Language Overflow

Anonymous

00:26

@userr2684291 Have you tried setting your language preferences on Google to English (United States)?

CowperKettle

02:41

5

Q: Why is "NO STEP" used instead of a grammatically correct spelling?

There are commonly "NO STEP" signs on airplanes where damage could be caused if a maintenance worker inadvertently put weight on a delicate part of the fuselage. However, the grammar of this appears to be off. It should either be: No Stepping -- akin to No Smoking, as it is the activity that i...

Anonymous

@CowperKettle Interesting. I've never seen no step before.

Anonymous

But it's also interesting because they conflated grammar with spelling.

Anonymous

My gut feeling is that this could be more suited for English.SE and their etymologists, rather than aviation. Most likely, and this is speculation now, they used NO STEP because it was short, easy to understand and made the message come across. Don't other signs also use incorrect grammar, e.g. "No turn on red"? — SentryRaven Apr 29 '15 at 11:51

Anonymous

But no turn on red isn't ungrammatical.

Anonymous

Signs do use non-standard spelling sometimes: thru and x-ing, for example.

Anonymous

02:47

No step doesn't seem like it's necessarily ungrammatical, either.

Anonymous

It's certainly not a complete Standard English sentence, of course.

Anonymous

It does strike me as sounding a bit odd.

Anonymous

What do you think?

Anonymous

It could be written in deliberately simplified English, knowing that the planes will be used internationally.

Captain Bohemian

05:51

you can't be concerned about people whose concerns are radically differently from yours and expect they can be concerned about your concerns in return. That's why money is devised.

Captain Bohemian

07:03

the health service we need the most frequent is food offer.

Captain Bohemian

09:18

I am really not much concerned about food makers' concerns, like how to make food, but I just want their food; as long as I give them money, they will give me food.

I guess food makers are not concerned about coherence, either.

I am interested in coherence recently.

CowperKettle

Good afternoon

Word of the day: blue carbon (carbon captured by the world's oceans and coastal ecosystems)

CowperKettle

10:01

@snailboat

Is there a special term in linguistics for when a number is used to denote "innumerable multitude"?
For instance, in this Ukrainian song, 40 000 Cossacks are freed from a slave ship.
But in reality the words "forty thousand" mean "many"
In Old Ukrainian this figure, "forty thousand", used to refer to "uncountable multitude"
Are there parallels in other languages, and what is the term for this?

Гей по синьому морю / Hey over the blue sea - Ukrainian folk cossack song

►

Surely no ship even today could carry 40 000 prisoners

userr2684291

10:34

@snailboat Ah, you're right.

There isn't such a language setting, but there's a region one.

Apparently my location prefers the ODE instead of the NOAD.

New Meta Question

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Q: 2018 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection

ELL Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election starting next week, July 9th. In connection with that election, as we've done in previous elections, we will be hosting a Q&A here for candidates. Unlike the previous iterations on this site, we will be collection questions one week before the nomin...

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userr2684291

When I change it to United States it shows the American English version.

SmokeDetector

10:52

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Pattern-matching website in answer: When your teeth are covered by plaque by Usama on ell.SE

userr2684291

@snailboat pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-476509.html

So that's two.

Anonymous

@CowperKettle There are definitely parallels. Old Japanese yorodu (lit. 'ten thousand') usually just meant 'many' or 'various'.

Anonymous

I don't know a special term for it.

userr2684291

11:08

Hm.

I wonder who will be nominated.

I saw that the user WendiKidd disappeared one day from the moderators list; probably due to inactivity.

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Email in answer: I win or I won right after the end of a game by pintu kr singh on ell.SE

Anonymous

11:43

I'm going to have to take "Expert in sleeping" off my resumé.

Anonymous

@userr2684291 For me, "English" and "English (United States)" were both language options. Is that not the case for you?

Anonymous

@userr2684291 Yes, that's right, due to inactivity.

userr2684291

@snailboat When you go to google.com, then in the lower-right corner click on Settings, then Search Settings, and then on the left you have Search results, Languages, and Help.

Under Languages there's just one English available.

Anonymous

Oh! I see. If I change it there, I only see one myself.

userr2684291

That'd already been set to English for me.

Anonymous

11:51

Anyway, I haven't used it myself in quite a while, but my recollection is that which version you get is based on that setting.

userr2684291

However, in combination with my current location (the Search results tab)...

Anonymous

And the American version has fewer entries and no IPA, I believe.

Anonymous

I get results from neither with my usual settings.

userr2684291

@snailboat I don't know about the former but yes to the latter.

