English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

1:21 PM

Yay! I got my Maya.

Looks really nice on the viscacha.

Look, @Kit! Look! Now look already!

@RegDwighт omg 2 cute!

Ver iz yorz?

Oh. Hang on.

giggles with glee

How do I have 16 effing hats already?

3 hours ago, by RegDwighт

Geez. @kitfox has 14 hats already. I am jelly. And if she gets just one more, she gets yet another one for free.

14 + 1 + 1 = 16.

@tchrist Kris is your ungrateful child, King Lear?

1:25 PM

Oh, yeah, but it is a dumb looking hat.

I like the necromancer one.

@KitFox You get a hat for effing?

But I am consulting today, so no time for dashing. I shouldn't even be chatting right now.

Except my liaison isn't in yet.

Work, work, work. Fuck, why isn't it the holiday yet?

I have to go find an AV cable for the Wii today.

The roads are shit too.

I think Christmas is my least favorite holiday.

AV? You live in 1990?

1:28 PM

Stuck in 1993, if you must know.

Been that way for years.

About 19 years.

Then you got the Maya hat 19 years too early!

Q: "If you don't do it, I'll". Why does that sentence feel so awkward?

Well, my computer is in 2012.

So I suppose that means my avatar is there too.

I am excited to give my niece and nephew this book though.

amazon.com/Interrupting-Chicken-David-Ezra-Stein/dp/0763641685

It's hilarious. One of my eldest's favorites lately.

Plus, my little one is getting a cool book about the solar system for Christmas and I really want to see it.

We just got Solar Walk for the iPad, and he spends a lot of time playing with it.

He can name the original nine planets.

1

Earlier today while writing a very informal email, I expressed: If you don't do it, I will. Upon looking at it, I realized that "I will" could be contracted to "I'll", however, this is completely unheard of and feels quite awkward. I am now quite curious, is there a reason why ending a sen...

contractions

Dupe!

17

Q: Is there some rule against ending a sentence with the contraction "it's"?

I heard this lyric in a song the other day and it just sounded so wrong that I assumed it must be incorrect grammar, but I can't find any specific prohibition that applies. That's what it's. That rolls off your tongue with the grace of a moose in a tutu, but I can't figure out why. There ...

grammaticality sentence contractions syntax

Monty Python famously ended a sentence with "It's ..."

Hey!

@Reg! I was going to do that.

grumbles

I waited.

And waited.

1:36 PM

I'm on Chrome.

I'm on Java.

In a concrete box. Underground.

I'm on

Ja

►

Damn. I've already said too much.

1:37 PM

va

Hahaha. OK fine.

I'm not supposed to be here anyway.

Everybody give it up for nohat.

None of us is supposed to be here. We are a fluke of the universe. We have no right to be here. But whether you can hear it or not, the universe is laughing behind your back.

He only needs a couple votes to get a Great Answer for the clitics question.

I wonder what hat that might get him.

Link?

A: Is there some rule against ending a sentence with the contraction "it's"?

1:39 PM

22

This is covered in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL), as it turns out, in Chapter 18, “Inflection Morphology and Related Matters”, section 6, “Phonological reduction and liaison”. The form ’s, representing either has or is, along with ’m (am), ’re (are), ’ve (have), ’ll (will)...

@RegDwighт Who is jlovegren and why is he all in my shit?

You don't recognize the name yet?

@Robusto He has been a busy little bird lately.

He's one of the critics who've been active on meta in the last few days.

Is he Andrew Lazarus's sock puppet?

1:41 PM

Nah.

But see, you know Andrew.

Then there's jlove, and Billy.

I upticked nohat, btw. One more and he's Great.

@RegDwighт So this might have been a deliberate reprisal for perceived injustice?

Nah.

I don't think he had any beef with you.

Just a coincidence, I'd say.

I've been arguing with all three for days on end, and nobody's touching my posts.

And Billy. Why does that sound familiar?

Nohat's at 25 now. Good job, y'all. Let's see if he has to change his name.

Will he be onehat now?

Oh, and spiceyokooko.

That was the name I was trying to remember.

That's another one, and I confuse him with jlove all the time.

raises eyebows in recognition spiceyokooko ....! Yes.

1:46 PM

So I've been arguing with all four. *FTFM.

Yeah, the current bête noire of all things Meta.

@RegDwighт I wish that some of those were actually each other’s socks, but I’ve noticed nothing that might suggest so.

Joe Hanna has been posting some good things.

So my liaison called to cancel on me.

A: What is a verb for "illusion"?

