Language Overflow - 2020-06-06

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4:58 AM

@EddieKal Would you mind taking a look at this edit ... ell.stackexchange.com/posts/249138/revisions

I feel the edit is changing the style of the original writing. Is this something necessary? I sentence isn't a run on sentence ... the sentence starts with a "but" (which needs to be capitalized); I see no reason to delete the "and" and start a new sentence. There is no problem here, just that the editor might continue to edit in this manner, which then might be a problem

1 hour later…

6:12 AM

@AIQ I think the editor made the changes for the better and in good faith.

It appears to me they wanted to correct "may be" to "maybe"

And couldn't have done so without making other minor changes

they left the incorrect spelling sitting there - apparent

In the context "So, could you please explain it to me?" does sound a bit clunky

@AIQ Thanks! I just corrected it

But we often speak like that - starting things with "so". I don't think it is wrong. And deleting the "so" may seem inconsequential but the OP may think they were wrong to use it ...

I don't know, I guess I am seeing too much into this ...

No it is not wrong. It is just a little wordy in my opinion.

I guess I am just being cautious here - I would raise this issue of the edit was say by someone who has been here for a long time (who knows how much edit is a good edit). But when I see new users on an edit spree, it scares me

cause they don't fully know where the balance is (they most likely haven't read the meta posts on edit) ...

As is seen from the new meta post on edit, where the OP did not bother to look at the previous related meta posts - which ColleenV later linked

would not* raise this issue if*

made*

sorry typos omg so many

Controversial comments on grammaticality haha

6:22 AM

Haha, it is good to be cautious. Luckily we have a system in place that addresses this. That edit has been approved by two other users. I would just let it go. No biggie here. If you feel strongly about it a holler on Meta is always an option

-1

Q: Do I need a comma in the end of the first part of a sentence that mentions an object of a verb that will be mentioned in the verb of the second part?

Do I need a comma in the end of the first part of a sentence that mentions an object of a verb that will be mentioned in the verb of the second part? For example: Whatever desires she may have, our company will be more than happy to meet them. Object: desires; Verb: meet; Another exam...

I don't know who to trust when native speakers have conflicting opinion on grammar

lol

I mean sure I can look in to it myself and then have my own judgement, but where is the fun in that

@EddieKal nah, no biggie, imma good

I want to trust FF for his experience, but I don't like his absolute take on this ...

There's 23 deleted comments under that question

omg

I don't feel like reading them now. Maybe I will try tomorrow. Apparently they really went back and forth on this

I think this issue about grammaticality on that particular type of sentence needs its own question

particularly because native speakers have different opinions

their comments could do just fine as research effort lol

6:32 AM

Yeah, sometimes if the OP does not successfully identify the nub of the problem, other users tell them: "Actually your example is ungrammatical." The OP has two options here. If they think grammaticality is what they want to ask about, they can modify their question to be more precise, or they can put the new issue in a separate question.

I think in this particular case the OP is really asking about a type of sentence structure with a clause led by "whatever". It seems their question has been satisfactorily answered

yeh - I would actually like to see the OP ask that question and point to these comments or at least quote both FF and BJ

@AIQ I will read their comments tomorrow. Getting ready for bed now

okay ... goodnight Eddie Kal

Goodnight

3 hours later…

9:32 AM

Is this for real?

> Actually, @Khan, English doesn't have a future tense. "Will" is a present tense modal auxiliary verb, so "I will help you" is present tense, though semantically it refers to future time, of course. – BillJ Oct 30 '18 at 19:02

No future tense? Really? That isn't what non-natives are taught in school ...

9:55 AM

@AIQ well, this topic is sort or convoluted

ELU has a jillion posts on this, this one being one of them best:

113

A: Is it true that English has no future tense?

Short answer: Yes, of course English has future tense ... for everyone except the most technical, and for them it doesn't have a future tense because they define "have a tense" in a non-intuitive way. So you can go ahead and say confidently that English has future tense. Longer answer: Most eve...