Anonymous

I have electronic editions of both, but I never use the American one.

CowperKettle

11:56

@snailboat Interesting!

The guy over on ELU SE said it boils down to forty, and probably that is true

Anonymous

They claim to have 350,000 and 250,000 words.

CowperKettle

(With "forty thousand" meaning "many thousand")

userr2684291

Oh, I've remembered the word Google's dictionary doesn't seem to have: moonglade.

It's odd.

So I thought maybe they display results from some previous version in which moonglade wasn't added.

But there also isn't an entry for rape. ...

But I feel the definition in the dictionary might be a bit... controversial, so that's why?

Anonymous

@CowperKettle Also yapo (lit. 'eight hundred').

userr2684291

No explanation concerning moonglade, though.

Anonymous

12:03

@userr2684291 Moonglade isn't in my copy either.

userr2684291

A-ha!

(Further investigation needed.)

Anonymous

@CowperKettle In Modern Japanese yaoya means 'greengrocer', literally a seller of eight hundred [things] = many things = a great variety of things.

userr2684291

You can report a definition, so that might explain the missing rape entry.

I asked my Australian penfriend what they thought moonglade meant and apparently the meaning is... apparent. I guess there aren't that many things the moon can be conceived of doing.

I asked them because it's labeled US – although Golden English isn't quite strictly British English, from what I've seen so far.

Anonymous

The /gl/ onset cluster is sound symbolic.

Anonymous

Glisten, gleam, glow.

userr2684291

12:12

But glade... sounds awfully generic, haha.

CowperKettle

@snailboat Very interesting! In Russian, sorokonozhka is the word for "millipede". Sorok is "forty", and nozh is the root meaning "leg"

Thus, "forty-legs" + hypochoristic suffix ka

Anonymous

Well, you either know it or you don't, I suppose, but if you don't the sound symbolism and context give you a fair guess.

userr2684291

@snailboat I didn't give them any context so I suppose they intuited it from the sound.

Anonymous

Another /gl/, less likely in moonglade: glue, glop, glom.

CowperKettle

@snailboat Yaoya sounds like yaoi, one of the very few words I know in Japanese

userr2684291

12:16

@snailboat Yeah I was just thinking, glimmer but gloomy.

But that's still connected with light.

Anonymous

But that glimmer, glint, glitter one seems to fit something the moon could do.

userr2684291

And you glide along a surface so then glade is similar-sounding...

CowperKettle

glade means "the area free of trees in the wood"

It's an old word

Anonymous

@CowperKettle In that word ya comes from the word meaning 'night', not 'eight'

CowperKettle

A kind of vista through the wood

Anonymous

12:18

I can't type very fast on my phone.

CowperKettle

> From Japanese やおい (yaoi), an acronym of Yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi (ヤマなし、オチなし、意味なし), "no climax, no point, no meaning".

Anonymous

What? Is it?

CowperKettle

So saith Wiktionary

Anonymous

But the author wrote it with the character for night.

CowperKettle

> glade: "clear, open space in a woods," late 14c., of uncertain origin, perhaps from Middle English glode (c. 1300), from Old Norse glaðr "bright" (see glad). If so, the original meaning could be "bright (because open) space in a wood" (compare French clairière "glade," from clair "clear, bright;" German Lichtung "clearing, glade," from Licht "light"). American English sense of "tract of low, marshy grassland" (as in Everglades) recorded by 1789, perhaps 1724 in place names (in Maryland).

Anonymous

12:20

So maybe sort of both are true.

CowperKettle

Could be so!

> The investigators assessed the effect of NAC, an agent that, when added to an antipsychotic medication in the treatment of patients with early schizophrenia, has been shown to improve general symptoms, negative symptoms, and cognitive impairment.

I wonder why they wrote has been shown

I would have written had been shown

Anonymous

Yaoyorozu < yapoyorodu (lit. 'eight hundred ten-thousand = eight million') is a word meaning a very large number, or all

Anonymous

Combining both of those numbers I mentioned

Anonymous

@CowperKettle If you write had, you're implying the result has been contradicted or is no longer relevant

CowperKettle

@snailboat Really? I thought that "had" would simply clarify the temporal dimensions of the sentence. 1) It had been known that the drug is helpful -->>> the scientists decided (Simple Past) to run another experiment.

Anonymous

12:28

The exact interpretation of had would depend on context.

Anonymous

But given the quote you showed me, I'd expect the present perfect because the results still have relevance in the present. That is, we still believe them to be true.

