Language Overflow

IͶΔ

20:22

@Dam @Cowper @Snail @Stoney et al.:

in Tavern on the Meta on Meta Stack Exchange Chat, 1 hour ago, by IͶΔ

@Shog what should I do if users on a site I paritcipate in don't understand why and how the site should be moderated? The situation is that we have a few apathetic meta regulars and other meta regulars like me know something's wrong but can't come up with an organized way of getting the problems solved. The users on the site also are very unfamiliar with the SE model and don't know or prefer to know the philosophy behind downvoting, close voting etc.
Educating would've seemed easy but the askers -- the majority of the active userbase -- prefer not to be educated and it's troublesome. An ins…

I just has a discussion about ELL with meta people.

I just thought I'd share it, 'cause why not.

Damkerng T.

I think the very heart of problem is that we don't have a standard or clear code of conduct.

IͶΔ

Also discussed that with Shog. Read all of it.

Damkerng T.

I don't see Shog in the transcript.

IͶΔ

@DamkerngT. Read further. He comes in 20:00-21:00.

Damkerng T.

in Tavern on the Meta on Meta Stack Exchange Chat, 15 mins ago, by Shog9

In any case, it is common on smaller sites to be more tolerant of askers who struggle. This can be healthy even - while there is low enough traffic that nearly any problem can be corrected, editing is far, far more important than closing.

I think I have that kind of feeling, too.

IͶΔ

20:27

Yes, it's usually what happens.

SO itself allowed questions like "what do you hate most about C dull?"

Damkerng T.

J.R. just wrote up his question, I think, based on the same feeling.

To the closevoters: This is a very hard phrase to interpret merely by consulting a dictionary. Put yourself in a learner's shoes, and check this out. — J.R. ♦ 1 hour ago

IͶΔ

But the more you get popular, the more you have to act bluntly so you could keep up quality.

@DamkerngT. I see everything here except a question. :P

Damkerng T.

I think it's similar to our tags. We have no clear tagging standard, tagging becomes hard, retagging becomes demanding.

IͶΔ

Yeah.

That's only the case for the tags.

Damkerng T.

I'm glad that at least we have comments as sort of our tools. We can at least communicate and try to find the middle point where everyone can meet, whenever possible.

IͶΔ

20:31

When I get some free time, which'll be after Norouz, I'm gonna write down all of the tags again.

Damkerng T.

Without comments, I'd say our opinions would've been even more diversified.

IͶΔ

Yep

Damkerng T.

@IͶΔ After late this month, I suppose.

IͶΔ

Next month, that is.

Damkerng T.

nods

IͶΔ

20:33

Then we'll separate good tags from the bad.

Anonymous

You know, at one point, we had tags like japanese for questions relating to specific languages.

Anonymous

We had several tags like that – five or so, I think?

IͶΔ

Dunno.

Damkerng T.

@snailboat japanese on ELL?

Anonymous

They were controversial, in that a particular user didn't like them and removed them from every question they were on.

Anonymous

20:35

@DamkerngT. Let me give you an example:

Anonymous

2

Q: They love their f***ing family

I am trying to translate Osamu Dazai's essay 如是我聞(Thus I heard from the Buddha) into English. The original text belongs to the public domain: http://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000035/files/1084_15078.html You can read about the author here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Dazai You can read pa...

Anonymous

This question would get that tag.

IͶΔ

That would make us look like a translation service perhaps, but a [Japanese] would have a good rating in MATT, I suppose.

Anonymous

That doesn't make sense to me, but moving on,

Damkerng T.

Hmm... I think japanese could be useful for that question.

Anonymous

20:36

We had those tags for maybe half a year, and they were added to questions here and there.

Anonymous

Even though that one user had originally deleted them, after a discussion on meta J.R. added them back, and they seemed to stick.

Anonymous

But after that half a year or so, a different user decided they were bad tags and removed them from every question they were on.

Anonymous

So now we don't have them. Again.

