ELL's Cabin

CopperKettle

20:00

"The volcano's activity has influenced the surrounding area, which has been covered by ash, hence the name of this region, Ashland." - I wonder if these two instances of Present Perfect work well together.

M.A.Ramezani

@CopperKettle Shouldn't the second one be past perfect?

CopperKettle

@M.A.Ramezani I doubt that. The second clause describes the outcome of the volcano's activity... IMHO

M.A.Ramezani

Oh? Lemme read it again. . .

Oh!

CopperKettle

I would remodel it thusly: "Its activity has affected the surrounding area - it has been covered by ash - hence the name of the region, Ashland. "

M.A.Ramezani

I think they do.

Tiny Giant

20:02

"which is now covered by ash"

reads better IMO

M.A.Ramezani

@CopperKettle That's a good revision.

CopperKettle

@TinyGiant Oh, great! I also thought of that!

M.A.Ramezani

@TinyGiant Or - Which has been covered by ash ever since or something like that.

I see your point; but I don't think it's an unforgivable sin to have two perfect thingies there.

Anonymous

I like dinosaurs.

Damkerng T.

@snailboat I like their descendants. :D

Anonymous

20:06

Me too! Like the dinosaurs!

Tiny Giant

@snailboat The town I live in has the largest dinosaur museum in the world.

Anonymous

A bunch of dinosaurs live in the trees around my house.

Anonymous

I could call them birds, but saying dinosaur is much more fun.

Damkerng T.

I talk to them or sprinkle some water at them sometimes. :P

Anonymous

Sometimes I try to have chirping conversations with them.

Damkerng T.

20:08

Oh, I should try that too. I'll try it tomorrow. :D

oerkelens

Our cat does that too

(having conversations with them, not sprinkle water on them)

Damkerng T.

@oerkelens I wonder if your cat would say, "Come down here, closer, so I can catch you, little bird." :P

oerkelens

@DamkerngT. Na, she's scared of most moving things bigger than a fly

M.A.Ramezani

Using purrse code, that would be common guys, I'm so unhappy and friendless. come and accompany me pretty please.

Damkerng T.

Hah!

oerkelens

20:14

The birds actually refuse to even be wary of her. It's downright insulting.

M.A.Ramezani

Hunt the birds.

oerkelens

They're quite small. Not a decent meal on them, so I won't hunt them.

Tiny Giant

that cold be interpretted two ways

Catija

This is why spaces are so important in English.

Tiny Giant

depending on where you insert whitespace

oerkelens

20:18

That's why the site expertsexchange.com changed it's name; they added a hyphen.

Tiny Giant

I brought that up in the tavern on meta not that long ago

M.A.Ramezani

@TinyGiant Hah! Where's that link?

Tiny Giant

google.ca/…

Catija

penisland.com

oerkelens

And then there is that site where they sell custom made pens.

Tiny Giant

20:20

lolz

oerkelens

ah, gmta

M.A.Ramezani

52

Q: On "That Hyphenated Site"

OK, which one of you jokers (oh, and I know it was one of you) did this? http://expert-sex-change.com :) Don't bother looking up the WHOIS, it's anonymized through GoDaddy. Also, for the record, I have nothing against "That Hyphenated Site". I for one applaud what they do, because they make o...

Damkerng T.

@Catija I'll admit that I had to read that twice.

Catija

@DamkerngT. It's an actual island... and they get a lot of tourism just because of the name.

Damkerng T.

LOL -- I can see why. :D

oerkelens

20:24

@DamkerngT. and don;t try it with other tlds while at work

Damkerng T.

@oerkelens Got it! :D

Tiny Giant

@TinyGiant Who knows, it could be a medical office specializing in gender change surgeries for kids.

1 point to anyone who can figure out how I did that ^

oerkelens

@TinyGiant Yes, but we wanted a boy?

M.A.Ramezani

@TinyGiant Did what?

Tiny Giant

Reference my own post

M.A.Ramezani

20:31

Link.

Tiny Giant

?

M.A.Ramezani

@M.A.Ramezani You're an idiot.

Tiny Giant

You didn't specify how though

M.A.Ramezani

Copy permalink; add a semicolon, delete everything except the chat message ID, write some text.

Tiny Giant

And there you go, isn't cheating fun?

oerkelens

20:33

@M.A.Ramezani Should I flag this as offensive? :P

Tiny Giant

I use a slightly different approach. Code inspector tool.

M.A.Ramezani

@oerkelens Totally. I insulted me.

oerkelens

nerd-approach

M.A.Ramezani

@TinyGiant You programmers. . . Making life hard since 1888.

Tiny Giant

lol

Programmers work smarter, not harder.

oerkelens

20:35

The only job where being lazy is an asset

M.A.Ramezani

Smarder.

Tiny Giant

I have actually written a program, which writes a program.