0

If you lived in the western suburbs of Sydney, one might be inclined to say: The light f**cks my eyes, For f*cks sake, I cant f*cking tell what the bl*dy thing looks like. Sh*t, F*ck...

@KitFox Curious.

I think the Review Queue is a broken idea. What might fix it would be giving reviewers credit for reviewing and pressing the SKIP button after, say, ten seconds.

1:53 PM

I dislike his cant.

The fucks don’t bother me.

I get to poke at some queries then take off and make big dollars for the day.

Except for their stars.

Pretty sweet.

Q: Why are only yes/no questions asked with a rising tone?

0

There is a rule used almost subconsciously by almost all English speakers (and I'm sure it applies to many other languages too) which is that yes/no questions are asked ending with a rising tone, and others are ended with a falling tone. Why is this and how did the phenomenon develop? There is ...

etymology language-change interrogatives

if anyone feels like taking a swing at that

erm

i mean that

3 mins ago, by Robusto

I think the Review Queue is a broken idea. What might fix it would be giving reviewers credit for reviewing and pressing the SKIP button after, say, ten seconds.

Discuss amongst yourself. AFK for shower.

1:57 PM

Discussing amongst myself is always quite pointless. I am always right and then it's over.

I could disagree if that would help.

But you are not myself.

See, I am right again.

It's tiring.

Why? If you review something and decide not to take action, that is itself a form of action.

Commute. Laters.

new rule: the first 5 downvoters have to give a justification, and if it's meaningless then a mod will undo it

@Robusto Um. I'm not quite sure how your why connects to what...

cornbread ninja

2:13 PM

@Robusto You really should run for mod.

Damn, Arqade are always exactly 41 hats ahead of us. We get one, they get one. We get seven, they get seven.

And @nohat and @kosmonaut are not helping. Looks like both have opted out of hats.

Noooo!!!! But why!?

They don't have to wear them!

cornbread ninja

@RegDwighт What'd you expect from nohat?

I've gotta go. Bye!

@cornbreadninja Changing his name into allhats. DUH.

2:17 PM

@Robusto rewarding laziness should not be done. there should be no rewards for using the review queue at all, it only encourages gaming the system

A: The current review system encourages fake reviews; some people upvote everything rather than actually fixing problems

144

I think the foundation of the problem is incentivizing reviewing in the first place. We incentivize asking questions. We incentivize answering them. We incentivize making questions better by editing them (for people with lower rep). However, all of these incentive processes have review. You onl...

@RegDwighт Now 40.

that's probably not an issue on EL&U, but it almost certainly is on SO

Now 39. We are gaining.

knocks on wood

2:31 PM

hehehe "noob hat"

interesting. every language seems to have its own word for "lollipop"

but only English deviates from ananas

pineapple lollipops sound tasty

Italian: lecca-lecca (it) m

my step-great-grandmother used to call them lickers

"sucker (US)"

hmm

2:50 PM

@MattЭллен Excuse me? This whole system rewards laziness, in a larger sense. Think of all the productive work hours that are lost due to people frittering away their time on SE sites.

@Robusto and work rewards laziness.

we should all just stop

I can't stop. Laziness is what gets me out of bed in the morning. I should be more diligent, and try to sleep the full 24 hours.

Yes! think of all the CO2 emissions that would be cut if we were all asleep all the time. Global warming would be a thing of the past

@cornbreadninja How would doing a stupid thing prevent people from doing stupid things?

@MattЭллен I can't help it. I mean to sleep all day, but I backslide.

me too. I feel bad for all the politicians who sat around and did jack shit at all those climate summits. They know where it's at.

if only we could be as energy conscious

2:55 PM

I hate that kit gets listed first on the leaderboard just cuz she has an alphabetically inferior user name. I need to change mine to a.

But it's hard to sleep all day.

@Robusto Not possible.

Even if you stay up all night.

@tchrist Wow, obsessed with hats much?

Perhaps, especially so.

@Robusto Teasing. Silly.

Likeweis.

2:56 PM

I guess I could go back to closing things.

cornbread ninja

@Robusto a thousand fucking pardons for allowing that edit. Change it back. Take my hat and step on it. I think you would enjoy the moderator power trip.

On to a more interesting topic: I was reading a New Yorker article this morning about a guy who invented a synthetic language that apparently got co-opted by the Russians, and now he can't control it anymore. It's called Ithkuil. I didn't have time to read the whole piece, but I can't wait to finish it.

sounds kuil

It ith.

@Robusto That’s what you get for putting a computed goto in your language.