Anonymous

This is sort of the process by which we arrive at our tag system.

Anonymous

Some people think something is a good idea, other people think it's a bad idea, some people discuss it on meta, and then people ignore that and act based on what they think.

Anonymous

20:37

Come to think of it, that's how we do everything on ELL :-)

Damkerng T.

It's hard to reach a site-wide consensus of any kind, considering the tools we have.

IͶΔ

Let's flip a table @snail.

Anonymous

I will say that, thankfully, despite the presence of the japanese tag for about half a year, no one ever treated the site as a Japanese-English translation service.

Anonymous

Meanwhile, we close lots of questions on Japanese.SE, because people want a version of Google Translate that's based on free labor rather than machine translation.

Damkerng T.

@snailboat Maybe someone had tried but didn't succeed?

Anonymous

20:38

@DamkerngT. I didn't notice, if so.

Anonymous

But!

IͶΔ

Tub!

Damkerng T.

(Anyway, I think Japanese people are naturally considerate.)

Anonymous

I do think we've had some questions that were Hindi-English translation requests that were clearly off-topic.

IͶΔ

Most Beta SE people are.

Anonymous

20:40

@DamkerngT. Well, without remarking on your parenthetical specifically, I'll just note that the off-topic translation requests on Japanese.SE are universally from English speakers who don't know Japanese. Sometimes they're about tattoos :-)

Anonymous

But you can find the same sort of question in Japanese on Chiebukuro.

Anonymous

Difference is, everything is on-topic at Chiebukuro.

Anonymous

'Cause Chiebukuro is Yahoo! Answers.

IͶΔ

Wait. Literally?

Damkerng T.

Hah!

IͶΔ

20:41

I know a Japanese word!!!!oneeleven!!!1! Freaks out

Anonymous

Which one?

Anonymous

Chiebukuro?

Anonymous

Well, a proper noun is a kind of word.

Anonymous

Chiebukuro literally means 'wisdom bag'. An imaginary bag that contains all the knowledge and wisdom in the world.

Anonymous

Pretty much always used figuratively – after all, there is no such bag – either to refer to all wisdom and knowledge, or to a particularly wise or intelligent person in a given group.

Damkerng T.

20:46

Oh! Interesting that it's a bag!

Anonymous

Like, you might use it where you'd say She's the brains behind the operation in English.

Anonymous

So the ideas of wisdom and intellect get kind of blurred together with that phrase, though it literally is closer to 'wisdom'.

Anonymous

I think it's fun to refer to the Chiebukuro Q&A site as Bag o' Wisdom, or Ye Olde Bag o' Wisdom, or other silly things :-)

Damkerng T.

You may find the Ye Olde Bag o' Wisdom at Baggins'. :-)

IͶΔ

Quick! Someone tell me how I can add more fluff to this answer:

0

A: Few people who are worth listening

Few people [who are worth listening to] speak in sentences of more than 30 words. It seems what confuses you is the preposition to after listening. It belongs to the clause, and it's not an infinitive marker. The sentence thus means that "few good speakers use sentences with more than 30 wo...

Damkerng T.

20:50

Speaking of Japanese's bag of wisdom, I don't know why in Thai, a "stratagem" would be at "the bottom of a chest".

Anonymous

Anonymous

Got a spoon?

IͶΔ

@snailboat Gimme gimme gimme

Damkerng T.

This is the first time I've ever seen marshmallow in a bottle!

Anonymous

Yeah, pretty gross, huh? :-)

Damkerng T.

20:52

I'm not sure what to think. :D

Anonymous

Grammatically, we can speak of a gap in a relative clause:

Anonymous

people [ who are worth listening to ＿＿ ]

Anonymous

The gap is where you'd expect who, but it's been moved to the front of the clause.

Anonymous

You can see it in its original position if you look at an echo question:

Anonymous

> It's worth listening to Bob.

Anonymous

20:53

> It's worth listening to who?

Anonymous

But that's a little different, so it's probably not suitable for an answer.

