Language Overflow

Anonymous

00:16

@userr2684291 I would always write an /s/.

Anonymous

Mentally, I'm always pronouncing the letter by its name when I write that. I don't pronounce the slashes indicating a broad or phonemic transcription.

userr2684291

@snailboat Hm.

@snailboat A /ʃ/?

Esh (letter)

Esh (majuscule: Ʃ Unicode U+01A9, minuscule: ʃ Unicode U+0283) is a character used in conjunction with the Latin script. Its lowercase form ʃ is similar to a long s ſ or an integral sign ∫; in 1928 the Africa Alphabet borrowed the Greek letter Sigma for the uppercase form Ʃ, but more recently the African reference alphabet discontinued it, using the lowercase esh only. The lowercase form was introduced by Isaac Pitman in his 1847 Phonotypic Alphabet to represent the voiceless postalveolar fricative (English sh). It is today used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, as well as in the alphabets...

I didn't know that was its name, but apparently it is. I think that changes everything now, doesn't it?

(I, too, pronounce /s/ as just the regular old s ("ess"), but I pronounce(d?) /ʃ/ as "sh".)

userr2684291

00:38

ell.stackexchange.com/a/171581/3395 Is there a name for the "linking", or maybe intentional "lag" made when pronouncing did an excellent; something like an-nexcellent job? Is this the same thing described here?

Or maybe even uh-nexcellent job.

I might be mishearing things, though.

Anonymous

I just say [n̩] for an.

Anonymous

Um, that looks funny for me in chat, but it's supposed to be a syllabic n.

Anonymous

It looks fine when I type it on here westonruter.github.io/ipa-chart/keyboard but when I paste it into chat here it looks funny. Something to do with fonts, maybe.

userr2684291

Anonymous

Yay.

Anonymous

00:45

@userr2684291 I can only imagine myself actually pronouncing a schwa there in hyper-articulate speech, like if someone couldn't hear me very well and I decided to repeat every word in a separated manner with careful pronunciation.

userr2684291

Right. I think I included the uh because I pronounced it slowly, starting from an and excluding the did part.

Still, I'm convinced there's some sort of overflow happening there.

Nah.

Never mind.

I'm not convinced anymore. I slowed down the thing and increased the volume.

userr2684291

01:17

Oh, I just figured out J.R.'s given name. I mean, they couldn't have made it more obvious, but still, heh. J.R.'s a very good moderator. Why exactly is ELL "scheduled for an election"? It doesn't seem to follow a pattern. There was one in two-kay-fifteen and the following year, so why is there one in 2018? Because that one moderator's gone AWOL?

Catija

01:38

Sites have elections when they're needed.

The moderator team here appears to feel that they need another hand, so they've requested it.

userr2684291

Ah.

I suppose the wording confused me.

Still, I posted a comment under Grace Note's post, and maybe they'll confirm what you say appears to be the case.

Catija

It's on Grace Note's schedule, not on a regular schedule.

Grace does all of the elections, for the most part.

CowperKettle

04:00

@userr2684291 Congratulations! By all the cries in the streets through the night, I was thinking that Russia won. I woke up, too my smartphone and googled for the score, and discovered that it didn't

CowperKettle

04:29

Compare How to Pronounce Loose VS Lose

►

Indeed.

She pronounces Loose as "lusss"

CowperKettle

09:20

> A serving of beef liver contains 4.25 milligrams of zinc, which fulfills 38 percent of the RDA of zinc for men and 53 percent of the RDA for women.

Can you go more moronic than that?

What is "a serving"? How many grams?

American sites get my goat with their cups, servings, oz, etc etc.

userr2684291

10:04

@CowperKettle Lol, indeed.

And their silly TLAs!

The article you pulled that out of does specify how much a serving weighs (81 g) – they simply didn't want to repeat it that many times, but they do repeat it quite a bit throughout the article.

Aha, RDA might stand for "Recommended Daily Amount".

userr2684291

10:30

@CowperKettle english.stackexchange.com/a/342281/71740 I think this is what's going on. @snailboat ?

userr2684291

10:43

I'm kinda surprised hoarse and horse are pronounced the same. I always thought the former a bit longer, i.e. the /ɔː/ vowel.

Anonymous

11:47

books.google.com/…

Anonymous

A subordinate imperative!