3:00 PM

Ithkuil

A phrase in the original version of Ithkuil, rendered in native script. Romanization: Translation: "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point." Ithkuil is a constructed language marked by outstanding grammatical complexity, expressed with a rich phonemic inventory or through an original, graphically structured, system of writing. The language’s author, John Quijada, presents Ithkuil as a cross between an a priori philosophical and a logical language designed to express deeper levels of human cognition overt...

The dude hates polysemy, apparently. Me, I revel in it.

Now I want to make a language with one symbol, just to annoy him

That symbol is already available. It's a dot: .

It stands for all other symbols.

Except newlines, of course.

.+

Yes, now you've got it. And what a clever thing to say!

The all-purpose statement.

I never need to speak again

3:03 PM

Whoa, wait a sec. You added a +. That's two symbols.

.*

2

I might have said something, or I might not have.

damn. you noticed.

> The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis postulates that a person’s language defines their perceptions and cognitive patterns.

> Stanislav Kozlovsky proposed,[2] in the Russian popular-scientific magazine Computerra, that a fluent speaker of Ithkuil, accordingly, would think “about five or six times as fast” as a speaker of a typical natural language.

> One may also argue that, Ithkuil being an extremely precise and synthetic language, its speaker would, under the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, have a more discerning, deeper understanding both of everyday situations and of broader phenomena, and of abstract philosophical categories.

Haha, good luck with all that.

This sounds like something Vitaly would be into.

Pure bull.

Strong S–W is widely debunked. Weak S–W is hardly worth discussion.

@Cthulhu lucky for us the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been disproved! — Matt Эллен Nov 9 at 12:09

I can't wait to see if an Ikthuil speaker can outthink me in real time.

3:07 PM

How that crap survives for years, I don’t know.

These synthetic language folks remind me of M. Homais in Madame Bovary.

@Robusto Haha yes!

you're not wearing any of your hats, @Cerberus!

Ease up on the doggy. He has to decide which three hats go together, and as far as I can tell, none of them do.

true, true

3:15 PM

Wow, the SO mods are AWOL. There are nearly 600 flagged postings in the SO flag queue, some with 11 flags, and from yesterday. That is almost weird. Hat attack? :)

I know that enough spam or offensive flags auto-zaps, but apparently not Not An Answers.

That queue is never really empty, is it? I mean, SO is a sty in that respect.

@MattЭллен I still don't understand what this hat thing is about, and something tells me I don't want to know.

@Cerberus on your EL&U user profile there is a button underneath "helpful flags". click it to see what "hats" you have. Click on one of them to add it to your avatar.

Where's that pic Vitaly made of @Cerb's gravatar in pink boxer shorts?

Ugh.

@MattЭллен I'm not 5 years old!

3:20 PM

@Cerberus congrats!

Thanks!!

what's that to do with?

did you forget?

@Robusto This I know not.

@Cerberus Oh, come on. You know about it.

I know about it.

3:21 PM

I'm sure it's open in one of @Reg's tabs.

But where it is I know not.

I'm sure it is.

If that is precise enough for you...

bah. the hats don't come in the onebox

@Cerberus It might have been in the WMT chat.

I think it was reposted here.

@Robusto The Not An Answer queue is usually cleared out by now in the morning by the mods. The close-flag queue you are right, though. BTW, there is a free Deputy badge sitting there for the reaping. And a hat, for just 5 flags. I just burned through all 58 of my regular flags.

3:25 PM

> "This complicated case spreads across three different countries, targeting users from a fourth one, making it very hard for law enforcement agencies to investigate and mitigate," Pierre-Marc Bureau, Eset's security intelligence program manager, wrote in a blog post.

I hate this use of mitigate.

But reviewing the SO queue is so, like, Augean Stables-ish.

@Cerberus Why?

@tchrist You shall be appointed High Cleaning Lady of the Shire of ELU.

No, they would subject me to an auto-da-fé on our Meta.

@Robusto I don't know, it just feels wrong.

Don't you agree?

I see this a lot.

@Cerberus Eat a biscuit. That will mitigate your bad feelings.

3:27 PM

See, that's the right way.

I got tired of getting bent out of shape about the things bureaucrats say.

AFK, meeting.

Bai.

I do get tired, but I often fail to mitigate the impact of said bureaucratic horrors.

I try not to listen.

contemplates just what a bureaucratic whore might possibly be

Feb 23 at 16:01, by RegDwight Ѭſ道

in War Metal Tyrant, Sep 23 '11 at 13:51, by Vitaly

Yay!