IͶΔ

:o Poor relative clause.

Anonymous

That's interrogative who.

IͶΔ

Ja

Anonymous

I shouldn't have brought up echo questions.

Anonymous

20:54

Still, moving on,

Anonymous

You can conceptualize who as having moved to the front of the clause, leaving behind a gap.

Anonymous

The other way you can think about it is this:

Anonymous

is worth listening to people

IͶΔ

Tomorrow maybe. I'm flying to bed.

Anonymous

You pulled out the head noun and moved it out of the relative clause, and add a relative pronoun to link this head noun to the gap in the clause.

Anonymous

20:55

people [ who/that are worth listening to ＿＿ ]

Anonymous

This particular example doesn't make for a very clean explanation, because as a standalone clause, there's no subject, so we add dummy it:

Anonymous

> It's worth listening to these people.

Anonymous

@IͶΔ It's okay, I wasn't managing a very good explanation anyway :-)

Anonymous

Have a good night!

Damkerng T.

@IͶΔ Fly smoothly. :D

IͶΔ

20:57

Night y'all

Damkerng T.

Nighty night!

IͶΔ

Oh huh, I got a pundit on meta.ELL before getting one on ELL itself.

AFK

Anonymous

I was just trying to think of some fluffy stuff.

Damkerng T.

The pattern "someone/something is worth Xing (to/for/etc.)" is interesting.

Anonymous

Have you ever realized you don't really know what a word refers to specifically in your native language when you find out how to say it in another language?

Anonymous

21:01

Worth is a highly exceptional word to begin with.

Anonymous

I didn't really know what an atoll was, though of course I'd heard the word a number of times.

Damkerng T.

@snailboat Hmm... probably, but I'm not sure. It's not very often, I think.

Anonymous

The Japanese 環礁 kanshō literally means 'circular reef'.

Anonymous

I just had a general idea that an atoll was something that was in the water, probably near land.

Damkerng T.

Oh!

Anonymous

21:03

The contexts I'd natively acquired the word in weren't sufficient to actually define the word for me, and I'd never looked it up.

Anonymous

If you look up 環礁 in a Japanese-English dictionary, you'll probably see atoll.

Anonymous

dictionary.goo.ne.jp/je/14632/meaning/m0u/%E7%92%B0%E7%A4%81

Anonymous

環礁 is morphologically transparent to a Japanese speaker – everyone knows 環 means 'circle' or 'ring', and everyone knows 礁 means 'reef'.

Damkerng T.

It seems like Bikini Atoll is a typical example!

Anonymous

My brain isn't working too well today. I need to eat more.

Anonymous

21:06

By the way, Wikipedia lists six pronunciations for atoll!

Damkerng T.

Huh?!

Ohh... /ˈætɒl/, /ˈætɔːl/, /ˈætoʊl/, /əˈtɒl/, /əˈtɔːl/ or /əˈtoʊl/

Anonymous

3 × 2, I suppose.

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

Two stress patterns and three vowel variations.

Damkerng T.

Hmm... why isn't the /t/ reduced to a flap-t?

Anonymous

21:10

The Longman Pronunciation Dictionary lists ˈætɒl əˈtɒl ˈætɔːl ˈætɑːl

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. I don't know.

Damkerng T.

It's reduced in atom.

Let's try Forvo!

Anonymous

But not atomic.

Anonymous

Sometimes we can explain it by looking at whether the syllable is stressed.

Anonymous

But sometimes we can't.

Anonymous

21:13

Although the LPD lists four pronunciations, they don't mark any of them as having a flappable /t/.

Damkerng T.

Two examples on Forvo aren't flapped.

Anonymous

It also depends on the following sound.

Damkerng T.

But we normally reduce at all.

Anonymous

Well, that's a coda /t/.

Damkerng T.

nods

Maybe atom is an exception case.

(Just realized that it's not reduced in item, either.)

Anonymous

21:17

In atom and item, we have a /t/ in onset position in an unstressed syllable, following a stressed syllable.