Anonymous

Relative imperatives like which see for further references are not especially uncommon in academic writing.

Anonymous

I think there are a few kinds of subordinate imperatives, though CGEL says there are none.

Anonymous

12:11

I suppose one question is whether any of the types of subordinate imperatives are Standard English.

Anonymous

4

A: There should be a "from" between graduating and high school. How do you see it?

In the US, '--graduating high school' and '--graduating from high school' are both correct usages. tunny pointed out that in British English, don't omit 'from'. US speakers are more likely to omit it.

Anonymous

> tunny pointed out that in British English, don't omit 'from'.

Anonymous

Isn't that interesting?

Anonymous

12:45

I can self-elicit examples that fit that pattern, with that and some intervening material: She says that if you want the best, don't go to that company.

Anonymous

It's hard to search for real world examples that fit this pattern.

Anonymous

> It says that if you want love, don't give too much away.

Anonymous

That one's from Google Books.

userr2684291

13:02

They all sound ungrammatical to me. As though you interrupted your thought process and transitioned to another construction. Not saying I haven't heard such sentences, just that they sound bad. You should've asked that user if they thought what they wrote a mistake. I don't understand what the academic example is supposed to mean. Is it like Which? See for further references.? Really not sure how to parse that.

userr2684291

13:30

"Not especially uncommon" – citation needed.

How posh is according as when used with the meaning "depending on whether"?

Depending on whether's always sounded redundant to me, as though there was a simpler way to put it, and I think I just found it.

Anonymous

@userr2684291 Which see is all over the place, for example, in MWDEU.

Anonymous

13:46

@userr2684291 I thought it sounded awkward, but the Google Books example sounded perfectly natural to me.

Anonymous

I'm not making any claims about whether or not it's grammatical or standard.

Anonymous

Which see is pretty well established, though.

Anonymous

Thing is, it doesn't work with any other verbs, as far as I can tell.

Anonymous

As far as I can tell, for example, which refer to is entirely unattested.

Anonymous

@userr2684291 Well, I'm sure I've seen dozens of examples.

Anonymous

13:50

In my experience the construction is limited to academic writing and reference works.

Anonymous

No one would ever say "which see".

Anonymous

At least, I imagine no one would.

CowperKettle

14:18

A guy wrote in a forum: now that Croatians have won, let's discuss, are they our brothers like Serbians? I wrote: I hope not, because we love to kill and occupy our brothers so much. Let Croatians be spared our brotherhood.

userr2684291

Lol.

@snailboat Could you explain what it means? I'm googling it but nothing useful comes up. Apparently it's an English translation of some Latin abbreviation. I understand where it's used but not how it works. I don't understand what makes it similar to your other examples.

CowperKettle

> Due to the diagnosis of pheochromocytoma (via a MIBG), I was sent to a surgeon. The first was an idiot (don’t stand for that – ever – there are decent people out there). Then I was allowed to choose my own team.

A curious usage of "don't stand for that"

userr2684291

14:38

@CowperKettle I watched the match and it seemed in the first half, say the first half an hour we were somewhat static. The goal by Chershev was beautiful, and ours was "proper", i.e. textbook. But other than that, it was the Russians who dictated the tempo.

Then, starting with our goal (I think 38') we sort of activated and I thought we could score 4 more goals. Throughout the entire second half we held very decent pressure and I was really surprised we didn't score.

Anonymous

@userr2684291 Oh, sorry, I thought it was self-evident.

Anonymous

I take it as a relative clause with a gap following see.

CowperKettle

My sister went to watch the match with her friends, but I just came from the nudist beach and showered and read some stuff.. I hope I understood soccer, but I have no passion for it..

I played a lot of tennis but hated watching it on TV

Watching your friends play in front of you, a different case

Anonymous

@userr2684291 Yes, it's a calque of quod vide, which is probably why it doesn't appear with any other verbs.

CowperKettle

14:57

Word of the day: gewgaw (a reduplication of Middle English give, geove (“gift”), from Old English giefu, geofu, geafu (“gift”))

Anonymous

15:12

It doesn't fit into (or establish on its own) a general system of subordinate imperatives.

Anonymous

@CowperKettle Neat!

Anonymous

15:29

@userr2684291 I sent an email to GKP, and he suggested I'd found another example of main-clause phenomena in subordinate clauses, as studied by Georgia Green and others.