3:31 PM

chat search's "relevance" tab is rubbish

I search for "transcript message imgur" but the imgur posts weren't all at the start

@tchrist You need to fill in two pink forms and red form before you can join her, and you need to deliver them to her pimp on Tuesdays between 8 and 8:45.

stupid search

Stupid search indeed.

@Cerberus Why don't you think my question about the tone of questions is true?

@Jez Because I heard your tone rise in this very question?

3:33 PM

@MattЭллен That's the one.

how could you hear me? i'm typing

I still could.

The ear of my imagination.

no you couldn't.

i guarantee you that the tone of my voice would have been lowering at the end of that sentence.

as would that of 99.9% english speakers

I hear a rising tone in all normal questions in standard contexts.

then you must sound strange as an english speaker.

3:35 PM

@tchrist A pleonasm.

@Jez so long as they're not infected with up talk

i'd be interested if you'd record that question and i could listen to it

@MattЭллен actually, the up-talk thing generally applies to just statements. i suspect even they would ask non-yes/no questions with a lowering tone.

maybe

do you want a drink? why do you want a drink?

drINK DRink

Are you a wench? Where is my drink?

3:38 PM

Intonation in questions is very complex.

There may be a perceptible difference between the average yes–no question and other questions.

actually i guess there may be rare occasions where a non-yes/no question has a rising tone, though mainly rhetorical ("what do you think you're doing HERE?")

@Cerberus send me a recording of you saying that question

But it is not as simple as the former always having a rising tone (at a specific location) and the latter never.

I have no recording.

it's pretty close to being that simple.

You can put primary stress on each different word in “What are you doing here?” and produce a meaningfully different connotation each time.

@tchrist Yeah exactly.

So it's complicated.

3:40 PM

stress isn't tone

so no it isn't

Stress is partly intonation.

Stress is certainly involved with tone.

What do you think it is, after all?

"what are YOU doing here?" and "what are you doing HERE?" - i would expect both to have a lowering tone for "here"

Then your expectations would be dashed to the rocks.

well again send me a recording.

3:41 PM

There is a high-tone rising in HERE.

i'd be most interested to hear it.

seriously.

i think it would sound weird

I think anything else would sound very weird, so much so I cannot envision it.

You cannot have stress with falling tone.

recording or it didn't happen

@tchrist you absolutely can

Yeah right.

We speaky no Chinny here.

Dis be EngLISHIST!

stress is about starting with a higher pitch and maybe louder, but that doesn't mean you can't lower the pitch towards the end of the word

3:44 PM

@tchrist It can be high or low.

i need some other native English speakers to chime in

Stress is not about speaking louder. This is a myth.

@tchrist what is your native language?

I can rise, fall or remain flat asking the same question. I think I've said that before here, but I'm not going looking for the quote

3:47 PM

In this video, you can hear the interviewer ask "what's your name?" with two different intonations.

@tchrist Well, some increase in volume can be involved. Stress is complex.

@Jez Ultrapondinian.

Also known as Acrosspondese.

Note the second paragraph’s mythbusting.

it just says that stress isn't just being louder

Cisatlantic English, of course.

i already said that

Intonation (linguistics)

In linguistics, intonation is variation of pitch while speaking which is not used to distinguish words. It contrasts with tone, in which pitch variation does distinguish words. Intonation, rhythm, and stress are the three main elements of linguistic prosody. Intonation patterns in some languages, such as Swedish and Swiss German, can lead to conspicuous fluctuations in pitch, giving speech a sing-song quality. Fluctuations in pitch either involve a rising pitch or a falling pitch. Intonation is found in every language and even in tonal languages, but the realisation and function are seemi...

"It is most common in informal speech to indicate a yes/no question with a sharply rising pitch alone, without any change or rearrangement of words."

3:51 PM

You know, Google gives surprisingly different results for "stress itch" than it gives for "stress pitch".

it doesn't help that they did all the examples in French, for some bizarre reason. French may have some intonational differences

oh, wait. i was looking at the french section.

English primary stress is marked by higher pitch than the rest of the utterance.

This is all I have been saying.

You cannot have primary stress and a lower pitch in English.

"Questions with or can be ambiguous in English writing with regard to whether they are either-or questions or yes-no questions. But intonation in speech eliminates the ambiguity."

IOW, yes/no has a rising intonation at the end, others don't.

that's not what it says

either or questions don't, apparently

Here.

3:56 PM

@MattЭллен well, they're not yes/no questions are they?

@Jez but they're not all other questions, either