Anonymous

And the following sound matters, too.

Anonymous

On my best of days, I wouldn't really be able to explain the rules for /t/ flapping precisely, though. They're complicated! :-)

Damkerng T.

:D

Anonymous

linguistics.byu.edu/faculty/eddingtond/flap_syllable.pdf

Anonymous

I think there are some words you have to categorize as lexical exceptions.

Anonymous

21:18

I was just looking at this. It's not a general reference, though. I had a good reference somewhere . . .

Anonymous

capitalistic 〜 militaristic

Anonymous

How do we account for flapping in capitalistic but not militaristic?

Damkerng T.

Besides that it would sound odd, I have no any better explanation!

Anonymous

revistas.um.es/ijes/article/download/48781/46681

Damkerng T.

I like this sentence:

> Using either random selection, selection by plurality, or both strategies, as children in nonlinguistic experiments appear to do (Messick & Solley, 1957), would account for the sort of variability that occurs in actual language usage and that is hard to account for in formal approaches that predict one and only one outcome in a particular environment.

Anonymous

21:32

The rule in A Course in Phonetics is simple and doesn't work all the time: Alveolar stops become voiced taps when they occur between two vowels the second of which is unstressed.

Damkerng T.

It becomes another baby rule-ish!

Anonymous

It's not exactly a baby rule, in that it's not intended to be a complete formulation of the distribution of flaps [taps].

Anonymous

They acknowledge there's a great deal of variation.

Anonymous

They have a revised form of the rule for speakers who have nasal flaps:

Anonymous

> Alveolar stops and alveolar nasal plus stop sequences become voiced taps when they occur between two vowels the second of which is unstressed.

Anonymous

21:35

> There is a great deal of variation among speakers with respect to this statement. Some make taps in familiar words such as auntie, but not in less common words such as Dante. Some make them only in fast speech. Try to formulate a statement in a way that describes your own speech.

Anonymous

(It's an introductory textbook, after all :-)

Anonymous

This is on page 75 of the sixth edition. (They're up to the seventh edition now.)

Anonymous

It's got lots of good information, though.

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

Ladefoged distinguishes taps from flaps, by the way.

Anonymous

21:36

(Well, distinguished.)

Anonymous

Most linguists use the two interchangeably, but in his books you'll find he talks about the two as separate things.

Damkerng T.

Eh?

They are different?

Anonymous

> It is useful to distinguish between taps and flaps. In a tap, the tip of the tongue simply moves up to contact the roof of the mouth in the dental or alveolar region, and then moves back to the floor of the mouth along the same path. In a flap, the tip of the tongue is first curled up and back in a retroflex gesture, and then strikes the roof of the mouth in the post-alveolar region as it returns to its position behind the lower front teeth.

Anonymous

> The distinction between taps and flaps is thus to some extent bound up with what might be called a distinction in place of articulation. Flaps are typically retroflex articulations, but it is possible to make the articulatory gesture required for a flap at other places of articulation. The tongue can be pulled back and then, as it is flapped forward, made to strike the alveolar ridge or even the teeth, making alveolar or dental flaps.

Anonymous

> Flaps are distinguished from taps by the direction of the movement—from back to front for flaps, up and down for taps—rather than by the exact point of contact. (p.175–176)

Anonymous

21:41

> Some forms of American English have both taps and flaps. Taps occur as the regular pronunciation of /t, d, n/ in words such as latter, ladder, tanner. The flap occurs in words that have an r-colored vowel in the stressed syllable. In dirty and sorting, speakers who have the tongue bunched or retracted for the r-colored vowel will produce a flap as they move the tongue forward for the non-r-colored-vowel. (p.176)

Anonymous

That's why he used tap rather than flap in the section on allophones of /t/.

Anonymous

He was describing what he calls a tap, although others call it a flap (so I put that word in square brackets, since I thought it'd be more familiar).

Anonymous

Many linguists don't make the distinguish he's suggested between the two.