CowperKettle

Interesting

Anonymous

Unless that's not the case. If you need to place it anterior to another event, to show that the state which began with the study (we now know it improves general and negative symptoms as well as cognitive impairment) ended with another state change in the past, for example.

Anonymous

If you draw a timeline with has been shown, there's a big arrow that starts with the study and continues to the present. If you draw another timeline with had been shown, that arrow starts with the study and continues to whatever point in the past you're placing the event anterior to.

CowperKettle

So the sentence makes no pronouncement on whether the positive effects of NAC were known before the "investigators assessed"?

So it could be that it were these investigators who actually were first to discover the positive effects

Anonymous

12:33

I suppose so. I didn't read that way.

Anonymous

But it doesn't sound impossible.

userr2684291

That's not how the sentence reads to me.

Anonymous

I think you would normally not read it that way.

Anonymous

I can't seem to get to the complete article.

userr2684291

I think it's clumsy when you try and analyze it that way, but that's because the temporal relations aren't that important to be made that explicit.

Anonymous

12:35

Presumably context would rule out that interpretation, at any rate.

CowperKettle

A Japanese man landed in Yekaterinburg's sobering-up station during the football championship

Drunk tank

A drunk tank is a jail cell or separate facility accommodating people who are intoxicated, especially with alcohol. Some such facilities are mobile, and may be spoken of as "booze buses". Traditionally, and in some jurisdictions currently, the circumstances of drunk-tank occupants may vary widely, as to whether in fact intoxicated, whether willingly there, whether isolated to protect them from others, confined to protect others from them, or simply permitted to find shelter, and whether legally under arrest, charged with an offense, or neither. Those in need of more long-term treatment may ...

I never knew this term, drunk tank

Anonymous

Ha, I haven't heard of a booze bus before. Drunk tank I'm sure I've heard quite a few times, though, probably on TV.

CowperKettle

> Such institutions, known as Vytrezvitel (Russian: Вытрезвитель, literally a "soberator"), were introduced in 1904 in Tula, Russia, by Fedor Archangelskiy, a surgeon. The reason that Tula pioneered the issue, not St. Petersburg or Moscow, was because Tula Arms Plant weaponmakers were freezing to death in snowbanks on the backstreets of the city on a daily basis right after the salary was paid.

Anonymous

Please add your questions, if any, to the 2018 ELL Moderator Election Questionnaire!

Anonymous

Pinned that 'cause we scrolled it off but good.

Anonymous

12:40

but good

Adverb: but good (not comparable)

(idiomatic) To a high degree; very thoroughly; in a most definite manner.
1992, Catherine Coulter, The Hellion Bride, →ISBN, (Google preview):
Ryder rode beside her, pleased at her pleasure, knowing that he'd surprised her but good.
2000 Oct. 2, Jessica Reaves and Frank Pellegrini, "For Bush, It's an Expectations Game; For Gore, It's Learning From His (Few) Mistakes," Time:
[T]he debate is a sublime mismatch: He's expected to whip this guy, but good.

(2 more not shown…)

2

Anonymous

By the way, I had a dream Damkerng came back to ELL chat. It turned out, he'd been out on a mountain expedition the whole time.

2

Cup Fever

that's a nice dream :-)

userr2684291

12:59

@CupFever Who are you rooting for?

(:

I hope we get the third place at least, but I haven't really watched the recent matches.

Anonymous

I just found out the World Cup was in progress.

Anonymous

My finding out came with a fair helping of mockery, since it was apparently about three weeks in.

Anonymous

And the people I was talking to were frankly shocked that I could be that oblivious to the world of football.

userr2684291

It's not a big deal.

Anonymous

Their mileage seemed to vary :-)

Anonymous

13:20

Migration stats: In the past 90 days, EL&U has migrated 170 questions to ELL; of these, 10% have been rejected. In return, ELL has migrated zero questions to EL&U.

userr2684291

15:13

The distinction between the two is unclear.

I've seen better answers regarding actual grammar explanations over here than there.

The only thing they do well there is word suggestions and etymologies.

Hah. I'm on the bus right now and a girl in front of me said (talking to someone on the phone) ...I like them [boys from a certain city and age group] because they drive cars. They drive a car? Why do I always use the plural?

Of course, both are correct in my first language. (I had to consult with my inner native speaker.)

SmokeDetector

15:39

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Few unique characters in answer, repeating characters in answer: Meaning of "If I could I would , but I can't , so I shan't"? by Curved Cock on ell.SE

morbidCode

Hi. I am new here. I'd like to ask about some sentences I do not understand. I am not sure if it is on topic. Can I post it here?

userr2684291

17:58

@morbidCode Yes.

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