English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Ice Boy

12:02 AM

sleepless in seattle

Damkerng T.

@snailboat Oh, a Bad Simile contest! -- "I was gripping the wheel tightly like a flea on a dog."

Or a cat, just to make it stranger.

Anonymous

12:23 AM

@DamkerngT. Like a cat on a dog!

Damkerng T.

@snailboat Oh, that just reminds me of "Riding on the back of a tiger"!

(A Chinese proverb)

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Oh, now the cat is on a cat!?

Damkerng T.

:D

Or a dog on a cat. Oh, no! Poor cat!

Anonymous

Or a snail on a snail!

Anonymous

Damkerng T.

12:29 AM

Magnifying...

Oh!

Robusto

12:53 AM

@snailboat You've hit the snail right on the head.

tchrist

1:44 AM

Cochleam acu tetigisti.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

4:55 AM

@Cerberus Just because the vendor sells a back-doored product for a certain market doesn't mean that all their products are back-doored. If every cell phone sold in the US was required by law to have a back-door for the government, do you think every cell phone company would refuse to make phones for the US? The question is, what would happen if they try to sell the same phones in markets that don't require a back-door. Sales would suffer if there are viable alternatives, but if there aren't?

tchrist

5:36 AM

Two questions. First, does anyone have any opinons here on writer Guy Gavriel Kay? Second, (TLDR=Wikipedia is dumb!) why in the world would Wikipedia call a tale set in the Iberian peninsula during the 11th century (the 1000s) as being Renaissance Spain? Quite apart from how calling that place “Spain” during that time makes no sense, but calling that time period “Renaissance” utterly baffles me. Might as well rename Augustinian Rome to Renaissance Sicily.

Ice Boy

No and no idea.

tchrist

I think they have somehow mistaken the word Reconquista for the word Renaissance.

I feel like editing it to have the right word.

Ice Boy

Go for it.

tchrist

GGK writes both fantasy and also historical fiction.

medica

@tchrist- glad to hear your knee is healing; maybe you'll be off the opioids soon. It can always go faster, I agree.

hey, skull/ice

Ice Boy

5:41 AM

Hi @medica :-)

tchrist

His historical fiction tends to be set in calques of our own world. Like Byzantium under Justinian.

medica

@tchrist these days, I'm glad when a sneeze doesn't throw out my back

tchrist

I find the Rebecca of York calque in The Lions of Al-Rassan an interesting character. But this time she and her father are not moneylenders as in Scott’s Ivanhoe, but rather physicians after the end of the Caliphate, contemporary with the calque for el Cid.

As a female doctor, she can aid women in childbirth in Moorish Iberia in ways that would get any male doctor killed.

I think she only gets away with having a profession at all because she’s Sephardic not Moorish, and because of the fame of her father Isaac/Itzhak.

@medica Apropos de rien, have you had your seasonal flu shot yet?

Chris's sis

7:38 AM

Greetings

warm-up activities or warm up activities?

Ice Boy

8:10 AM

@Chris'ssis either is acceptable.

Chris's sis

@IceBoy OK, thanks :-)

Ice Boy

Thanks for asking :-)

Johan Larsson

11:09 AM

►

Robusto

1:00 PM

@tchrist Who is so calling it that?

tchrist

1:54 PM

Historical fiction

Historical fiction is a literary genre in which the action takes place in the past. It is an ambiguous term, because while it is frequently used as a synonym for the historical novel, the term is often used to describe other narrative formats, such as those in the performing and visual arts like theatre, opera, cinema, television, comics, and graphic novels. The settings are drawn from history, and often contains historical persons. Works in this genre often portray the manners and social conditions of the persons or times presented in the story, with attention paid to period detail. == H...

> Guy Gavriel Kay has number of historical fantasy novels as "The Lions of Al-Rassan" set in Renaissance Spain and "The Sarantine Mosaic" in Ancient Greece.

Also, the Greece he’s calquing is that of the emperor Justinian, so 6th Century. I believe he also has his Mohammed calque appear in those books.

Robusto

Yeah. That wasn't even the beginning of the Gothic era, much less the Renaissance. And it certainly wasn't "Spain" then, either.

tchrist

That is not what I would call “Ancient” Greece.

Robusto

Yeah, that would have been Byzantine Greece.

tchrist

In Lions, he even makes a point of saying it’s been 1,000 years that the Wandering people had been set a wandering, making it easy to identify as the 11th century.