Anonymous

Now, I'd be happy to come up with a more precise rule for /t/-flapping, but I don't remember where I found the description I liked . . .

Anonymous

I need to take better notes :-)

Anonymous

21:44

But I think the paper's point about learning by analogy is basically true, and true of language in general.

Anonymous

We tend to do things in ways that are similar to what we've heard.

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

Things that seem similar to other things tend to sound more "right", and what we call rules come out of these habits and tendencies to make things similar to one another.

Damkerng T.

I think I've written here somewhere that in language we mostly go by familiarity and analogy.

Anonymous

Yeah, I think that's true.

Anonymous

21:45

But irregularity and lexical exceptions can be a corollary to this observation.

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

Words you barely ever hear or use? Those words are most likely to be regular, because you're going to make them fit the rules.

Anonymous

If a word used to be irregular, but people don't use it much, they're going to fall back on the general patterns they know, rather than imitating how people've used that particular word.

Anonymous

And that word will come to be regularized.

Anonymous

But this happens at the level of the speaker, and two different speakers can natively acquire a word with different forms.

Anonymous

21:47

To be honest, I think I learned atoll from reading and just imagined it as /əˈtoʊl/:-)

Damkerng T.

Also sometimes we get conflicting information in school and at home.

Anonymous

I don't think I got that pronunciation by listening to other speakers. But I'm not sure.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Sure.

Anonymous

Well, there's also the matter of prestige.

Anonymous

A lot of kids grow up hearing things like if I had went, where Standard English uses if I had gone.

Anonymous

21:49

There's no logical reason why one form should be considered higher prestige than the other. It's just a historical accident.

Damkerng T.

nods

I think I never said "I'd like to have some water to [eat]" in Thai to a stranger.

Anonymous

So these kids say had went, and other people shudder because they've been trained to disdain this sort of thing. They may have never said it themselves, or they may have once spoken that way but been taught that it's wrong.

Anonymous

And some of them learn never to say things like that again. Others learn not to say them when they think Standard English is expected of them, but otherwise fall back on the patterns they learned when they were little.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Can you elaborate?

Damkerng T.

On the other hand, I always say "Give me some water to 'eat'" at home.

Anonymous

21:50

Oh, I see!

Damkerng T.

@snailboat I think, in Thai, the standard word for consuming water is 'eat' (กิน).

But teachers would teach us not to say 'eat' with water in school. :-)

Anonymous

Oh, my. I have to add something off-topic here:

Anonymous

0

Q: Is 食品昏睡状態 a thing?

I have effectively zero knowledge of Japanese, but I'm trying to learn :D Out of curiosity I tried to see if something like the german "Fresskoma" (english: food coma?), i.e., the lethargic state after eating too much food, exists in Japanese. I came up with 食品昏睡 (probably ridiculous :D), but the...

translation

Anonymous

I looked up food coma on Wikipedia, and I was redirected to:

Anonymous

Postprandial somnolence

Postprandial somnolence (colloquially known as a food coma, carb coma, or the itis) is a normal state of drowsiness or lassitude following a meal. Postprandial somnolence has two components: a general state of low energy related to activation of the parasympathetic nervous system in response to mass in the gastrointestinal tract, and a specific state of sleepiness. The increased sleepiness is thought to be caused by hormonal and neurochemical changes related to the rate at which glucose enters the bloodstream and its downstream effects on amino acid transport in the central nervous system, though...

Damkerng T.

21:52

"food coma"!

Anonymous

The difference in register between the two is astounding :-)

Anonymous

Food coma is the term I'm familiar with. I don't know the Japanese term.

Anonymous

If I were forced to say it, I'd just borrow it from English :-)

Damkerng T.

I don't even know it in Thai!

Anonymous

Well, the OP successfully calqued it into Japanese.

Damkerng T.

21:55

Hehe!

Anonymous

But from looking at corpus evidence, it seems to be exceedingly rare.

Anonymous

I can find typos that are thousands of times more common.

