille

Not quite sacrée!

There was an article about it.

@Cerberus La nourriture est la souffrance

I actually heard a French person say that once (or something like it)

Bien sûr, mais il y a de la souffrance et de la souffrance horrible.

C'est la vérité.

Et les plantes, est-ce qu'ils souffrent quand on les coupe?

5:29 PM

The person was a baker so I'm not sure how relevant it was to his work

maybe singeing his finger tips when pulling loaves out of the oven?

Think of the plants!

@Cerberus L'horreur!

Peut-être.

Ô rage!

A friend of mine is now in parliament.

5:31 PM

Quelle dommage

Guess how he began his first speech, in Latin.

'Gallia est in partes tres'?

Alas, it was his own tinkering.

If only he had used a good quotation.

What'd he say?

And if only his political views were reasonable.

Something about how the traditional parties are a cartel that needs to be broken.

5:32 PM

haha! so embarrassing

@Cerberus oh. a disruptor

Yes.

And a bit of a xenophobe, though in a civilised enough way.

He really wants to leave the EU.

tear down to build back up? or tear down because explosions are cool?

@Cerberus Can't he go to Aruba or Suriname then?

Mm hard to predict.

@Mitch Heh.

I suppose he could.

But he probably feels that he is the people, or something.

Wait, he wants NL to exit?

Yes.

5:35 PM

That just seems unproductive.

Yes, but it's what some right-wing populist parties in Europe want.

They feel they have lost control of their country.

Everything is dictated by the bureaucrats in Brussels, etc.

Like UKIP and the Front National.

sure there are all sorts of problems with the EU but wouldn't be easier to fix them? 'Leaving' (as the tidal wave of news the past couple days has it) doesn't really address the problems people thought they were having with EU membership

@Cerberus oh. I thought they were just racist assholes.

It might address a very small set of problems.

@Cerberus I think that is a very reasonable concern to have...

that leaving won't address well.

@Mitch Usually more xenophobic than racist, but, yes, also assholes.

@Mitch Yes, to some degree.

But the main parties now also want no more extra competencies for Brussels, or even to take some back.

5:38 PM

@Cerberus I don't see much difference between xenophobia and racism. I mean we can philosophize about the abstract distinctions, but in the end (and frankly pretty near the start) they result in the same thing.

But the EU has brought us so many good things, it's stupid to leave just because of a few issues.

dickishness

Well, it depends on the situation.

In Holland, there is hardly any racism at all directed at East-Asians.

@Cerberus with all the analysis I've heard...

And xenophobic people don't talk about black people much. Immigrants from Suriname, for example, are rarely criticised.

Muslims, however, now get all the criticism.

@Mitch What have you heard?

5:40 PM

it seems like, in the creation of the EU, the economic stuff was more of an afterthought/layer on top of the prevent war stuff

Umm.

I would say the economic stuff was and still is the core; they figured the peace thing would follow automatically (which it has done).

and that the no war stuff is just not a consideration at all (It's totally understood that there's no fear of it among EU members)

@Cerberus oh.

@Mitch It was a consideration then, but now it no longer is, at least not for most people.

Although some keep telling the populists that you never know.

@Cerberus so is racism just xenophobia in someone's face?

Perhaps the main problem is the fact that any European can migrate anywhere within the EU.

5:43 PM

@Cerberus well... cough Ukraine cough

@Mitch Racism is about the three 19th-century races, black, while, yellow, red. It's not my favourite theory.

@Mitch That's outside the EU.

@Cerberus as an analogy

As in, look what could happen to countries that leave the EU? I suppose.

but that is why there should be a push towards getting Russia in the EU. Or NATO. Or something.

What? You say you've never heard of that before?

@Mitch It was tried.

5:44 PM

Oh

really?

Sort of.

It was planned.

Eventually.

But first the rest of Eastern Europe had to join.

Oh

they stole my idea from me

But, yes, it was hoped that Russia would eventually join both, I believe, twenty years ago.

hm

But look at what happened with Turkey.

5:46 PM

they probably didn't follow my plan then

Did it become easier to manage because of NATO?

Why don't countries listen to you?

my plan, which I haven't made up yet.

which they stole from me in the future

@Cerberus I know!

I'd do it for a nominal fee.

But anyway.

I think what most anti-EU people rage about is immigration.

The Poles than came to western Europe.

They're idiots

The Romanians, etc.

5:47 PM

the anit-EU people

not the Poles

They steal our jobs, they rob our houses.

Is how it goes.

The romanians? I'm not sure what the Poles would say.

And the Poles would not have been allowed to come here if it had not been for the freedom of movement dictated by Brussels.

@Cerberus They do all the work that we're not willing to do and will repopulate our future which we are not doing ourselves.

Possibly.

But anyway, that's why Brexit.

5:48 PM

@Cerberus The Poles were leaving the UK in droves before the Brexit vote.

But may did come to England.

And Holland, Germany.

more people speak Polish in their home in Ireland than Irish

I blame the British

@Mitch And rightly so.

@englishstudent I've been looking all over italki and can't find anywhere to find free language conversation. They're all just paid teachers (which I may very well do). I just want to see about doing what you did (it's for free right?).

5:54 PM

@Cerberus Among all that data the one thing that I notice is ... wow... no idea so many Germans in England

There are many Germans everywhere...

OK also, I would have thought way more South Asians

But they're usually not perceived as trouble-makers or job-stealers, perhaps also because they're often higher educated, as opposed to Eastern-European immigrants.

Another factor is the money that was sent to Greece and southern Europe, partly thanks to the EU.

The higher educated ones are the ones to worry about as stealing jobs. They're more likely to also be job- creators.

I'm not sure what you mean?

5:56 PM

But net gain, educated or not, statistically an immigrant adds.

Xenophobes usually have below average education.

Which is partly why they fear immigrants from poor countries.

Whether it's realistic or not.

Let's say a German with a medical degree comes to the UK for a job. You might think that they are taking the job away from an equally educated UK person.

Yes.

But the effort to recruit the German shows that the hiring manager in the UK couldn't find someone qualified for the high level position.

so the German is actually a better fit for the job.

That happens, sure.

But so what?

5:58 PM

If the job is high enough level, they might be in charge of hiring themselves.

Doctors don't vote xenophobic anyway.

and since they are better at their job then the corresponding UKer, they will more likely be better at hiring too. (and so likely more jobs in the UK under them)

@Cerberus there's all sorts of education. doctors lawyers engineers business people.

doctors do hire outside of a hospital (assistants, office managers). maybe it's different in the UK I don't know.

@Cerberus because they're educated!

Actually doctors can be jerks too. I'm not so sure they're not xenophobic