Anonymous

So now I'm reading jstor.org/stable/412566

userr2684291

15:50

@snailboat Oh, it is, I apologize. I didn't bother with clicking on the link because I'm on my phone and I can't zoom in, but now that I have, it's obvious because the references are mentioned. I now see how it fits with your other examples.

"which consult if" might turn up something.

"That such is the case has been shown from many passages quoted in the Angelic Wisdom concerning the Lord,* which consult if at hand" is that it?

OK this sounds like abbreviated style.

Anonymous

@userr2684291 If I had to guess, I would suppose that might be formed by analogy to which see rather than as an example of a more general construction, since in most cases it seems to be flatly ungrammatical.

CowperKettle

> O reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle reader! you would find
A tale in every thing.
What more I have to say is short,
I hope you'll kindly take it;
It is no tale; but should you think,
Perhaps a tale you'll make it.

I've memorised about 70% of Simon Lee thus far

I liked this particular stanza when I first read it, and so decided to memorize it

This stanza is so particularly Wordsworthian

userr2684291

@snailboat Could be, I merely wanted to check if see was truly the only verb that works in that construction.

In Croatian there isn't such a restriction and the Latin thing translates bijectively and makes complete sense.

Anonymous

16:08

@userr2684291 It's like long time no see, where sometimes people put in different verbs, making a snowclone long time no X. I think the core of language is doing everything by analogy to what we've been exposed to, and it's mostly just a question of how much people are willing to diverge from one model or another, and how well established each model is.

Anonymous

Well, not to imply that every construction exists in terms of "models", but you know what I mean. You get exposed to a pattern a bunch of times and you internalize it.

Anonymous

I know my own idiolect changes over time as I'm exposed to new things, and it happens frequently without any conscious effort to change how I use the language.

Anonymous

Sometimes I surprise myself with what I hear coming out of my own mouth.

Eugene Pakhomov

Hello. Just a quick question. I just found out about "ell", and I've been using "english" for years. What's the difference between the two?

Anonymous

Hello! Um, good question. After years of being on both sites, I'm not so sure myself :-)

Anonymous

16:12

ELL was created because a number of users felt EL&U wasn't meeting the needs of non-native speakers, and they wanted to make a special place for their questions.

Anonymous

But both native and non-native speakers are welcome on both sites.

Eugene Pakhomov

Hmm, that's a fuzzy border. Anyway, thanks for the answer!

Anonymous

Yeah, it really is fuzzy. Both sites have essentially the same range of topics. EL&U is probably a better place for etymology and single word requests, though.

CowperKettle

ELL is more people-friendly

ELU use more pedant-friendly

Anonymous

If you'd like to ask questions, please feel free to ask them wherever you feel more comfortable. Sometimes questions get rejected over on EL&U for one reason or another, and they point people to ELL instead. In many cases we'd be happy to take those questions on ELL.

Anonymous

16:15

And of course, if you'd like to answer questions, you can do that anywhere you like.

Anonymous

I want ELL to be a friendly place where learners feel comfortable asking the questions they need to ask.

CowperKettle

I want ELL to be a friendly place where I get $1 for each point earned.

Anonymous

Hey, that'd be nice too. Where can I sign up for that?

CowperKettle

(0:

userr2684291

@CowperKettle Hm. I think that's because it's hard to be a "pedant" when someone's asking about basic usage.

But pedantry finds a way.

CowperKettle

16:20

We're having a rain. It's so good to feel the thermometer get back to +20 °C again

But Zemfira's concert in the Mayakovsky park is soaked I believe

Anonymous

@userr2684291 I prefer to focus on whether the claims a post makes seem to be correct or not. Subtle rules people don't normally pay attention to can be very interesting! But the perception that something is a rule when it is not is less likely to be interesting, more likely to be harmful.

Anonymous

So I think actual pedantry is not a problem, but making claims that are false in the name of pedantry is.

Anonymous

I guess that's the sort of thing some people mean by the word, but I like to distinguish the two.

userr2684291

16:50

@snailboat Yes, as I was walking over to my apartment (I was on the bus for 5 hours) I was thinking about what pedantry really means. Some people equate it with "being a stickler for rules regarding grammarz", and the same people who usually defer to these kinds of pedants will accept anything so long as the tone is authoritative and a few technical words are sprinkled around.