Anonymous

Well, I guess some typos are common, so maybe that's not a fair comparison :-)

Anonymous

But to find zero results in the Google Japanese Web N-gram corpus? That's pretty slim.

Damkerng T.

I guess one can work around the problem by writing it in katakana. :D

Anonymous

21:56

Then again, the corpus is frozen in time as of 2007.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Yeah, that's what I said I'd do. Except I'd have to be prepared to define it . . . :-)

Anonymous

Maybe more people started using the term after 2007.

Anonymous

Aww, no mentions of 食品昏睡 on Chiebukuro.

Damkerng T.

Wow, the word took off after 1988 in English.

That's very recent, linguistically, I think.

Anonymous

I can find examples in Japanese, but they're slim.

Anonymous

22:02

I found some examples where they just put some English into the middle of their sentences:

Anonymous

> 私postprandial somnolenceはある、も４－５年。

Damkerng T.

It looks like the word became popular around the same time as the Internet.

Anonymous

I don't capitalize internet anymore.

Anonymous

Seems old-fashioned.

Damkerng T.

sad :-)

Anonymous

22:03

Well, it's perfectly fine for you to go on capitalizing it.

Anonymous

Sometimes my phone corrects me and capitalizes it for me.

Anonymous

Then I shake my fist at my phone, narrow my eyes, and say, "Next time, iPhone. Next time."

Damkerng T.

LOL

I guess the closest Thai phrase to food coma would be อิ่มจนง่วง (lit. "so stuff that someone's sleepy").

Anonymous

Because I'm an evil villain from a cartoon from the 80s.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Ooh, neat.

Anonymous

22:05

Sometimes ideas are transmitted with language.

Anonymous

Like, the idea that people get sleepy after a meal might become more common as people start talking about a food coma.

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

I think I first heard it when I was a teenager, when my brother and I made our first deep dish pizza. After eating a slice, he laid himself down on the floor and claimed to be in a pizza coma.

Damkerng T.

Pizza coma! :D

Anonymous

This is probably not a genuine medical condition.

Anonymous

22:08

Pizza coma, I mean.

Anonymous

16

Q: A friendly reminder: ELL is not EL&U's trash can

We've been getting a lot of migrations to ELL lately. That's actually fine by me – I think a lot of them are okay on ELL, even if they're not suitable for EL&U. The two sites have different standards, and that's okay. But we've also been getting migrations like this: When someone wanna tal...

discussion migration ell

Anonymous

Up to +17, -1.

Anonymous

I wonder what the downvoter wanted to convey.

Anonymous

I suppose there's a chance they disagree and think ELL really is EL&U's trash can, but I imagine there are lots of other reasons they could have in mind.

Anonymous

But they didn't comment, so I can't really guess.

Anonymous

22:11

I'm always interested in what people are thinking, but I'm so bad at reading minds!

Damkerng T.

Wow

Anonymous

EL&U has a very active meta site, though. It's nice.

Anonymous

ELL's meta seems fairly active lately too, but it's still on a smaller scale than EL&U's.

Anonymous

I always like participating on sites where it's easy to get lots of votes.

Anonymous

Watching the number go up is somehow pleasing. :-)

Damkerng T.

22:14

@snailboat Ka-ching! Ka-ching!

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. It feels like you're accomplishing something racking up the points.

Anonymous

I know some people don't care about the numbers. And I mean, intellectually, I don't either.

Anonymous

But at a gut level, the gamification Stack Exchange uses is definitely manipulating me successfully.

Anonymous

If I want to not care about the numbers, I have to use JS to hide them. (I did that for a while! :-)

Anonymous

Do you like gaining imaginary internet points?

Damkerng T.

22:16

It could be fun, but you know me. :D

Anonymous

I guess you'd prefer imaginary Internet points.

Damkerng T.

Haha!

Well, I think when I use the word Internet attributively, I don't normally capitalize its first letter.

I think I have to retire to my bunk...

G'night!

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