You would think somebody writing an article on historical fiction would have a better command of history.

Robusto

Is it just the Wikipedia article that's so profligate with periods, or does the author make the same mistakes?

tchrist

1:59 PM

No, the author is fine.

Wikipedia is full of shit.

Robusto

No surprise there.

Wikipedia is fine when you don't need a high degree of confidence in the information being imparted.

A lot of the Wikipedia articles are auto-generated by a few authors. Anyway, you get what you pay for.

I tried reading Robert Graves's Count Belisarius, but it just didn't interest me.

tchrist

I have read pieces of Robert Silverberg’s Roma Eterna; a short story set there.

I’m not sure what I think about these alternate-universe historical fiction pieces.

Unlike say Cry to Heaven, which Anne Rice set in actual Renaissance Italy, no slant involved.

Robusto

@tchrist Kind of like playing tennis without a net.

tchrist

Or perhaps later.

My memory says Renaissance but Wikipedia says 18th century Italy. Well, I read it 30 years ago, so who knows.

Robusto

I put Mary Renault at the top of the historical-fiction genre.

tchrist

2:12 PM

Then we have Gene Wolfe’s Soldier series, which truly is set in the Mediterranean of the Ancient World, although that is fantasy. But the fantasy elements are rather light (mostly a guy who due to a knock on the head imagines he can “see” gods and such that others cannot), and the emphasis on actual history solid.

Robusto

I don't know how they have a Wikipedia page on historical fiction without mentioning her even once.

tchrist

I read her Persian Boy when I was clearly not old enough for it, and it bothered me a bit.

Robusto

It's for adults, that's true.

Read The King Must Die (the first part of the Theseus story), The Last of the Wine (the Peloponnesian War), and The Mask of Apollo (Greek theater from an actor's perspective).

tchrist

Ok.

Have you ever done i18n or l10n work in Javascript?

Robusto

There's also The Bull from the Sea (the latter portion of the Theseus story), The Praise Singer (about the lyric poet Simonides), and several books about Alexander (which, of course, includes The Persian Boy). But I think she's too uncritical about Alexander, so I don't recommend those.

@tchrist I have not.

tchrist

2:18 PM

Joy.

Robusto

Well, except in the sense that I've used localization files.

tchrist

That may suffice.

I’m only talking about LC_MESSAGES kind of l10n.

Robusto

But that's usually transparent to front-end coders.

tchrist

I’m working on something where eventually we’ll have to make the Javascript parts and AJAX responses hook into l10n work. I guess I’ll be using this piece since it will connect to the backend that uses Locale::TextDomain::OO.

To a first approximation, you have to change all program and template-file literals to bounce through funny functions with strange names like __("Thingy") and __n(), etc.

Robusto

I prefer to get text from an object map that also has convenience methods attached to it.

But usually it just comes down in the correct translation in whatever JSON comes back from the AJAX request.

tchrist

2:24 PM

I haven’t done the work yet so it isn’t yet clear to me which end does which thing.

Robusto

You want to think of the front end as a view as much as possible. Business logic, including text translation, gets done on the back end.

It's a distinction that is hard not to blur, though.

tchrist

I can see sending just plain EN or ES or FR text back in the AJAX request, who is the one that has the user’s language preference on the context object, instead of using the functions in the front end such as are named in the referenced link above.

Hm, where "who" means backend.

But again, I haven’t done the work yet, so there will be things I haven’t thought of. Ask me again in a couple weeks how it turned out.

Robusto

For example, one thing we were discussing a while back was correct plurals in enumerations. "One thing, two things, zero things," etc. The back end usually knows nothing about how many things there are or how they relate to the text, so if your front-end coder likes to make that distinction with, say, an s, that will break in translation.

tchrist

That’s one of the things I’m looking at, in fact.

But it’s never right just to blindly add an s. That doesn’t even work in English: churches, etc.

Robusto

@tchrist When it gets to the front end, you usually know what noun is being delivered. Not always, but usually. I don't blindly code s, either. But nobody bothers with that stuff on the back end, so I wind up having to do something about the issue or it doesn't get addressed.

tchrist

2:29 PM

sighs

Robusto

If you figure out a way to tag plurals, say, and associate them with references to multiples, you will have something splendid that few but the cognoscenti will appreciate. But they will appreciate the hell out of it.

tchrist

This is one church in your cart. There are five churches in your cart. You will have a busy Sunday morning.