2

Stoney also has a question "Whose tense is it, anyway?" but that one's a bit complicated

okay, I can understand convoluted or controversial ... but I don't quite understand why someone would state it with such conviction - particularly in a comment where one cannot provide sufficient details

this isn't a good thing to do - it can confuse people - now imagine non-natives running around trying to be clever and claiming "Hey, there's no future tense in English"

I did that shrug

Jesus

10:30 AM

That answer on ELU is just confusing things further. It's equivalent to saying "It's correct to say the Great Wall of China can be seen from space. Only some astronauts and people who look closely do not see it from space. Of course it can be seen from space." – and, to be honest, if someone were naming great walls, and mentioned as a parenthetical that the great wall in question may be seen from space, it would be seen as cavilling if someone commented otherwise.

10:54 AM

You could of course say the two things are incomparable because we're talking about terminology here, which can be variously defined. In that case there's no point in asking the question; if you don't really care, don't ask. If you don't want someone to correct you, either avoid using the term, or use it correctly (or use it incorrectly and hope that people with the ability to comment haven't gone past the outdated, vague terminology from elementary school).

11:22 AM

@EddieKal I looked at it in the review queue and had the same opinion and I'm a real jerk when it comes to suggested edits. I guess I got distracted before I hit the approve button.

Oh, I was going to "improve" it because of the apparently misspelling and never got around to it.

@ColleenV I guess I am too ... I should let go a bit, I think.

I don't think so

Suggested edits are training folks for when they have enough reputation to make edits without peer review

I think everyone should think about whether they would like to see someone editing a hundred posts that way before approving an edit

I almost always approve spelling corrections if they make other changes that aren't rewording the entire post

I might have refrained from this particular edit because the author of it and I had a clash in comments on one of his answers

and I didn't want him to feel like I was picking on him by improving his edit

@ColleenV Good morning

Do you remember voting on the "future tense" question M.A.R. linked here?

The selected answer has 113 votes (which basically states the future tense exists for most English users, other than pendants). And Mari-lou's answer has 9 votes and she states that the future tense does not exist

And Araucaria seems to have upvoted Mari-lou's answer

I can't really make any sense of what is going on ...

@ColleenV This is a hard quality to come by ...

11:59 AM

I run a half-marathon today. I wonder how many days it takes for the body to fully "recover".

I wonder how many half-marathons is normal to run in a week. Only one, or two will do.

I tried googling but the info seems non-scientific.

Some popularized rules of thumb.

There must be some research into this.

1 hour later…

1:13 PM

@userr2684291 I didn't get this

@userr2684291 Well, exactly. Why does it matter if English has two tenses, or three, or three thousand, if this piece of information in itself does not add anything of value to what you already know, unless accompanied by 200 other pages of grammar

I think that's the point he's making.

I can't tell someone that's just starting to learn the structure of H2O that octet fails in many cases, but chemists are as enthusiastic about confusing beginners as linguists.

And it's way beyond "no, I'm just trying to make them understand it's an oversimplification and that there's a bigger world out there"

Anonymous

@AIQ languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=897

Anonymous

It doesn’t really help anything to talk about English as having a future tense.

Anonymous

And for the record, when I click the link to that post with 113 score, I can see my downvote on it.

Anonymous

@AIQ Actually, I do know quite a few non-native speakers who were taught in school that English has no future tense.

1:38 PM

@snailplane Yeah sorry I wasn't generalizing .. I just mean to point out that some if not most non-natives are taught that there exists a future tense, and based on that particular statement (if future tense does not exist) then non-natives are taught wrong in school ...

Now I am seeing that even natives are not one in this ...

@snailplane There's a lot of information on that EL&U thread ... I am having a hard time absorbing all of that in one go.

Anonymous

1:54 PM

I recommend the blog post I linked to instead as a starting point.

Thank you snailplaneeee

2:22 PM

Well that blog post is great too.

I guess every read on it would be as enlightening as needed.

I see the typical perspective that "There's no future tense, so why teach it?" and Mitch's as "What the hell, everyone's doing it anyway, so doing both results in more confusion, not less"

2 hours later…

4:01 PM

@M.A.R. Why include the term in the answer in the first place? Furthermore, why include the wrong one? Haha.

2 hours later…

6:07 PM

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11:27 PM

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