M.A.Ramezani

That's what TeX guys do all the time, pfft.

oerkelens

@TinyGiant I've written one that wrote thousands :P

Tiny Giant

Depending on the size and complexity of the ending programs, that could be impressive

oerkelens

20:37

They were smallish and they were simple conversion programs.

But it was done in COBOL :)

Cobol is good for generating Cobol

Catija

20:48

... Someone posted this (funny) video on FB and all I can think of is that it's based on a bad premise, so I don't find it funny at all. I think I'm defective :P

Tiny Giant

No, people on FB have a tendency to be overly.... dumb.

M.A.Ramezani

@TinyGiant Have you seen YouTube comments?

A must-be xckd:

xkcd.com/202

Catija

Here's the video

People are just generally stupid.

And, yes, I know I'm being overly general in that statement.

M.A.Ramezani

I'm stupid. I can agree with that.

Tiny Giant

Correction, "A person may be smart, but people are always stupid"

Back to accents, this is actually english.

A Newfoundland Language Lesson with Mark Critch, Candice Walsh and Travel Yourself

►

oerkelens

20:57

@M.A.Ramezani Well, you did call yourself an idiot, so you'd have to agree now :P

M.A.Ramezani

I agreez.

Tiny Giant

Can you understand the video I posted?

Catija

@TinyGiant I don't think the girl he's talking to can understand, either. I sort of get the gist of it and can catch certain words but... it sounds like there are a lot of words that aren't "normal English".

Tiny Giant

Most of the words are normal english, it's just the accent is out to lunch

Anonymous

Code generation is a useful tool, especially if you're using a language that isn't powerful enough to support proper metaprogramming in the first place.

Damkerng T.

21:04

@TinyGiant Lovely!

The accent sounds almost like my local Thai accent in the South (which is different from nearby cities).

Catija

I find it amusing that the "translation" is so brief but what they're saying is much more info.

... the words are... blurry? It reminds me of Welsh people speaking English.

Tiny Giant

Yes, that is funny. But most of what newfies say can be ignored and you'll still get all of the relevant information.

I'm not talking too fast, you're listening too slow

Damkerng T.

Another funny thing to me is that in the first section, I was able to catch more words spoken by Mark than by Candice! I think Candice's voice kinda sank into the background in that section.

Tiny Giant

I'm married to one of them, so I can understand it pretty well.

Damkerng T.

@TinyGiant One of them in the video? :P

Tiny Giant

21:09

Yeah, it's not a great example

No, one of them newfies.

Damkerng T.

Ahh :P

Hey, they had India Beer! (I got a good glimpse of the label at 3:03.)

Catija

@DamkerngT. Yeah, they were talking about what "India" means. Including "I'll Never Drink India Again".

Damkerng T.

nods

Catija

21:40

0

Q: Generic Term for Derivative of a Conceptual System

What is the generic term for a noun that forms part of the main vocabulary of a conceptual system? For example: A number is a derivative of arithmetic. A word is a derivative of language. An atom is a derivative of chemistry. A border is a derivative of map. I'm looking for the most appropr...

single-word-requests

Comments here. Gotta love that.

Damkerng T.

:D

Damkerng T.

22:41

@TinyGiant I found this very challenging to transcribe!

But I tried anyway. Here is the result of my attempt at the first part. I'd be nice if someone will let me know what the correct transcript looks like. :-)

> 0:05
Hey, I'm Cailin O'Neil from Travel Yourself and I'm here today with my Newfoundland friend, Candice Walsh of Candice Does the World, and Canadian and comedian actor, Mark Critch.
Hello.
Today we're here for our Newfoundland language lessons.

Part 1: General Conversation
0:22
Ca'ce, for you hav'a d'okie?
Not much, why(where?) were you at(asking)?
Oh, not much, those can go'l'the way down a'bout week'n'wah. (hehe) How's your fath'n how's your mother?
You know, I've by husters(?).
Deadly week'n alligator (altogether?).

Come to think of it, what I transcribed as sports may be supposed.

Damkerng T.

23:05

2

Q: What is a construct like "data found" (vs "found data") called?

I learned some time ago that in some cases the "characteristic" of an object, like "found" with respect to "data" is put after the object, i.e. if we found some data we should refer to them as "data found" not "found data". Example sentence: The findData() function returns the data it finds. ...

grammar

Nice! Finally someone found its duplicate. I noticed it several hours ago but couldn't find a good one.

Closed!

Anonymous

23:31

Well, I wouldn't call it postpositive, and I wouldn't call it an adjective, but apart from that "postpositive adjective" seems apt

Anonymous

I'm more on board with what TRomano's answer-comment says

Damkerng T.

I upvoted his comment too.

Anonymous

Postpositive isn't really a bad term, I mean. It's just that it's not usually used for this sort of non-finite clause.

Anonymous

There's no reason it couldn't be used.

Anonymous

But, well, I already left my comment :-)

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