The guy who wrote this is sensitive to situations where languages distinguish more than just 1-vs-many, kinda like you vs you both vs you all.

That is, the fellow who wrote Locale::TextDomain::OO. All his examples use English lookup keys for German and Russian alternate locales.

So you have to take case into account in those languages.

Robusto

True.

Machine translation is hard, even when you have good translations.

tchrist

So he might have a lookup for something like "You have chosen to go to {town: accusative}."

Where town gets filled in.

And has a decoration attribute of attribute in case it matters in the target language.

He uses a ":num" attribute for nouns, so he can have keine Bücher vs eine Buch vs viele Bücher or some such.

I don’t need case for articles or nouns or adjectives, since this will “only” ever need ES or FR at most.

And we won’t be playing any tu–vous games with the customer.

It’s interesting on which one of those two sides various sites fall into.

Go to Amazon or social networking sites, and it’s always tu forms, but go to that country’s equivalent of the IRS and it is always vous forms.

One never gets too chummy with the government.

Why are burrito-type beans refried not just fried?

Robusto

3:44 PM

@tchrist It's ein Buch.

@tchrist I dunno. The Spanish (Mexican) is refritos, I think. Does re- mean something different in Spanish?

Anyway, in a middle tier I once worked on we used the Lingua system, in which I took pains to create correctly numbered noun constructions.

tchrist

4:18 PM

@Robusto I knew that. I don’t know what I was typing.

Well, unless I was thinking of the author’s accusative example. Blech. German’s case system seems a bit worn-down.

@Robusto Refrito is a style of frying something in oil with garlic, onion, and other ingredients use in various dishes. However, it also has an extended meaning of something redone or relaunched; “rebooted” as they say of TV and movie franchises these days.

The OED says that says that “The original sense of re- in Latin is that of ‘back’ or ‘backwards’, but in the large number of words formed by its use, the prefix acquires various shades of meaning, of which the following are the most clearly marked.” When it comes from Latin, it can mean a bunch of different things just like it did in Latin. However, as a productive English prefix, it pretty much only means to do something again. It meant more than that in Latin.

The Spanish RAE gives 4 short senses for re-, and these are essentially the same as the OED gives for English using about 20x the space to explain it that they do in Spanish.

Compare:

> re-. (Del lat. re-).
1. pref. Significa 'repetición'. Reconstruir.
2. pref. Significa 'movimiento hacia atrás'. Refluir.
3. pref. Denota 'intensificación'. Recargar.
4. pref. Indica 'oposición' o 'resistencia'. Rechazar. Repugnar. Significa 'negación' o 'inversión del significado simple'. Reprobar. Con adjetivos o adverbios, puede reforzarse el valor de intensificación añadiendo a re- las sílabas -te o -quete. Retebueno. Requetebién.

Versus — and even here I abbreviate greatly — the OED:

> re-, prefix, of Latin origin, with the general sense of ‘back’ or ‘again’, occurring in a large number of words directly or indirectly adopted from Latin, or of later Romanic origin, and on the model of these freely employed in English as a prefix to verbs, and to substantives or adjectives derived from these.
In earlier Latin re- was used before consonants, and red- before vowels or h-, as in redīre, redimĕre, redhibēre (rarely in other cases, as in red-dĕre). The latter form appears in Eng. only in a few words which are ultimately of Latin origin, as redeem, redemption, redintegrate. In…

I am omitted the citations from the OED entry. There are a googolplex of them at the end.

Robusto

8:45 PM

Interesting.

Ice Boy

icic

Stack Exchange

9:17 PM

Limerick Machine: There once was a man in a mask Who tried to drink wine from a flask It spilled out the cup When h…

posted on September 28, 2014 by sgdi

There once was a man in a mask Who tried to drink wine from a flask It spilled out the cup When he tried to sup It seemed an impossible task

Ice Boy

10:05 PM

The Raiders (0-4) suffered their 10th straight defeat dating back to last year.

Oakland is winless after four games for the first time since an 0-5 start in 2006.

Heads must roll!!!

rscnt

They should.

Ice Boy

10 straight >8(

Ice Boy

10:57 PM

In 2006 we only won 2 games all year.

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…