I mostly mean pedants who create some arbitrary rule and reason it with logic or some such. Or go so far as to claim something is incorrect or ungrammatical because it doesn't belong to some elevated style they deem quintessential English.

Anonymous

That's a bit of a pet peeve of mine: conflating formality and grammaticality (or "correctness").

CowperKettle

On the bus for 5 hours!

Anonymous

Yeah, that sounds like a long bus ride!

userr2684291

Every damn weekend.

But I'm very much used to it so it's alright.

Anonymous

@userr2684291 The post of Fumble's you linked to the other day was pretty good. We didn't really discuss the formality–politeness distinction, but you brought it up in your message to that other user in chat. I think my agreement that it was a matter of politeness rather than formality was implicit in what I'd already typed at that point, so I didn't type anything further.

Anonymous

16:57

But I think English speakers in particular often talk about formality and politeness as though they're the same thing.

Anonymous

Which is weird to me since they don't seem terribly similar to me.

Anonymous

Not unrelated, of course.

Anonymous

@userr2684291 Whom can be funny sometimes: ell.stackexchange.com/questions/170833/…

Anonymous

This deleted post looks like an attempt to correct who in Michael Harvey's post to whom.

userr2684291

@snailboat Yeah. Honestly, it struck me as odd that they talked about formality there given that politeness doesn't necessarily entail it. (And the expressions we discussed aren't particularly formal, but, of course, they could be.)

Anonymous

17:01

I think sometimes people when think whom is more "formally correct", they're the same people who confuse formality and correctness. And one of the most salient attributes of whom is that it's more formal than who, so . . .

Anonymous

I can't really tell what people are thinking or why they make the errors they do, though, so I'm just guessing.

userr2684291

I think you're mostly right. (I can't see the deleted post there, however.)

Anonymous

Oh.

Anonymous

For some reason I thought you had enough rep to see deleted posts.

Anonymous

They wrote:

Anonymous

17:03

> 1) Mary sits near Joe whoM is the team leader. Mary sits near hiM.

userr2684291

Hahah.

( :

That's a nice example of why the "just use whom when you'd use him" rules of thumb don't work.

Anonymous

I'm really surprised how many people make assumptions like "all pronouns must have the same case distribution" and "case distribution must be the same in coordination as in uncoordinated uses". The data points to both assumptions being false, but I think they're made both implicitly and explicitly fairly often.

CowperKettle

nods, feigning understanding

Anonymous

I most recently found myself commenting on that here:

Anonymous

@stangdon You're assuming that the same grammatical rules apply to case in coordination, but there is no evidence to support this assumption, and in fact it turns out there is very strong evidence that this is not correct. See for example Thomas Grano's 2006 thesis, “Me and her” meets “he and I”: Case, person, and linear ordering in English coordinated pronouns. — snailboat ♦ Jun 19 at 3:08

userr2684291

17:09

Oh, I remember that comment of yours.

I don't think it's surprising because most people who understand how these rules usually work can't think that much outside of the box of simple substitutions.

Zekka

hey, i think the case distribution observation is really interesting! i don't think I've ever written down that assumption, but I definitely think I've made it implicitly.

rephrasing to make sure i got it: some people assume that if "me" happens half as much as "I", then "him" probably happens half as much as "he." sorry, i struggled to rephrase the coordination thoughts but i'm not very confident i understand what it means

CowperKettle

Primer: Acoustics and Physiology of Human Speech

Why Human Speech Is Special

Anonymous

17:24

@Zekka Oh, I probably need to define some terms for what I said to make sense. When I say distribution, I'm referring to the range of environments a given form can appear in. So for example, if you compare who/whom to he/him, you find that the two have somewhat different distributions. People say who all the time in environments they'd never say he in.

Anonymous

An overview: itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004084.html

Anonymous

For the discussion of case, I mentioned Thomas Grano's thesis earlier: “Me and her” meets “he and I”: Case, person, and linear ordering in English coordinated pronouns. If you search for that title on Google Scholar, you should get a link where you can download the PDF. (I'm not sure, but I think if I copy the link directly here it won't work.)

Anonymous

It's interesting:

Anonymous

> 1. Kim and I saw the accident.
> 2. Me and Kim saw the accident.

Anonymous

Example 1 is Standard English. Example 2 is not, but people say things like it all the time. It's not grammatical in Standard English, but it's grammatical in non-standard varieties.

Anonymous

17:30

Some linguists have analyzed this by saying "Me and Kim" is the natural version which we acquire as children, which is replaced later on by "Kim and I" in school. We're taught that "X and I" is more correct than "me and X" in subject position.

Anonymous

You could try to justify this by saying something like this: "I saw the accident" is fine, and so is "Kim saw the accident", but "Me saw the accident" sounds like a caveman talking. All of which is true.

Anonymous

But the thing is, people say "Me and Kim saw the accident", and it sounds perfectly natural (if informal and non-standard). It doesn't sound like a caveman talking. They don't say "Me saw the accident".

Anonymous

Well, maybe really little kids do once in a while. :-)

CowperKettle

> The duo presented a panel of listeners with words having the form h-vowel-d [hVd], such as had and heed, produced by 10 different speakers in quasi-random order, and asked the participants to identify each word. Out of 10,000 trials, listeners misidentified [i] only two times and [u] just six times, but misidentified words having other vowels hundreds of times.

> Similarly, in a 1994 experiment in which listeners had to estimate people’s height (which roughly correlates with vocal tract length) by listening to them produce an isolated vowel, the vowel [i] worked best.4

Anonymous

If you use that line of argument to justify "X and I" being okay but not "me and X", you fail to accurately predict the distribution of forms in natural speech. It doesn't seem to be correct.

Anonymous

17:33

You also fail to make any sort of prediction about linear order in coordination. Why not "I and X"?

Anonymous

People are taught it has something to do with politeness, but that's false as well.

Anonymous

@CowperKettle I'll need a bit to catch up.

Anonymous

@CowperKettle Thanks for the links! :-)

userr2684291

@snailboat I'm pretty sure you've made this argument more than twice. I think it would be nice to make it into a "Canonical Post". The same for the who / whom thing, although I don't know how to explain away the observations stated in CGEL (mainly those where they say whom isn't limited to formal style).

I mean of course it isn't, but...

Oh, or that it's not even largely confined to formal style.

I think maybe people would trust those more; especially because they'd be somewhat shorter and sweeter than StoneyB's disquisition(!) over there.

I mean both trust and remember.

Zekka

oh hey thanks for writing more details! so by distribution you basically mean "odds of happening based on other features of the sentence"

your argument is that if you say he/him-ness is a completely independent characteristic from he/you/I-ness, then you expect there to be as many "whom"s to "who"s as there are "him"s to "he"s

userr2684291

17:47

No. It just means occurrence in specific constructions/sequences with respect to their generalized forms.

Zekka

if you say "well, a coordinated pronoun like A and B is only OK if A would be OK or B would be OK" then you also mispredict that. and you don't account for how "B and A" is often more likely than "A and B" (x: he and I vs I and he)

userr2684291

It's got nothing to do with probability.

Zekka

oh. sorry, my background in language is all statistical so when I saw a familiar word I latched onto it

but I think "is allowed to occur" and "is likely" are similar enough that if you sub "is allowed to occur" for "is probable" in my sentences some of them would still be true

(basically, giddy addled zekka thought "oh! they mean likelihood according to a markov chain, not according to a bag of words" where they actualy meant neither)

userr2684291

Sorry for the delays; I was eating chips and typing with one hand is annoying.

Anonymous

@Zekka On that note, LSTMs tend to be more relevant than Markov chains these days: karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness

Zekka

17:53

oh yeah, i've used both models. i'm kind of a markov chain fan just because they're easy to implement and don't require a ton of mathematics, but tbh sparsity is still a real problem for me

userr2684291

Anyway, I gotta go now. Gotta study. See ya.

Zekka

see you, good luck!

(when i say "my background in language" i mean "help my boss is making me do statistics on natural language data even though that's not technically in my job description")

Anonymous

Sounds fun :-)

Zekka

it is, but i'm increasingly trying to turn us towards using some already-built machine learning models on the basis that I will probably not be able to tune the system we end up using

but sorry, i totally made the convo about me while trying to explain why 90% of my statements about language are going to be terminologically garbled or misinformed in some way!

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